Talk:European Community

(old comments)

Please note that it is not technically correct to describe the EC as the EU. The EC will remain until all three pillars are amalgomated under the draft constitution.

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Are you sure Sweden is a member of the European Community? It was not a member of the European Union when it was established, and the other 'new' EU members are not on the list.

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Yes, Sweden is an EU member -- every member of the EU is in the EC, and every member in the EC is in the EU. The EU and the EC are basically the same organization. (Techincally, only the EC is legally an organization, and the EU is composed of the EC and also wider non-EC responsibilities in areas such as foreign policy, security and defence, policing and crime co-operation.) Also, all the the 'new' EU members are on the list -- your not thinking of the candidate countries are you? (They are not yet members.) --- Simon J Kissane

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I expect there is some good Wiki reason why there isn't a list of country names here.

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In regards to the date change... from the EU website: http://europa.eu.int/abc/treaties/index_en.htm

"The Treaty on European Union, which was signed in Maastricht on 7 February 1992, entered into force on 1 November 1993. The Maastricht Treaty changed the name of the European Economic Community to simply 'the European Community'."

I think that the entry into force date would be the appropriate changeover moment for the EEC name to the shortened EC, despite any preceding signings/ratifications.

-Mike Hollis

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I think that the redirect from the European Communities to "European Community" is wrong. Here is a short summary to go with. "The European Communities" used to mean three European Communities: the European Economic Community (which was changed to "European Community" by the Maastricht Treaty), the European Steel and Coal Community (which does not exist any more) and the European Atomic Energy Community (which still exists). Now, the European Communities legislation always refers to "the Community" (which used to be, as necessary, any one of the three Communities which was issuing the respective legislation, and now means one of the two remaining Communities) while "the Communities" used to mean all three. Therefore, reference to "the Community" could mean any one of the three while reference to the "European Communities" used to mean all three and nowadays mean the two left (EC and EURATOM). Hence, the European Communities are not the same as the European Community. The European Union includes the Communities but has some additional "ingredients" (pillars). Basically the Communities are becoming more and more a thing of the past while emphasis is laid on the term "European Union". E.g. the Council of the European Communities was renamed to "Council of the European Union" some years ago etc.

As for information regarding this quite complex structure, I find the information contained in this article quite poor. I hope that someone with better editing skills than mine could fix this. -Anonymous Commenter

I concur. European communities and European community are two different matters. Leonr (talk) 23:55, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Rated

• Article rated--if there are sources it should be nominated for Good Article Candidate (WP:GAC). →James Kidd (contr/talk/email) 12:25, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

European Union and WTO.

"For legal reasons the European Union is known as the European Communities in WTO matters."
This is nonsense. The EU ist _not_ a WTO member, but the EC is. I'll delete this, okay? Henning Blatt 21:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Expiry

Are EEC/Euratom treaties going to expire just as ECSC treaty ? Siyac 21:19, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

This article needs cleaning...many points are repeated.

Merge of articles explaining the relationship of "European Community", "Europea Communities" etc. to EU

I think it would be a good idea to merge the two articles, as flagged on the article page.--Boson 14:44, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

It might also be a good idea to change the title of this article to "European Communities" (i.e. change the direction of the redirect). The text should indicate the different usage of the terms even more clearly, also bearing redirects in mind.--Boson 14:44, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes to the first, why that article is there I don't know. We should also try to expand this, it is way to limited. But to the second, the current name is "European Community". That is the formal name of the pillar, the plural is an old and/or informal term. - J Logan ^t: 15:15, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Infobox

FYI: In the same manner as the European Coal and Steel Community article, I've put together an infobox to be used here post-2009: User:JLogan/Sandbox.- J Logan ^t: 23:28, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. Writing about the EU will be much easier once the various communities and pillars are gone. - $\mathrm {S}$ $\mathrm {Solberg}$ $\mathrm {J}$ 11:53, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Split

I've been thinking about this for a while, although we don't have much separate data I think it might be good to have individual articles for European Economic Community, European Communities and European Community. For a start, the nature of the pillar is different from that of the EEC which was a direct predecessor. Having them all link to the same page might sound good from a continuity point of view but it may confuse some people who need to understand the differences better. The European Communities page would be small, just explaining the three different ones, the term and how they were interlinked. The EEC page would show everything pre-1993 of the individual development, members, institutions etc. while the EC page would concentrate on the pillar system, policies etc. Sticking them together gets a bit messy, like talking about members as post-1993 we go into repeating EU information.

Any objections to this proposal?- J Logan ^t: 10:39, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I think this is a very good idea, if people know enough about the different things to actually write three separate articles. - SSJ ☎ 12:05, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Draft EEC article: User:JLogan/Sandboxa. Communities would be small by nature. The only thing that might be hard to get the proper amount of data is the EC one but time will build it.- J Logan ^t: 12:43, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Done, I know I should have waited but it takes ages for anyone to notice things here unless you actually edit it.- J Logan ^t: 20:04, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Treaty of Lisbon

Presently this treaty is dead and irrelevant. The text regarding it was written when it was under serios consideration. May we agree to delete speculation about it until there is some real prospect that it will come into force? Raggz (talk) 22:48, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Who says its dead? Arnoutf (talk) 10:04, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Ditto, ratification is still continuing. It is the full intention of the leaders to continue with the ratification (and failing that, a treaty doing exactly the same).- _J.Logan`^t: 16:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Fine. Raggz (talk) 23:09, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Euratom is not defunct

