Dit document bevat het Engelse gedeelte van het eerstejaars vak Europees recht. Alle hoorcolleges/kennisclips zijn samengevat van beide delen, van alle 3 de weken. Evenals de bijbehorende literatuur per week. Daarnaast zijn ook de werkgroepopgaven met antwoorden toegevoegd, bij het Engelse deel hel...
Europe after WWII and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC):
•Origins
- The rise of nationalism and two world wars in the 20th century.
- Occupation of Germany and the International Authority for the Ruhr.
The origins of why it was about coal and steel are in the international authority for the Ruhr.
After Germany had lost the Second World War, Germany was occupied by the allied forces.
The allied forces had set up this international authority for the Ruhr, which meant that
German sovereignty over strategic goods that you needed to wage war (coal and steel)
would basically become in the hands of this international authority for the Ruhr. The Ruhr
area in Germany is the area where you have all German coal and this international authority
for the Ruhr was deeply popular in Germany because it really affected Germany's
sovereignty. It affected Germany had no say whatsoever over the regulation of these goods
in this particular sector. So something had to be done about the international authority for the
Ruhr, but at the same time France in particular really wanted to have access to German
coal, for the obvious reason that this is a strategic good for waging war (coal and steel). So
France came up with or the French minister of foreign affairs Robert Schuman came up with,
was quite ingenious. He realized that Germany's current situation where Germany had no
control or whatsoever over coal and steel was not viable and they had to learn from France
and the other countries in Europe had to learn from the First World War where the objective
really was to punish Germany and to exclude Germany from international collaboration and
European collaboration. The solution here was to establish an international organization that
would have control over coal and steel by which Germany would still fully participate. So it
would be a system whereby these participating Member States would transfer part of
their sovereignty so that Germany wouldn’t have full control over coal and steel but
neither would it also be seen as losing control either. So it really was a rather ingenious
organization that Robert Schuman came up with; the European Coal and Steel Community
that pulls sovereignty over the trade and development of coal and steel within these six
founding Member States.
- 9 may 1950: Schuman declaration.
•1952 Treaty of Paris (expired in 2002)
- European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
The history of EU law and more in particular the history of the European Union. About why it
was formed, what its subjectives were, in which context it was developed? This lecture will
be covering basically two main topics. The first is the establishment of the European Coal
and Steel Community and a bit about what this international organization was, why it was
formed, in which context it was formed and what its main features were. The European Coal
and Steel Community very much established the blueprint for the European Union as we
know it today. The way the European Coal and Steel Community was set up, its institutions,
the way collaboration was organized, that’s very much something that we can still see within
the current European Union. About the development and evolution of the EU treaties as we
know them today will be talked about as well. There are two very important treaties; the
treaty on European Union (TEU) and the treaty on the functioning of the European Union
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,(TFEU) ; these two regulate the EU institutions and set up the EU functions. How have these
treaties adopted and changed overtime from 1958 to with the establishment of the European
Economic Community and the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Lisbon and that’s basically
the treaty that has changed that TEU and TFEU as we know it today. About the geographic
expansion of the EU; the European Union did not always consist of 27 member states but
was originally a very small group of countries. The European Economic Community (EEC)
was set up by 6 Member States and that has changed overtime. There have been several
geographic expansins that have also changed really how the European Union operates
overtime. The European Coal and Steel Community is an organization that was
established in 1952 and it was very innovative for its time. It was also a very particular to its
time because it was in 1952, it’s the middle of the 20th century, if we think about what the
challenges that we face now currently in the 21st century you might be thinking about issues
such as climate change or migration but halfway the 20th century European countries were
mainly concerned with how can we ensure that there won’t be new military conflict between
the different nations in Europe. How do we prevent a third World War? How do we prevent
Germany from starting a third World War because it lost the Second World War was
basically what happened after the First World War. So the pressing challenge back in the
middle of the 20th century was really how to foster European collaboration and cooperation
rather than economic rivalry and nationalism between the different states of Europe. There
were other initiatives too, there were many ideas about how to foster European cooperation.
For example the Council of Europe, which is an intergovernmental organization,
established in the late 1940s and that organization is ofcourse home to the European
Convention on Human Rights (not EU law, more a very distinct organization that is much
broader and much more governmental in nature). The European Coal and Steel Community
is an organization that shows how different EU law would become. Because the European
Coal and Steel Community was an organization that was very limited in scope but
still, compared to the Council of Europe, had a setup that was supranational in nature.
Supranational: an organization by which the founding Member States had transferred
powers to supranational institutions. The decision-making within this organization was
very much not no longer fully in the hands of the different governments of the different states
that compose the European Coal and Steel Community.
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC):
The blueprint for the current EU, it established for the first time an international organization
that had several supranational institutions. These were institutions that were not fully
controlled or to a large extent controlled by the Member states Governments. The European
Coal and Steel Community established institutions such as the high authority; a
common assembly that would be composed of representatives from the different
parliaments of the different Member States. It also established an European Court of
Justice and the Council of Ministers. This is an international institution that also exists till
today within the European Union. It’s composed of the different ministers of the different
Member States, so that’s the more intergovernmental organization.
There were 5 main features of the European Coal and Steel Community:
•Supranational organization (as opposed to intergovernmental): the high authority which
has evolved into the European Commission within the EU, was a body that had distinct
decision-making powers over the regulation of coal and steel. Within these different
Member States you have the Courts of Justice as a common assembly. So there were
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,different organizations and different institutions that had real decision-making powers within
this organization as opposed to the more traditional way in which countries would collaborate
before this time which was more intergovernmental in nature by the governments of the
different states. The Dutch government for instance would maintain full control over the
decision-making process.
