Liberal Hegemony
The Berlin Wall falls. Fukuyama publishes The End of History. The European Union experiments with pooled sovereignty. NATO expands. The Washington Consensus globalizes finance. For a moment it looks as if liberal democracy is the final form of human government and the nation-state its permanent vehicle.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
10 moments in this segment.
- — The Fall of the Berlin Wall. West and East Germans at the Brandenburg Gate the morning after the wall opened, 10 November 1989. Place: Bornholmer Straße crossing; later the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Figures: Günter Schabowski, East German Politburo spokesman · Harald Jäger, Bornholmer crossing commander · the crowd, growing through the evening The Mistake At a 6 p.m. press conference, Günter Schabowski reads a hastily-drafted travel-regulation document. An Italian journalist asks when the regulations take effect. Schabowski, who has not read the document carefully, shuffles his papers and says ab sofort — immediately. The document had specified the following morning, with prior application for visas. Schabowski's misreading is broadcast live across both Germanies on the 8 p.m. news. Crowds gather at the Berlin crossings by 9 p.m. Border commanders have no orders. At Bornholmer Straße, Harald Jäger telephones for guidance for hours, receives no useful instruction, and at 11:30 p.m. opens the barrier on his own authority. The Wall falls because an East German Politburo spokesman misread his notes and a colonel decided not to shoot. End of the Cold Equilibrium Within two years, the Soviet Union dissolves into fifteen sovereign states. The bipolar Westphalia that the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) had codified for forty-five years ceases to exist. The veto-structured Security Council becomes effectively a Western-dominated body, until China and a recovering Russia begin asserting their vetoes again in the 2010s. Francis Fukuyama publishes The End of History? in the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest, then a 1992 book. The argument: liberal democracy has won the great ideological contest, and history (in the Hegelian sense of conflict over fundamental principles) is over. The Westphalian state, briefly, looks like the final destination. The post-Cold-War decade is shaped by that briefly-credible reading. Video: Associated Press news flash from the morning after the border opened, reporting that East Germany had begun dismantling the Wall. Crowds at the Brandenburg Gate, 10 November 1989.
- — The Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Leonid Kravchuk, Stanislav Shushkevich and Boris Yeltsin sign the Belovezha Accords dissolving the Soviet Union, 8 December 1991. Place: the Kremlin, Moscow; the Belovezha hunting lodge, Brest oblast, Belarus (8 December); Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR (21 December) Figures: Mikhail Gorbachev, last Soviet president · Boris Yeltsin, Russian president · Leonid Kravchuk, Ukrainian president · Stanislav Shushkevich, Belarusian chairman · the Soviet of the Republics voting itself out of existence Belovezha to Alma-Ata On 8 December 1991, in a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest, the heads of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian republics sign an accord declaring that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases to exist. The three founding signatories of the 1922 Union Treaty have, between them, simply revoked it. On 21 December at Alma-Ata, eight further republics sign the Alma-Ata Protocols, joining the Commonwealth of Independent States and confirming the dissolution. Gorbachev learns of Belovezha after the fact, by telephone, from Shushkevich, who calls George H. W. Bush before he calls the man whose state has just been dismantled. Gorbachev resigns on the evening of 25 December. His televised address concedes the necessary lesson, that the old system collapsed before a new one had time to start working. The next day, 26 December, the Soviet of the Republics, the upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet, passes Declaration 142-N, formally dissolving the Union. The chamber is half empty. The vote is not contested. The Flag at 19:32 At 19:32 Moscow time on 25 December, the red banner with hammer and sickle is lowered over Senate Dome of the Kremlin. The Russian tricolor is raised in its place. The footage carries no commentary; Soviet state television, on instructions, simply broadcasts the lowering and the raising. Fifteen sovereign states emerge from one: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the three Baltic republics (already independent since September), the three Transcaucasian republics, and the five Central Asian republics. Each inherits a flag, a foreign ministry, a seat at the United Nations. The Russian Federation inherits the USSR's permanent Security Council seat (see [[un-charter-1945]]), its strategic nuclear arsenal, and the bulk of its sovereign debt. It does not inherit confidence. The unipolar moment that Charles Krauthammer had named in 1990 now formally begins. Fukuyama's argument (see [[fall-of-the-berlin-wall-1989]]) acquires its empirical anchor. For the next seventeen years, until Lehman, the system will be governed on the working assumption that the contest is over. Video: CBS News coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation address from the Kremlin, 25 December 1991. The Soviet flag is lowered for the last time and replaced by the Russian tricolour.
