Word: ec
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Next week, a major European summit, one which may seal a federal future for Europe, will take place at Maastricht, in the Netherlands. There, leaders of the 12 EC states will sign away some portion of their sovereignty over monetary, social, foreign, and security policy...
Leaders from the Continent criticize Britain as being out of step with the rest of the EC. But everyone recognizes that at the end of the day Prime Minister John Major will shake his partners' hands, whereas his predecessor was far more likely to beat them about the head. The conciliatory Major will reach some agreement, and probably a fairly wide-sweeping one, with the rest of the EC at Maastricht...
...giants of the East and West. France has long kept America's attention by playing hard-to-get, but now it wants respect. Germany, after a long period of forced repentance for its sins, wants to get back into the game. Most of the rest of the EC (including the former colonial powers Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Portugal) can't go it alone on the world stage, but wouldn't mind pooling their resources to get a piece of the action...
...Euro-federalists hate the fact that, as the Belgian foreign minister Mark Eyskens noted, "The EC is an economic giant but a political dwarf and a military worm." They want to start changing this state of affairs at Maastricht, with as firm a call for political union as they can wheedle out of Britain. A federal Europe, they say, will not be flat-footed when crises arise...
...rationales for their positions, while unstated in official communiques, are not secret. Germany wants to expand its power to the East by slicing up potential rivals, and France fears an expansion of Germany's influence over Eastern Europe. The cause of the EC's hemming and hawing on the Yugoslavian question, then, is not some failure in coordination, but the natural outgrowth of deep-seated rivalries and insecurities within the Community...