By JIM GENARO

A half-century after its humble origins as an industrial alliance, the European Union has made significant progress toward economic and political stabilization in Europe, Dr. Linda Cornett told the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina last Monday afternoon.

Cornett, an associate professor of political science and director of the International Studies Program at UNC Asheville, discussed the history and structure of the EU at the university’s Owen Conference Center. About 75 people attended the talk.

The current structure of the EU is the result of a dialectic between two schools of thought — supernationalists, who want to create a unified state similar to the U.S., and intergovernmentalists, who see the alliance more as a cooperative venture among sovereign nations, Cornett said.

Furthermore, as the alliance has grown in both members and economic authority, it has become more and more supernational, with fewer issues subject to the veto of individual nations, she said.

The union had its roots in the 1951 Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community — consisting of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. 

Though it essentially was an economic alliance, the founders of the ECSC also sought to avoid a  repeat of World War II, Cornett told the audience. 

“The security implications were not at all unimportant from the very beginning,” she said.

Treaty members sought to promote stability in the region by establishing an alliance that included Germany and France, the two major protagonists of the war. Because it specifically related to the crucial elements needed for industrial and military development — coal and steel — the hope was that no country in the alliance could pursue militaristic expansion independently of the others.

From these humble origins, the alliance began to grow through a number of incremental steps in the 1960s and ‘70s, Cornett said.

In general, the model behind these steps was that the member nations established agreements on various economic issues, eliminated tariffs among members and set up uniform tariffs with outside nations.

Furthermore, the process became increasingly based on majority elections, rather than the consensus-based system in which each member had the power to veto a measure.

A major step in this direction came in 1979, when the EU established direct voting for its Members of Parliament. While the Parliament shares authority with the Council of Members — whose members are appointed by member states — it has become an increasingly important body within the EU, she said.

In 1987, the Single European Act “eliminated all remaining barriers to full economic integration,” Cornett told the audience. It also gave more authority to Parliament.

However, it was in the early 1990s that some of the most significant changes took place within the EU — prompted in large part by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As East Germany and several other former Soviet satelites became assimilated into the EU, the importance of a strong supernationalist alliance grew.

In 1992, the Treaty of the European Union  granted EU citizenship to all citizens of the member nations, set up a common currency, the euro, and established standards to which prospective member states would have to adhere. These included having a budget deficit of less than 3 percent of GDP and other requirements that were intended to ensure that new nations did not destabilize the union when they joined.

Those rules were further clarified by the Treaty of Nice in 2002, which required countries that wanted to join to have a history of democratic stability, rule of law, human rights and protections for minorities.

The last of these was motivated in part by the legacy of Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the EU’s delayed response to it, Cornett said.

“After the breakup of Yugoslavia, (minority protections) became very important to many Europeans,” she noted.

The EU is still trying to find its balance, Cornett told the audience.

“It’s not quite the United States of Europe ... but it’s not like the U.N., either — there really is a lot more sharing of authority.”

Today, the Council of Ministers shares power with the Parliament, which rules by qualified-majority voting, in which votes are tied to population.

However, fundamental issues, such as whether to allow new members to join, are still decided by consensus.

The EU’s operational budget of about 116 billion euros per year primarily is used to fund agricultural subsidies and development in poor sections of member countries.

This is done in part to help new member states deal with the increased pressures of competition that often result from membership in the EU.

“That has been absolutely critical for some of the poorer countries,” Cornett said.

However, despite its benefits, the EU has not been entirely popular among European citizens. A backlash has been growing among many Europeans, who have concerns about the harmful effects of globalization, as well as the threat of illegal immigration.

Nonetheless, the “elites in most countries support it,” she said. “They’re having to convince their populations that it’s good for them.”

Among the benefits that the EU has provided is “unprecedented European peace and prosperity,” she said.

She noted that the EU was crucial to facilitating the transformations that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“That kind of change rarely happens without major bloodshed,” Cornett said. “I still believe that this has been one of the grandest experiments in international cooperation.”