The chapter considers the powers of the central administrative and legislative institutions. The Commission comprises a college of twenty-seven Commissioners appointed for five years. It has four central types of power. It can adopt quasi-legislation. It proposes laws, policies and the budget. It administers EU policies. Finally, it has powers to police the observance of EU law. The Council of Ministers, comprised of national ministers, has the final power of decision over almost all fields of EU law. It votes either by unanimity or by Qualified Majority, where fifteen States representing 65 per cent of the Union population must vote for a measure. The European Council comprises the Heads of Government. Its central role is to provide political direction for the other EU Institutions. The European Parliament comprises 705 directly elected representatives. Depending upon the field, it has the power of veto over legislation, has to assent to it or must be consulted over it. The Parliament also has significant powers to hold the other EU Institutions to account. This chapter concludes by examining the circumstances when individuals can seek disclosure of documents from the EU Institutions.

This chapter outlines the EU’s seven official main institutions (the European Council, Council of the European Union, European Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, Court of Auditors and European Central Bank) and the different executive, legislative and judicial powers that are allocated to them. It describes their tasks and the way they have organized their work. The EU’s combination of institutions is unique and can be characterized as ‘mixed government’ or as ‘a polity with many principals’. It is nevertheless based upon a common model for organizing democratic systems, namely that of consensualism, and aims to disperse power and constrain the use of it.

Helmut Schmidt’s Germany helped to found several multilateral institutions in the mid-1970s. Chapter 14 opens with the European Council, a thrice-annual gathering of EC-9 leaders that reasserted the primacy of European nation-states over supranational governance. Schmidt reconciled with Britain, acceding to the Regional Fund in hopes of swaying a British referendum on EC membership. The CSCE summit, held in Helsinki, was a milestone for East-West détente – though Bonn’s relations with the USSR remained strained, even as improvements with Poland were achieved. The Federal Republic fell into recession, and Schmidt fretted about Global South proposals for a New International Economic Order. Bonn’s response was to court major countries individually, highlighting Germany’s interest in positive trade relations while loosening controls on weapons exports and nuclear commerce. Economic anxiety also animated Schmidt’s urgent demands on allies to cooperate in staving off protectionism. Informal coordination with Britain, France, and the United States became commonplace, a more structured grouping, the G-7 (adding Japan, Italy, and soon Canada), reestablished confidence in Western leadership.

This chapter explores the key policy and law-making institutions in the EU – the European Parliament (the EP), the European Council (the EC), the Council of Ministers (the Council) and the European Commission (the Commission). The elements of the exploration will be taken from Article 13(2) TEU, where each institution is mandated to act ‘within the limits of the powers conferred on it in the Treaties, and in conformity with the procedures, conditions and objectives set out in them’. The chapter will outline the powers: what authority does each institution have, for what functions and how is it exercised? It will discuss their composition and identify supervisory relationships between the institutions.

To understand ‘Europe as a bureaucracy’, this chapter lays down a central principle underlying the EU’s bureaucracy – the notion of ‘institutional balance’. What is the EU’s institutional structure trying to balance? Answering this question is important to understanding how different institutions in the EU inter-relate. It also outlines the composition and powers of the main EU institutions and examines how these institutions produce law, examining the EU’s central decision-making process. As we will see, the practice of EU decision-making is often untransparent and complex. Yet these very features are difficult to avoid given the need to balance the different interests that have to be brought on board for EU policy to be both effective and legitimate. The EU’s bureaucracy creates inevitable trade-offs, the resolution of which depend on one’s normative view of what Europe is for.

Foreign relations law is treated in Poland as part of constitutional law. One of the most important issues is the distribution of competencies in this field among state authorities in the light of the 1997 Constitution. This is mainly the domain of the executive, which is dualistic: it consists of the President and the Council of Ministers (government). In principle, the tasks and competencies in foreign relations belong to the government, while the President has competencies only in the cases specified in the constitution and in the laws. There is, however, a constitutional obligation of the President to cooperate with the government in the field in question. The competence dispute over the representation of Poland in the European Council settled by the Constitutional Tribunal in 2009 was spectacular. The President's limited constitutional powers do not prevent him from showing significant political activity in foreign relations and military cooperation.

This chapter discusses the initiation of the euro’s transformation and the shift from negative to positive solidarity, in the form of financial assistance, that it caused. Its origin lies in a historical meeting of the heads of state or government on 11 February 2010. There, the leaders initiated a change in the Founding Contract by jointly committing themselves to safeguard the currency union’s financial stability. The chapter subsequently focuses on the positive solidarity displayed towards distressed member states through various temporary rescue funds. This not only created difficulties for political leaders back home, politically and legally, it also put great strain on the single currency’s legal set-up that still reflected a stability conception from the past. The third part of the chapter therefore discusses how member states tried to take away this strain by incorporating the shift in solidarity in Union law through the creation of Article 136(3) TFEU, allowing member states in the currency union to establish a permanent rescue mechanism. The chapter traces the process and considerations behind both this amendment and the establishment of the mechanism it enabled.

The European Union (EU) has its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was formed by six European countries in 1951. Since then, it has grown to 27 members through the accession of new Member States, and has increased its powers by adding new policy areas to its remit. At the time of writing, the EU is negotiating the first exit of a Member State after a majority of the UK electorate voted to leaving the EU on 23 June 2016 in a process that has come to be known as Brexit. The chapter explains the functions of the most important EU institutions (European Commission, Council of the EU, European Council, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice) and legal instruments (including directives and regulations). It proceeds by outlining the process of monetary integration, from the agreement in principle in 1969, to the creation of an internal market, and the adoption of the euro in 1999 by 11 Member States. The final section discusses steps towards financial integration, including the Financial Services Action Plan, Banking Union and Capital Markets Union.