ABSTRACT
The first pillar was the European Community, which worked by using the ‘Community Method’. The third pillar was Co-operation on Justice and Home Affairs, what Ministers of Justice and the Interior do, and was inter-governmental. Whereas the second pillar, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, was built up in public view, the foundations of the third pillar were obscured. Apart from free circulation of people as a Treaty objective since the beginning the original Treaty was silent on justice and home affairs. But as problems magnified, the Member States used their gatherings to set up informal co-operation. By 1988 the gap between the lifting of frontier controls on goods and the continuing control of people was so stark that the Member States decided to create a new intergovernmental body: the co-ordinators of free movement of people. Like the Working Group on Immigration, it consisted of officials from Interior/Justice Ministries.
