European Community Law from a U.S. Perspective

Although less than forty years have passed since the founding of the European Economic Community (now the European Community), the lifetime of the Community is well marked temporally. The term of each Commission furnishes a convenient time-line for measuring the Community\u27s progress in legal integration. Since the 1970s, each year has been punctuated by two or more summit meetings of heads of state or government. These summits not only are key markings in their own right, but also furnish an occasion for additional monitoring of the Community\u27s state of health. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Community submitted to periodic self-examinations through specially commissioned studies and reports on the Community\u27s well-being. In more recent years, intergovernmental conferences (IGCs), convened for the express purpose of negotiating amendments to the constitutive treaties, have provided additional fora for deliberately and comprehensively assessing the state of the Community and its direction. While the Community continues to fulfill its geographical manifest destiny through successive enlargements within the European continent, it provokes a considerable amount of interest in the effect that each particular widening has on the Community\u27s overall deepening