A retreat from the system of national vetoes in the European Council was unavoidable if any decisions were to be taken by an increasingly cumbersome community of states that had doubled its size in just thirteen years and was already anticipating applications for membership from Sweden, Austria and elsewhere. The larger it grew, the more attractive—and somehow ‘inevitable’—the future European Union would become to those not yet inside it. To citizens of its member-states, however, the most significant feature of the European Union in these years was not the way in which it was governed (about
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