As mentioned in above, it added the concept of a monetary union with the creation of a European System of Central Banks (ESCB) and the European Central Bank (ECB), both in charge of conducting the Union’s monetary policy.4 It also added two “annexes” to the main Community “building”: the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), the latter now, as a result of later changes, known as Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (PJCC). In notorious Community jargon, the main “building” housing the three initial communities – the EC (formerly the EEC), the EAEC, and (until 2002, when it expired) the ECSC – is now called the first pillar of the European Union. The two “annexes,” the CFSP and PJCC, are known as the second and third pillars, respectively.

This strange terminology was developed in the negotiations between the Member States for easy reference: the three components of the entire European construction were compared with the three pillars of a Greek temple supporting a common roof. That common roof, consisting of the common provisions in Title I of the EU Treaty, and the three pillars were, together, called the European Union (EU). Of these three pillars, the first- and particularly the European Community part thereof 5 – is the most supranational in nature, the other two pillars remaining more intergovernmental,6 and is therefore also the pillar where the democratic legitimacy of the European construction is most developed. Hereinafter, reference will frequently be made to the “Community institutions” when discussing first-pillar matters, whereas I will refer to the “Union institutions” when second- or third-pillar matters are at issue, or when I refer to the European construction as a whole. The aforementioned common provisions in Title I of the EU Treaty contain the objectives of the Union (Article 2) and set out the structure of the Union’s single institutional framework with special reference to the European Council (Articles 3-5). They also enumerate the principles on which the Union is founded (Article 6) and the procedure to be followed if a Member State were found to act in serious breach of those principles (Article 7).

4 See n. 18 below.
5 In this work, I will only exceptionally refer to the two other Community Treaties (the ECSC and the EAEC Treaty).
6 See below, pp. 12–14 and 22; also pp. 58ff. 10 Institutions, Identity, and Values Council at the time of signature.