•Limited in scope: there were several other initiatives around this time that were being
floated between the different governments in order to foster European collaboration.
However, they all failed because they were so to speak too ambitious, they sought
collaboration in a wide range of issues, such as foreign policy defense. A really ingenious
aspect of the European Coal and Steel Community was that it was rather limited in scope
so collaboration only took place within a very limited area, namely how to regulate the
markets for coal and steel. That’s the idea of Robert Schumann but also Jean Monet, who
was also very much behind the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community,
was really that this working in one particular area, if it would turnout to be successful,
would push further collaboration between the different Member States in other areas
as well. That’s what happened after the European Coal and Steel Community, but the first
ambitions in that sense were rather limited. They tried in a very intense way but only in some
limited areas.
•Its means were trade liberalization: the means by which the organization sought to achieve
its subjectives, this collaboration between the different Member States, that was trade
liberalization and the regulation of competition between the different companies, involved in
that sense. The ways you can regulate and economic activity in coal and steel, you could
also nationalize these industries and partition them. There are different kinds of ways of
doing this but what was quite key to how the European Coal and Steel Community
approached the means by which this collaboration would take place, was that it was based
on trade liberalization. So the removal of tariffs and quota for coal and steel, (this was of
course very important for France because the main reason that France also wanted to join
the European Coal and Steel Community was that it wanted access to German coal), one of
the ways to do that was to make sure that there were no trade barriers and that German
coal could be freely exported in no limited way to France. That was quite a
distinguishing feature of the European Coal and Steel Community as well. The European
Coal and Steel Community, and the Americans were behind this, the background was also
to regulate competition in this area to protect competition. The Americans have had a
lot of experience from the early 20th century to ban trusts; the trust busting with the Sherman
act and several other initiatives in the United States that really sought to protect competition
in the US, to prevent big companies from abusing their dominance. The Americans really
gave the French the idea to also introduce this within the European Coal and Steel
Community, because the French really feared the German cartels. Germany in the early
20th century was a very cartelised country whereby all the industry were together regulating
prices, making all kinds of agreements with each other and the French industry really feared
that they would be disadvantaged there by German industry in that sense. So that was also
a very distinct feature in the European Coal and Steel Community that really was there to
establish a free market in coal and steel throughout the different Member States.
•Treaty obligations applied to its Member States as well as individuals. Normally
international agreements for that time were really agreements between states. The
European Coal and Steel Community however, by introducing provisions on competition,
preventing abuse of dominance for instance, or price fixing those, those types of obligations
really created obligations for individuals as well.
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, •Centre-right political initiative. At the time of the governments that agreed to the European
Coal and Steel Community these were all centre-right governments. So in Germany, Italy,
France and also in the Benelux there were generally speaking more centre-right political
parties in the government. And that really speaks to if you see what the means of this
organization were, like trade liberalization and to prevent nationalization for instance.
That was also the reason why for instance in 1952 the United Kingdom did not join the
European Coal and Steel Community. Back in the day in 1952 the UK was governed by the
Labour Party which is a left-wing political party in the United Kingdom and that political party
had just initialized the coal industry in the United Kingdom. So they were definitely not
interested in joining an organization that sought to liberalize trade and actually make it easier
for companies to do business in coal and steel. Germany at the time was divided, in western
Germany there was a centre-right coalition at the time that was in power, that really sought
to align itself with the West, whereas the Social Democratic Party in Germany wasn’t in
power at the time was more keen on staying neutral and so as to enhance the prospects of
German unification between western Germany and eastern Germany. Eastern Germany was
under the influence of the Soviet Union at the time. In Italy the government supported being
backed by more centre-right political parties because the biggest political party that was in
opposition at the time in Italy was the Communist Party in Italy. This was really a means of
making sure for the Italian government to align Italy with the West in that sense. So there
really was more centre-right political initiative.
The European Coal and Steel Community really proved to become the blueprint of the
European Union as we know it today because of its set up, the way the institutions were
organized, its main substantive provisions, although of course the European Union now is a
much broader organization than the European Coal and Steel Community. If we look at how
EU law looks at today the European Coal and Steel Community no longer exists. It has
basically been absorbed by the European Union and the treaties that formed EU law today.
The evolution of EU law:
Today’s most important sources of EU law:
- Treaty on European Union (TEU).
Origins: Treaty of Maastricht 1993: a treaty that both reforms the European Economic
Community treaty but has also established the European Union.
- Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
Origins: Treaty of Rome 1958 (E.E.C Treaty): this is really the founding Treaty of the
European Economic Community that we now call the European Union and so that goes back
to 1958.
- Charter of Fundamental Rights: is an important source of primary EU law as well
and that’s been binding since 2009 since the Treaty of Lisbon. It's relatively new that
this important source of primary EU law exists.
Four themes in the history of EU integration which have really dominated the political
discourse in the formation and adaptation of EU law:
- The powers of the EU institutions vs Member States:
With the European Coal and Steel Community there were discussions about how much
power should we grant this community and how much power should we grant to the different
institutions of the European Coal and Steel Community and what should these institutions
look like? Initially in the plan by Robert Schumann the idea was to not even have a Council
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