The Maastricht Treaty — Treaty on European Union (1992)

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The Maastricht Treaty — Treaty on European Union (1992)

Free Resource · Founding Document · Signed February 7, 1992

The treaty that created the European Union and set the path to the euro

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For the complete official text, see the EU’s own legal database: Treaty on European Union, EUR-Lex.

Signed in Maastricht, Netherlands on February 7, 1992 and in force from November 1, 1993, the Treaty on European Union transformed the European Economic Community — a trade and coal-and-steel arrangement dating to the 1950s — into the European Union: a union with its own citizenship, a common foreign policy ambition, and a path to a shared currency.

The three pillars

Maastricht organized the new Union around three “pillars”: the existing European Communities (economic, social, and environmental policy, run through the supranational EU institutions); a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), coordinated between member governments rather than run by Brussels; and cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs. This pillar structure lasted until the Lisbon Treaty merged it back into a single legal framework in 2009.

European Union citizenship

The treaty created the legal status of “citizen of the Union,” held automatically by every citizen of a member state, alongside their national citizenship — carrying the right to move and reside freely within the EU, to vote and stand in municipal and European Parliament elections wherever in the EU one lives, and to consular protection from any member state’s embassy abroad.

The path to the euro

Maastricht set out the timetable and the economic “convergence criteria” — on inflation, government deficit and debt, interest rates, and exchange-rate stability — that member states had to meet to join Economic and Monetary Union. Those criteria led directly to the launch of the euro, first as an accounting currency in 1999 and then as physical notes and coins in 2002.

Subsidiarity

The treaty also wrote the principle of subsidiarity into EU law: outside its areas of exclusive competence, the Union acts only where member states cannot sufficiently achieve an objective on their own — a check meant to keep decisions as close as possible to the citizen.

Primary source: Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty), Official Journal of the European Communities.