This paper relates the main steps of the European Union building from the end ofWWII. What may today look like a coherent and well-defined project is in fact the result of numerous steps owing much to contingent circumstances. From ECCS to the treaty of Rome and beyond, the integration of Europe, is in fact as Monnet put it « the sum of the solutions adopted to crises ». Despite crises and the limits of this model, it is true that autonomy in an interdependent world is a reactionary illusion.
In the forty-odd years that have elapsed since the two Treaties of Rome came into force, the attention of learned authors has tended to be overwhelmingly focused on one of them, the EC Treaty and subsequent up-datings of it, to the detriment of the other, the Euratom Treaty, which has been correspondingly neglected.
The authors of this article trace the process of "constitutionalisation" of the Treaty of Rome and European law. This process was largely driven by the European Court of Justice and some other pro-European legal experts, thereby establishing a legal order of a protofederal character with direct effect and primacy vis-à-vis national law.
This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of EU member states’ power, the EU’s capability to act (efficiency), and the proportionality of the voting system in the Council of Ministers from the treaties of Rome in 1958 till the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 and beyond, using a wide range of alternative power indices.
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