The Intergovernmental Conference on Political Union - Institutional Reforms, New Policies and International Identity of the European Community

The radical changes taking place in the international scene during the late 1980s have presented the European Communities with important new challenges. The twelve Member States agreed that the only way to respond effectively to this new situation was to speed up the European integration process, and in December 1990 two Intergovernmental Conferences, focusing respectively on the development of an Economic and Monetary Union and a Political Union, were inaugurated. It was the difficult task of the Luxembourg and Dutch Presidencies to channel the often very diverging positions of the different actors in the process into one coherent set of amendments to the Treaties forming the European Communities.
This publication examines the positions which the different Member States, the Commission and the European Parliament have been defending in the Intergovernmental Conference on Political Union. The introduction gives an overview of the progression of the negotiations and places the debate on the development of a CFSP in a historical perspective. The concluding chapter presents a general framework for better understanding of the course and results of the negotiations, and makes a critical evaluation of the outcome. The annexes reproduce the main proposals submitted to the Conference.