Europe after the Maastricht Treaty 1992 to Brexit 2020

The European Union was founded in 1992, when the then 12 members of the European Economic Community signed the Maastricht Treaty espousing principles of “ever closer integration”, a single currency, EU citizenship and a common foreign and security policy. Austria, Finland and Sweden joined in 1993 before the grand enlargement of 2004. The accession of ten new member states to the European Union (EU) in 2004 can be seen, in retrospect, as a high watermark for the ascendance of liberal democracy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The new entrants encompassed a swathe of former members of the Soviet Bloc from Estonia to the Czech Republic, Slovenia from the former Yugoslavia, and the Mediterranean island states of Malta and Cyprus. While Bulgaria joined the Union in 2007, and Croatia in 2013, the Eurozone debt crisis which erupted in 2010 (and almost resulted in Greece’s exit) created a chilling effect on further expansion, while the upsurge of migrants into the Union occasioned by wars in North Africa and the Middle East occasioned a political backlash which would climax with Brexit, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, in 2020.