Paris Summit 1974
The Paris Summit was a summit meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the Member States of the European Communities on December 9 and 10, 1974 in Paris . The decision was made to hold such summits under the name Regular at least three times a year. This was the creation of the European Council .
prehistory
After various crises in the 1960s, the summit in The Hague in 1969 , the first summit of European heads of state and government, made possible various compromises on established problems and brought about a revitalization of communities. Because of this success , two more such meetings took place in the following years, mainly at the initiative of French President Georges Pompidou , the Paris Summit in 1972 and the Copenhagen Summit in 1973 . These meetings were also perceived as successes. That is why in 1973 Jean Monnet , one of the “founding fathers” of the European Communities and chairman of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe , suggested that the summits be held in place in the sense of a “provisional European government”.
While the governments in France , Germany and Great Britain were sympathetic to this proposal, the smaller EC member states, especially the Benelux countries, were skeptical. They feared that the large states would gain too much influence through the new institution and that the Community organs, especially the European Commission, would be devalued. At the Copenhagen summit in 1973 they therefore prevented a decision to set up regular meetings.
However, the oil crisis of 1973/74, to which the EC did not find a common answer, made clear the need for new steps towards integration in the following year. In addition, there were changes of government in all three major states, with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing becoming President of France and Helmut Schmidt becoming Federal Chancellor in Germany . Both were even more convinced than their predecessors of the need for intensive intergovernmental cooperation . In the run-up to the Paris Summit, they therefore developed a proposal which the other states ultimately also agreed.
Results and consequences of the summit
At the Paris Summit it was decided to set up the European Council , at which the heads of state and government of the EC would meet at least three times a year in order to take into account the “internal problems that construction entails and the problems that Europe from the outside, seen as a whole ”, to“ develop the activities of the communities and the work of political cooperation and ensure their overall coherence ”. The presidency of the European Council , like the presidency of the Council of Ministers, should rotate between the member states every six months.
The European Council was not anchored in the contract and existed in the following years in parallel with the institutions provided for in the EC Treaty . In the EU legislative process , he formally did not matter. However, since the national ministers represented in the Council of the European Communities were in most cases subject to the authority of their respective heads of government to issue guidelines , the European Council quickly developed into the most important decision-making body wherever extensive compromises were required between the nation states.
Individual evidence
- ^ So the final communiqué of the summit, quoted from Gerhard Brunn, Die Europäische Einigung von 1945 bis heute , Bonn 2004, p. 201.