Devious and deceitful? EU has just moved on with the times

In Monday’s Shropshire Star Mr Bob Wydell tells us that ‘devious and deceitful from day one, the EU has changed its name five times’.

He goes on to say: “It was evolved from the European Coal and Steel Company (sic), through the Common Market, the EEC, the EC and today’s EU.”

Please allow me to correct his interpretation of the facts. The first European Treaty after the war was the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (not Company) in 1951, designed to put coal and steel production under a common authority to prevent the rearmament of Germany and make further wars, particularly between Germany and France, impossible.

1957 saw the creation of the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the European Economic Community (EEC). The legislative and administrative functions of these three institutions were merged in 1967 to create the European Communities. We joined these institutions in 1973. The ‘common market’ you talk about is not a new name but merely a shorthand term used all over Europe for the EEC. Under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 these three treaties were amended to transform the institutions into the European Community (you are right to use the initials EC at this point).

The European Union itself is an amalgamation – under the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 – of the European Community (EC), known as the first pillar, and two intergovernmental pillars – a) Justice and Home Affairs (e.g. the European Arrest Warrant), and b) a Common Foreign and Security Policy, both pillars involving no more than intergovernmental cooperation.

I do not see why evolving names reflecting evolving circumstances is necessarily devious and deceitful. Are Russians devious and deceitful for turning St Petersburg into Petrograd, then Leningrad, and then back to St Petersburg? Are Indians devious and deceitful for changing Bombay into Mumbai and Calcutta into Kolkata? And is the British Government devious and deceitful for amalgamating the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to create the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) before turning it into the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)?

I rest my case.

Alan Gardiner, Withington

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