Introduction: Cooperation and integration among europeanized states

European integration has come along way since early visionaries such as Jean Monnet set forth the basic idea of Europe. The three communities formed in the immediate post-war period, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom, 1957), and the European Economic Community (EEC, 1957), were limited both in the scope of their supranational decision-making and the resulting impact onto the member states. More recent integration efforts, those memoralized in the Single European Act (1986) and the treaties of Maastricht (1993), Amsterdam (1999), and Nice (2000), established the basis for intensive intergovernmental and supranational decision making in a whole range of policy areas. This evolving process of European integration has had a deep, although varied, impact on the member states.