Three pillars of the European Union: Encyclopedia II - Three pillars of the European Union - The three pillars

Three pillars of the European Union - The three pillars

1. The first or 'Community' pillar concerns economic, social and environmental policies.
2. The second or 'Common Foreign and Security Policy' (CFSP) pillar concerns foreign policy and military matters.
3. The third or 'Police and Judicial Co-operation in Criminal Matters' (PJCC) pillar concerns co-operation in the fight against crime. This pillar was originally named 'Justice and Home Affairs'.

• Customs Union and Single market
• Common Agricultural Policy
• Common Fisheries Policy
• EU competition law
• Economic and monetary union
• EU-Citizenship
• Education and Culture
• Trans-European Networks
• Consumer protection
• Healthcare
• Research (e.g. Sixth Framework Programme)
• Environmental law
• Social policy
• Asylum policy
• Schengen treaty
• Immigration policy

Foreign policy:

• EU battle groups, European Rapid Reaction Force
• Peacekeeping
• Human rights
• Democracy
• Foreign aid

Security policy:

• European Security and Defence Policy

• Drug trafficking and weapons smuggling
• Terrorism
• Trafficking in human beings
• Organized crime
• Bribery and fraud

Within each pillar, a different balance is struck between the supranational and intergovernmental principles.

Supranationalism is strongest in the first pillar. Its function generally corresponded at first to the three European Communities (European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), European Economic Community (EEC) and Euratom) whose organizational structure had already been unified in the 1960s through the Merger Treaty. Later, through the Treaty of Maastricht the word "Economic" was removed from the EEC, so it became simply the EC. Then with the Treaty of Amsterdam additional areas would be transferred from the third pillar to the first. In 2002, the ECSC ceased to exist because the treaty which established it, the Treaty of Paris, had expired.

In the CFSP and PJCC pillars the powers of the European Parliament, the Commission and European Court of Justice with respect to the Council are significantly limited, without however being altogether eliminated. The balance struck in the first pillar is frequently referred to as the "community method", since it is that used by the European Community.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The three pillars", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki