Important Aspects of the European Integration Process
Important Aspects of the European Integration Process

Summary/Abstract: The European Union is far from being a perfect construction. It is, nevertheless, the result of a long and difficult integration process started more than fifty years ago, aiming at a peaceful and powerful Europe able to compete with other economic forces on the world market. The introductory part of our paper presents the main steps towards the European unity that have been accomplished since the end of the first world war. We will focus on the permanent balance between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, the two fundamental approaches of the European integration process. As we have already stated, the EU is not a perfect system; it was built by European elites and brings more advantages to these elites than to ordinary people. There is a democracy deficit we try to outline and explain in our paper. Last but not least we discuss, in the closing part of the article, another important aspect of the European Integration: the building of a European Knowledge Society and the contribution of knowledge to the integration process. We mention that all these topics have been considered during the lectures and the workshops of the Summer School jointly organized by the Faculty of European Studies, "Babes-Bolyai" University Cluj-Napoca and the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences, Westfaelische Wilhelms Universitaet Muenster (8-19 August 1999), on "Teaching European Studies: Approaches, Methods, Curricula".

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