Acceso usuarios
Niamh Nic Shuibhne
You wait a long time for significant anniversaries, and then three come along at once. The 50th anniversary of the judgment in van Gend en Loos was already observed in previous editorials this year. But November 2013 saw the 20th anniversary of two further EU milestones: the coming into force of the Treaty on European Union, and the decision in Keck and Mithouard.
The Maastricht Treaty signified a radical reimagining of the European Economic Community by introducing the European "Union" and the associated pillar construct, which in itself reflected a compromise among competing State visions of and degrees of readiness for the consequences of intensified integration. The complex imprint of the resulting tripartite polity (or maybe policy) structure can still be traced today, notwithstanding the formal levelling of the pillars through Lisbon.
