The emblematic statement of the Nobel Peace Prize. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 13 No. 1, January 2013

From the Introduction. On October 12th the Nobel Committee announced that the annual Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to the European Union for, “promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades”.1 This was a bit of good news for the EU who had produced nothing but bad press with the Euro Crisis, the bailouts of struggling countries like Greece, and protests in the southern member states of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. At such a momentous occasion the EU’s next challenge was to figure out who would be the rightful head of the EU to accept the award. The EU has made their decision by opting to send its top three officials Jose Manuel Barroso the President of the European Commission, Herman Van Rompuy the President of the European Council, and Martin Schulz the President of the European Parliament2 as a sign that the EU is not headed by one person but instead is an supranational economic and political bloc that seeks to unify the European continent. Their symbolic acceptance of the award is in response to what Geir Lundestad, the Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, called, “an accumulated record.”3 This record has ushered the EU into the international spotlight as a beacon for countries in the EU’s periphery to want to join the bloc.

Europäische Integration aus historischer Erfahrung. Ein Zeitzeugengespräch mit Michael Gehler = European Integration as historical experience. Discussion with Michael Gehler. ZEI Discussion Paper C220, 2013

No abstract.

Europäische Integration aus historischer Erfahrung. Ein Zeitzeugengespräch mit Michael Gehler = European integration as historical experience. Discussion with Michael Gehler. ZEI Discussion Paper C221 2014

No abstract.

The European Construction - from Communities to a Genuine Supranational Union

The European Union is an entity having a unique way of construction. All started as a need to put the coal and steel resources together in order to avoid a new army conflict on the old continent and as a way to rebuild the European economies after the World War Two. The success of these strategies and policies but also the newly realities that appeared at the European and global level, encouraged the European leaders to dare for more. Hopefully, more and more European states embraced the idea of integration, thanks to all the advantages brought by the membership. Hence, new premises were created and the decision makers took advantage of them and used the treaties as mechanisms for a safe and stable development. Using the observation and the qualitative method by analyzing several researches on this topic and the reforms introduced through the treaties, we will finally be able to validate our research hypothesis that we can speak nowadays about a real union having its own identity, a union which has moved from an intergovernmental organization to a supranational one.