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The champagne did not go flat everywhere in Europe during the 1990s. In Finland it bubbled over for ten years once the cork was pulled. In Britain it also kept sparkling into the new millennium. In Italy, the prosecco tasted great when first poured, though a little light, but had to be quaffed while cool and before losing its delicacy. It was in the great trans-Rhenanian areas of sparkling wine production, of champagne and Sekt, that the stuff lost the power to tickle the palate, enchant the spirit, and enliven the company. In France and Germany few folks really understood how the magic had been lost or what had gone wrong with the formula – why no one seemed effervescent and everyone morose – but morosité was indeed the word of the day. Perhaps the irrepressible Dutch had the answer. At least they had not forgotten how to laugh. The party began as the new world economy opened. Why did some Europeans enjoy it and others remain glum? This is not a question for Trivial Pursuit but a pastime of another kind: the asymmetrical three-level interdependence game taking place internationally, regionally, and nationally and from which, in complicated and unpredictable ways, integration advances. The impasse at the EU signified neither its end nor its need – merely that the impetus to change would have to come from outside of official Brussels. Where the arrows of the future point is not always evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacques Delors cast a long shadow over the development of Community institutions in the 1990s. The EU's agenda for the decade was his: the completion of the internal market, the attainment of monetary union, and, above all, the erection of the second and third Maastricht “pillars” – one for a Common Security and Foreign Policy (CSFP), the other for Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). A new commitment to widening the Union, the eastern Enlargement, dated from 1993. Until the very end of the decade, however, it received lower priority than “deepening” (i.e., building up) Community institutions. Delors's commitment to institution building was unwavering. The prospective addition of new member-states merely gave him a handy excuse for accelerating the program. The president was wary of anything that might dilute the authority of his office. The French felt likewise about their power within the Community. They, too, dragged their feet when it came to taking in new members. For Mitterrand as for Delors, Enlargement distracted from the real task ahead – the construction, bureaucratically, of a federal Europe. They would have tried to build “vertically” even if it had not become – owing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the challenges of globalization – politically and economically necessary to expand “horizontally.” The historian of the EU during the 1990s should practice for the task of writing by playing arcade video games of the sort that feature a movable object – the driver of a racing car, for instance – faced with navigating successive and often quite unpredictable perils and pitfalls in order to arrive safely at a distant finishing line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Have it as you will. In the 1970s, the Community was ground between the hither and nether millstones, stuck between a rock and a hard place, flattened between exogenous pressure from above and endogenous force from below. It was, so to speak, sandwiched. Pressed between the two thick slabs of bread were a thin slice of processed ham, a single soggy piece of lettuce, browning and curled at the edges, and a solitary smear of butter. Who could be blamed for not wanting a bite? Cast aversion and distaste aside. Lend an ear. The struggling Community was stuck between the world monetary disorder that bore down on it from above and the thickening mass of national protectionism that swelled up from below. The two left little wiggle room for the Commission, the Council, or the court stuck in between. The co-editor of the decade's standard work on the EC concluded that the policy context of the European Economic Communities seems [close] to that identified by Lindblom in his “muddling through model” of public policy making … [whose tendency is] to prefer maximizing security to radical and comprehensive innovation, [and] … the policy process as a whole [is] characterized by incrementalism and a high degree of continuity. Is that a surprise? Is there anything to add to the elegant formulation of this eminent Yale political scientist? The results were, under the harsh conditions of the era, actually a bit better than muddling through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Monnet has a strong claim to be called the Father of Europe. Monnet deserves almost single-handed credit for creating in 1951 the first of Europe's epochal institutions for integration, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). He was also the power behind the grandiose but ill-fated European Defense Community (EDC), a scheme for an integrated armed force composed of multinational units and tied into the NATO command structure that was rejected by France in the summer of 1954. Jean Monnet was, in addition, the moving force behind EURATOM (European Atomic Energy Commission) – a proposal for a continental nuclear power industry – which he put forth in conjunction with the “re-launching” of Europe in 1955. Unlike EDC, EURATOM would not be dead on arrival; instead, along with the ECSC, it would develop into an organ (though only an appendage) of the European Economic Community (EEC). As president from 1954 to 1975 of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, a lobby for the integration cause, Monnet would be an inexhaustible font of unification and federation initiatives. Yet after the mid-1950s he was reduced to the status of an outsider and could influence the integration process only indirectly through allies in Washington, Bonn, Brussels, and other capitals. Thereafter, many initiatives associated with Monnet stemmed from self-anointed disciples – “monnetists” – acting (sometimes without specific authorization) on his behalf in a manner thought to be consistent with his “spirit.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]