With the formation of NATO in 1949 and other regional
organizations such as EURATOM and the European
Community, Western European governments took the
initial moves toward creating a more unified continent.
By 1992, the EC included nearly 350 million people and
constituted the world’s largest single trading bloc, transacting
almost one-quarter of the world’s commerce.
In the early 1990s, EC members drafted the Treaty on
European Union (known as the Maastricht Treaty, after
the city in the Netherlands where the agreement was
reached), seeking to create a true economic and monetary
union of all members of the organization. The treaty
would not take effect, however, until all members agreed.
On January 1, 1994, the European Community became
the European Union (EU).
One of its first goals was to introduce a common currency,
called the euro. But problems soon arose. Voters in
many countries opposed the austerity measures that their
governments would be compelled to take to reduce growing
budget deficits. Germans in particular feared that replacing
the rock-solid mark with a common European
currency could lead to economic disaster. Yet the logic of
the new union appeared inescapable if European nations
were to improve their capacity to compete with the
United States and the powerful industrializing nations of
the Pacific Rim. On January 1, 2002, eleven of the EC nations
abandoned their national currencies in favor of
the euro.
In the meantime, plans got under way to extend the
EU into Eastern Europe, where several nations were just
emerging from decades of domination by the Soviet
Union. In December 2002, the EU voted to add ten new
members, including Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary,
Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, in 2004. Yet not all are
convinced that European integration is a good thing. Eastern
Europeans fear that their countries will be dominated
by investment from their prosperous neighbors, while
their counterparts in Western Europe express concerns
at a possible influx of low-wage workers from the new
member countries. All in all, a true sense of a unified Europe
is still lacking among the population throughout the
region, and the rising wave of antiforeign sentiment (see
the box on p. 188) and anger at government belt tightening
are issues that will not go away in the near future.
The NATO alliance continues to serve as a powerful
force for European unity. Yet it too faces new challenges
as Moscow’s former satellites in Eastern Europe clamor
for membership in the hope that it will spur economic
growth and reduce the threat from a revival of Russian
expansionism. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
and Poland joined the alliance, and the Baltic states have
expressed an interest in doing so in the future. Some observers
express concern, however, that an expanded
NATO will not only reduce the cohesiveness of the organization
but also provoke Russia into a new posture of
hostility to the outside world.
World History