The article starts with the note that "...three defunct European international organisations (the EEC, ECSC and EAEC),...", but this applies only to ECSC (lapsed in 2002) and EEC that transformed into EC and was then "integrated in the EU" by the Treaty of Lisbon. The EAEC is still functioning as before. Alinor (talk) 11:13, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Good catch, might just be the redirect note but best be accurate.- _J.Logan`^t: 22:09, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

European Community/European Communities as a Pillar

Hello from Russian Wikipedia, and sorry for my poor English. I'm a member (perhaps, the only active one) of the Russian version of European Union Project. I've noticed that two years ago you've came to some consensus about what is European Community and what is European Communities. However, studying various official sources I found no basis for considering the European Community, not European Communities, the first pillar of EU. E.g. the Treaty of Maastricht clearly covers all the communities; the same is in European NAvigator (note the picture); the official glossary; even the picture in the article itself states 'European Communities', not 'European Community', the same is with the diagram in Three pillars of the European Union. So, shouldn't the text in the beginning of the article, 'This article is about the abolished pillar of the European Union,' be changed with the corresponding changes to related articles (at least European Communities)? Volgar (talk) 19:06, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

The EU is founded on distinct treaties, the EU treaties are what was the EEC Treaty and the EU Treaty. The ECSC and Euratom were totally distinct and did not form part of the EU. If you recall, the integration of Euratom into the failed constitution was put aside as they feared addressing nuclear issues would needlessly put people off the treaty. Euratom/ECSC are/were defacto part of the EU but not legally as they had distinct treaties and legal personalities. The confusion arises when people mix up the terms (as they do frequently) but the European Community was the renamed EEC and alone legally formed the first pillar. The Communities was referring to them all but there was no single legal personality - only common governing institutions. That is also why there is a slight lack of Parliamentary power over Euratom issues.- _J.Logan`^t: 20:18, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I called Europe Direct yesterday, without having seen this section, believe it or not, and asked whether the first pillar was called European Community or European Communities. The answer was that the EU's first pillar was collectively called "European Communities". It is clear that, since the European Community was by far the most dominant part of the pillar, the pillar was often called just "the european community pillar". But as the European NAvigator chart and the Europa.eu glossary clearly state, the European Community was not a pillar in it self. The Lisbon Treaty says (I've copied the quote from the treaty): "The Union shall replace and succeed the European Community". It seems like only the European Community part of the European Communities pillar had a legal personality. The first pillar never had a legal personality. Do we agree? - SSJ ^t 17:06, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm, I think the misunderstanding we have here is due to the fact the European Communities never really existed and the pillar system never legally described in the treaties. I've been trailing through the treaties to find something solid but given the lack of definition of the pillars there I haven't dug up anything either way. However the EU treaty does amend all three community treaties so I'll agree, unless someone can come up with new evidence, that the Communities did all form the first pillar. However I would like to stress that we should agree here what to do with the articles before people move things around - in order to make sure everything is consistent.

We currently have three articles;

• European Economic Community
• European Communities
• European Community

If we move the data that currently resides on European Community to European Communities, we still have the question of a name change between European Economic Community and European Community. So, do we maintain two articles or do we have one (my preference) and if we do have one, what do we call it? Furthermore, we need to ensure appropriate redirects and clarifications in intros. Another question is the infoboxes.- _J.Logan`^t: 20:05, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Now that we finally have settled this question, I think we should sort out the three articles and get the facts straight in the first round at least. What we need to do is to clarify the following across all articles:

• European Economic Community: Most prominent of the communities established by the treaties of Rome, had legal personality - shared institutions with Euratom and ECSC from 1967 - was in 1993 transformed into the biggest component of the 1. pillar of the EU (and changed name), retained its legal personality.
• European Community: The name of the biggest portion of the first pillar of the EU from 1993 to 2009. Was effectively what the EEC had been transformed into with the Maastricht Treaty. Obtained the legal personality that had belonged to the EEC. Passed its legal personality on to the EU and was succeeded and replaced by the EU in 2009.
• European Communities: a term that is used to refer to the Communities that were created by the Treaties of Rome as well as the ECSC. Was a common term even before the Merger Treaty, but with the common institutions that were introduced with the Merger Treaty, the term "European Communities" became formal (purely) in the sense that the common institutions had names that included the term (e.g. Commission of the European Communities and Court of Justice of the European Communities), yet the term European Communities never was a legal term in itself nor had a legal personality. Was from 1993 to 2009 used to refer to the first EU pillar, due to the fact that the first pillar was composed of the same three communities which had been given common institutions with the Merger Treaty. European Communities was still not a legal person or a formal name in itself. The first pillar never had a formal name - the treaties only defined its content. The term ceased to be used in 2009 as all communities but Euratom were abolished, and at the same time the pillar of which "European Communities" had been an informal name, was also abolished.

Any objections? - SSJ ^t 23:59, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

The only thing I'm not too sure about is whether the European Communities never had a legal personality. Should we call Europe Direct? :) - SSJ ^t 00:17, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

As each of the three communities had their own legal personalities, I doubt the collective of all thre,e being very informal, would have had one. As for your outline, I think we can combine the first two, the European Community article is very short (especially as pillar data would be under European Communities) so I think we can get away with it. We should also use the EEC name as that is most distinct.- _J.Logan`^t: 08:36, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree, even though the "European Community" is the latter name of the organization, it'd be almost indistinguishable for a reader, since it's too close to the "European Communities". Thanks guys! I'm glad I was right with my case. —Volgar (talk) 08:48, 2 September 2010 (UTC)