(p. 9) Part 1 The Historical Context 

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the European Communities in the 1950s that gave rise to the European Union in the 1990s. It begins with a discussion of key developments in the first four decades of European integration and some of the tensions that have shaped them. It then considers how the idea of ‘European union’ lost momentum in the 1970s but was revived in the 1980s with the Single European Act (1986) and the Single Market project. It also shows how the EU was established through ‘Maastricht’ and the adoption and implementation of the Treaty on European Union (1992). The chapter concludes by analysing how the new ‘union’ was affected by reforms introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty (1997) and the Nice Treaty (2000) as the EU sought to prepare itself for the further enlargement and the challenges of the initial years of the twenty-first century.