The Policy Portfolio

This chapter examines the EU’s policy portfolio. The most distinctive feature of this portfolio is that it has continued to expand since the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. The result of this expansion is that today there are many policies in which the EU is actively involved, or even for which it has prime responsibility, that previously had been under the sole control of the individual member states. A very important example is that of monetary policy, in which even in the 1970s the EU had minimal involvement. Since 2002, for those member states that relinquished their national currencies and adopted the euro, all major monetary decisions have been taken at the EU level.