ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) was born following the consummation of the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht in 1992. It was the culmination of a process initiated by the 1986 Single European Act. An important goal of the Treaty was to promote growth, employment and rising living standards, not only by the removal of barriers to the movement of capital, goods and labor across internal borders, but also ultimately through monetary union. The common currency, and a singular monetary policy, was introduced in 1999. This profound ‘deepening’ of the EU was also accompanied by a relatively swift ‘widening’. The twelve Maastricht signatories were joined by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995 and by ten new member states (NMS) in 2004, mainly former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). By 2013 the EU had grown to twenty-eight member states, with most (seventeen) adopting the euro as their currency. In the course of a generation, therefore, the EU became a heterogeneous collection of states, diverse in terms of history and culture, economic development, fiscal regimes and welfare and employment institutions, yet economically bound to each other in ways never before seen on the continent outside of conquest.
