Maastricht Treaty

[laughing]

These awards have now been running since 1993, when it was felt that the British beef industry needed a shot in the arm after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and the following explosion in the imports of cheap French donkey meat.

[laughing]

Many of us will remember Christmas 1992 when beef sales dropped off a cliff after the French government spent several million on the Think Donkey at Christmas campaign.

yeah, exactly.

More specifically, the European Union was created with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.

The Maastricht

Treaty? The official geopolitical block of, I guess...

And the Tories had actually developed a bit of a taste for building things by this point, admittedly mostly roads.

Nevertheless, Treasury asserted that not a penny of public money should be spent on building anything.

This position was only then compounded by the European Union and its Maastricht Treaty.

I'm catching myself there to not say Tweety.

And so it gets to this point where after they elect a parliament under the EEC, they decide they want to have a formal union.

And they sign a treaty called the Maastricht Treaty.

The Maastricht Treaty brings into existence what is now the European Union.

And instead of just being about commerce and about the exchange of trade and goods, they suddenly want to have political union.

They want to try and marry up all the nations of Europe into a formal, deeper political economic union.

Allora, entriamo subito nel merito, perché qui si gioca davvero l'interpretazione di uno dei pilastri della nostra Repubblica.

La ratifica del Trattato di Maastricht, che è avvenuta in Italia con la legge 454 del '92, rientra in modo impeccabile nelle limitazioni di sovranità che l'articolo undici non solo consente, ma oserei dire incoraggia.

Incoraggia, addirittura?

Sì, perché dobbiamo guardare all'evoluzione del concetto di pace.

Deve sporcarsi le mani, deve confrontarsi in modo esplicito, crudo e diretto con la dura realtà di registri contabili

Concordo pienamente.

E proprio in questo senso l'appendice del working paper offre un'intuizione procedurale davvero preziosa che tu stesso hai in parte anticipato poco fa: la cosiddetta via incidentale, basata sull'articolo 23 della legge 87 del '53 contro la stessa legge 454 del '92, quella che ha ratificato il Trattato di Maastricht

Spiega esattamente, ehm, cosa implicherebbe nella pratica una cosa del genere

So our longtime listeners, Ed and Sanjit, enlightened us to what this was most likely in reference to.

The Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992.

I hope I pronounced that correctly.

And this treaty created the European Union and established the single market.

I don't want to spend too much time about this, but I think it's nevertheless interesting to understand, including to assess the impact on foreign policy and on diplomacy.

When you mentioned the farmers, but you know it better than I do, and again, it's a French experience, but during the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, it was a referendum, and it was a near escape And then for the convention, it was not an escape.

It was a failure.

And the near escape for Maastricht, but again, Pierre was in a position where he knows far more than I do, the farmers voted against Maastricht.

France is not the only European country to vote on unity.

The Irish voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Maastricht Treaty.

That's what it's called, last June.

Sean Phelan is a computer engineer who lives in Dublin, and he joined me earlier today.

Bye.

Sean Phelan in Dublin.

Now, you should know that the Danish rejected the Maastricht Treaty, that's the plan for European unity, by a narrow margin in a referendum that was also held in June.

The government is now considering a second vote.

Look, I'll just, for our American audience, I'll just wheel back a little bit.

Formerly, in the Treaty of Maastricht in 19- 1992, and then subsequently un- under the Lisbon Treaty, the, the Treaty of the European Union, the TEU as it's referred to in short, which is the de facto constitution of the European Union.

U- European Union law is sovereign over member states' law, right? The European Court of Justice, which is, I suppose, equivalent to the EU's Supreme Court, came out with a, a couple of judgments in the '60s and '70s that already made that claim, but that was judicial activism.

It was put in the treaties, it, themselves in, in Maastricht and Lisbon.