The Maastricht Treaty is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary and faces the challenge of reforming the Stability and Growth Pact. A dossier that has always been at the center of fierce disputes between member states and is now of crucial importance for the economic future of the Union itself, marked by the wounds left first by the sovereign debt crisis and then, in the last three years, a permanent state of emergency ranged from Covid to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Signed on February 7, 1992 in the Dutch border town and came into force promptly at midnight on November 1, 1993, in keeping with the spirit of the twelve European heads of state and government who signed the agreement – including Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterrand – the treaty was intended to represent the first step towards an economic, monetary and political union. A hope that arose from the euphoria triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even today it is still difficult to achieve it, weakened by multi-stage European integration, by the often categorical rejection of a gradual transfer of national sovereignty and by the cyclical winds of Euroscepticism.
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