Introduction

Originally, there was only the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was created by the Treaty of Paris 1951. This community, which came into being in 1953, was established for a fixed term of 50 years.

In 1957 two Treaties of Rome established two further communities, namely:

the European Economic Community (EEC), as it was originally called before the Treaty on European Union 1992 (the TEU or Maastricht Treaty) renamed it as the European Community (EC); and

the European Atomic Energy Community (also known as Euratom).

As well as renaming the European Economic Community as the European Community, the Treaty on European Union created the first incarnation of the European Union. The Union was a composite construction, which was usually said to consist of three pillars. One pillar consisted of the two remaining communities (taken together as a single entity for the purpose of counting the pillars), alongside two areas of inter-governmental co-operation which, by the time of the Treaty of Lisbon 2007 (ToL), covered a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (PJCCM). It is important to notice that, at this stage in its evolution, the European Union was not itself a legal entity, being instead an amalgam of two legal entities and two political collaborations. However, under the Treaty of Lisbon, which came into effect in 2009, all the functions of the Union were transferred to a new legal entity which became the second incarnation of the European Union and replaced all three pillars of its original incarnation.

The structure and functioning of the second incarnation of the European Union are governed by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the Treaty on Union (TEU). In form, these treaties are heavily amended versions of, respectively, the EC Treaty and the TEU as they were immediately before the ToL. The fact that the drafters of the ToL achieved the objectives of that treaty by the technique of amending two existing treaties (including renaming one of them) means that the ToL itself will very seldom be referred to, since what matter are the texts of the TFEU and the TEU in its post-ToL incarnation.