It was Jean Monnet, the great French statesman and thinker known as the "father of interdependence," who devised the system during long meditative walks in the French countryside. Those who enjoyed quiet walks with Monnet included Winston Churchill, the first post-war West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and Robert Schuman, French foreign minister and the first president of the Council of Europe. Together, they created a new political and economic entity. It was one that would adapt to changing times and new technologies in a world more needy and more dangerous than anything they could have imagined. It was a system founded in democracy and human rights and backed by a new economic model that, by the early 1980s, had turned the grouping of European states into the world's biggest and most powerful trading bloc.

On May 9, 1950, Robert Schuman, then French foreign Minister, formally adopted Monnet's suggestion that coal and steel production in France and Germany should be "pooled" under a common supranational authority. This was the basis for the first of three pan-European bodies, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) that remains a powerful symbol of Franco German post-war reconciliation. It effectively forced the two nations to become reliant on each other, so that neither would be able to threaten its neighbor.

At its creation after the war, the United Nations had 55 member nations. With the accession of Switzerland in early March 2002, it has today 190 members. In 1950, six European countries formed the European Community as the basis of the coal and steel community. These nations‹France, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands‹were joined in 1973 by Britain, Denmark and Ireland, in 1981 by Greece, in 1986 by Portugal and Spain, and, more recently, by Austria, Finland and Sweden. Today, this club of 15 nations with a population of 375 million calls itself the European Union (EU).

For centuries, Europe has been a place of many states, empires, wars and genocide. But the EU is that rare historical phenomenon representing the reverse of conquest and social revolution. It created a civil framework which has seen half a continent living in peace, prosperity and democracy for over half a century and, today, a further 25 to 30 countries are seeking membership.

The EU is run by four key governing bodies:

Other key bodies include the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Auditors, the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, and the European Ombudsman. The EU also has two major lending agencies, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund. Management of the EU's new currency, the euro, is overseen by the European Central Bank (ECB). Consisting of representatives of the eurozone's national central banks, it was created in 1998 and is based in Frankfurt. The Dutch economist Wim Duisenberg currently serves as ECB president. Appointed for a term of eight years, his executive board comprises a vice president and four other senior bankers. Both the ECB and the European Commission have come under fire for a lack of transparency in their dealings, with some of the sharpest criticism coming from members of the European Parliament. So complex are the myriad rules, and so technical many of the ministerial meetings that politicians, let alone the public, often have difficulty coming to grips with what the EU and its institutions are all about. This has led to domestic political problems in every member nation, usually because the government or the media have failed to explain an issue carefully.
With national currencies consigned to history and replaced by the euro, the EU launched a three-year debate to see how far integration should go and what kind of constitutional arrangements are needed for a club which could keep growing. According to officials in Brussels, the key issues will be the division of powers between Brussels and national governments, the role of parliamentarians in EU decision-making, and how to simplify the notoriously complex treaties of the EU legal framework. Known as the Convention on the Future of Europe, the debating body is to be chaired by the 76-year-old former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing with a committee of 105 politicians and experts drawn from member nations. Whether or not, after consultations with civil society and government, they will be able to draft an EU constitution by the year 2004 remains to be seen.

A core issue to be discussed will be the cost of admitting new members, both in terms of the impact on the euro, as well as in terms of how extensively wealthier governments will have to foot the bill for poorer Eastern European countries. Whether this cost will have a negative impact on Europe's huge aid and humanitarian budget also remains to be seen.

Pascal Lamy, the EU trade commissioner told The Earth Times Monthly that the EU is currently the world's biggest provider of development assistance. Lamy, who describes himself as "firmly rooted" in the French Socialist Party mainstream, is so concerned about the public perception of the EU that he published a new blueprint this week. Entitled The Europe we Want, the publication is aimed at preventing the French left becoming too "euroskeptic."

Throughout the existence of the Community and the EU, skeptics have argued that the cold war, the superpowers' control over Europe and the balance of nuclear terror were sufficient to maintain security without a European club. But by introducing and refining the rule of law in relations between its members, the EU has removed an entire dimension of potentially destructive expectations by policy makers and reined in the dangerous nationalism that has spilt so much blood in Europe over the past 1,000 years.