ABSTRACT
As the largest and richest country in Europe, Germany has had an outsized impact on the course of European integration and in the actual workings of the institutions of the European Union. Along with France, Germany makes up the other “twin engine” powering an overall generally positive approach to European integration (Clingaert 1996, pp. 106-8). Starting with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer following the Second World War, through a succession of leaders, the German government has seen European cooperation as central not only to its own survival as a fledgling democracy, but to Europe as a whole. This generally steadfast support for the integration project has been crucial to its overall success into the present.
