A half-century of the construction of Europe is dealt with in this book, (1) which traces in reverse the period between the texts of the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) and the Treaty of Rome (1957), commenting in turn upon the Treaties of Nice (2001), Amsterdam (1997), Maastricht (1992) and the Single Act (1986). The voyage begins in the Portuguese capital, and we take up the entire group of the articles in the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU); we land in Rome where the European adventure began more than 50 years ago. “The goal of this guidebook is to help political science students understand the origin of various rules and their development over time”, explains Quentin Michel, professor of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Liège, and director of the Research Unit for European Studies. “We have compiled all the articles, and we have gone all the way back to the founding Treaty from 1957; we took the Treaty of Lisbon as our starting point, and the object was to identify the origins and preceding versions of various articles, and then to comment on the eventual changes [moving in the other direction] in the original versions over time.”
 
Like Rome, the European Union was not built in a day. The process begun after the Second World War is far from complete, notwithstanding the number of countries that have joined the Union in recent years, greatly complicating the functioning of European institutions. “Things don’t work with 28 the way they worked with 6”, according to Quentin Michel, professor of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Liège, and director of the Research Unit for European Studies. “This has had an obvious impact, if only in practical terms. When the representatives of the six founding Member States (Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) met, you could go around the table with each speaker taking the floor for two minutes, and in less than 15 minutes you were done. Today it takes an hour to go around like that. In addition, not only do we have more speakers, but the number of languages has increased. So we can say things have not gotten simpler over time. At the beginning the European [Community] was expected to operate with a maximum of 15 members. No one imagined we would have almost twice that number today."

In 1957 the earliest working languages for the European Union were four (German, French, Italian and Dutch); now we use 24. In practice English, French and German are most often used as procedural languages, but we must admit that the House of Europe has begun to look a little like the Tower of Babel. We are conscious of this reality – increasing complexity and a risk of slowdown – but the Member States have all endorsed the idea of simplifying the functioning of the whole group of European institutions. If we make exception for the Euratom treaty, today’s Europe is based on the Treaty of Lisbon, which was a modification of the Treaty on the European Union (Maastricht, 1992) and the founding treaty for the European Community (Rome, 1957). The first treaty has kept its name (TEU for short); the second survives as the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Unsurprisingly, the second treaty is the heavyweight in terms of legal articles, containing 358 as opposed to 55 for the first. In all, the Treaty of Lisbon contains a little over 400 articles as opposed to 248 in the Treaty of Rome. The number of articles has not only increased, but they have changed as well, in letter and in spirit. 

(1) Quentin Michel (director), “De Lisbonne à Rome. Evolution article par article des traités institutionnels de l’Union européenne”, European Studies Unit, University of Liège press.