Comunità economica europea

Starting with the failure of the European Defense Community, interpreted as the failure of the federal model, the author first retraces the birth of the EEC and the connection to the international context and the widespread challenges of decolonization in the mid-fifties. He analyzes why the Messina Conference was perceived as a tool for the re-launching of European integration, describing the different positions held by the single member states. He then points out the main turning points in the seventies and the eighties: the enlargement policy and the attempts to implement an institutional reform within the Community; the end of gold standard and the first attempts to design a common monetary union; German reunification and enlargement towards Eastern Europe. Finally he describes the main features of the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties, closing the analysis with the impact of the failure to ratify the Constitutional treaty.