- — NAFTA. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Carlos Salinas with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at the NAFTA initialing ceremony, San Antonio, October 1992. Place: trilateral: signing at San Antonio, Mexico City, and Ottawa simultaneously; effect across the USA, Canada, and Mexico Figures: George H. W. Bush, US president (signing) · Bill Clinton, US president (ratification) · Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexican president · Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister · Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN spokesman in Chiapas A Continent as a Free-Trade Zone The North American Free Trade Agreement enters force at midnight on 1 January 1994, eliminating most tariffs across a continent of 370 million people and 6.5 trillion dollars in combined GDP. It is the first major free-trade agreement between an industrialized economy (the United States) and a developing one (Mexico). Negotiated under Bush, signed in his last weeks, ratified in 1993 with decisive Republican support over the objections of organized labor and the Perot wing, NAFTA is the template the Washington Consensus exports to the rest of the hemisphere for the next decade. The Mexican concessions are the most significant: liberalization of the financial sector, of agricultural protection, of the constitutional reservation of the ejido communal lands. The 1917 constitution's Article 27, which protected the communal land tenure of indigenous communities, is amended in 1992 to enable NAFTA compliance. The amendment, more than the tariff schedule, is what the Zapatistas will fight. The Zapatista Counter-Reading At dawn on 1 January 1994, hours after NAFTA enters force, masked indigenous fighters of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional seize seven municipal seats in Chiapas including San Cristóbal de las Casas. Their First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, read from the balcony of the captured palace, frames the rebellion explicitly: NAFTA is a death sentence for indigenous Mexico, and the constitutional amendments enabling it have voided the social contract of the 1917 revolution. Subcomandante Marcos, the movement's writer and spokesman, gives the framing its global vocabulary across the next year: a revolt of the local against capital's borderlessness, fought from a forest, mediated by the early internet. NAFTA's record over the next three decades is genuinely mixed. Mexican manufacturing employment in the maquiladora border zone expands sharply, then is hollowed out by China's WTO accession (see [[wto-founded-1995]]) in 2001. US manufacturing employment declines. Cross-border supply chains for autos and electronics become continental. The Westphalian state's sovereignty over its own trade policy has been explicitly pooled in regional treaty form. The Zapatista reading, which Video: President Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act in the Mellon Auditorium, Washington, 8 December 1993. Former Presidents Carter, Ford and Bush stand alongside him. NAFTA enters into force 1 January 1994.
- — The Dayton Accords. Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic initial the Dayton Peace Accords at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 21 November 1995. Place: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio (negotiation); Élysée Palace, Paris (signing) Figures: Richard Holbrooke, US chief negotiator · Slobodan Milošević, for the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia · Alija Izetbegović, Bosniak president of Bosnia and Herzegovina · Franjo Tuđman, Croatian president · Warren Christopher, US secretary of state · Carl Bildt, EU co-mediator Three Weeks at a Base in Ohio The Bosnian war (April 1992 to November 1995) has killed approximately 100,000 people, displaced more than two million, and produced the first systematic ethnic cleansing in Europe since the 1940s. The July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces executed approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a UN-declared safe area, has made continued Western non-intervention politically intolerable. NATO airstrikes through August and September, combined with a Croat-Bosniak ground offensive, force the Bosnian Serb leadership to the table. Holbrooke chooses an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, partly for security and partly to keep the delegations physically unable to leave the negotiation. Twenty-one days of proximity talks, with no press access, produce the General Framework Agreement and eleven annexes. The parties initial at Dayton on 21 November; the formal signing takes place at the Élysée Palace in Paris on 14 December. Holbrooke's account, To End a War, will later document the negotiation in detail; the Bosnian Serb delegation, present at Dayton, refuses to sign there, leaving Milošević to sign on their behalf, a clarifying signal about who actually controlled the war. A State and a Protectorate Bosnia and Herzegovina is preserved as a single sovereign state within its 1992 borders, with two constituent entities (the Bosniak-Croat Federation, holding 51 percent of the territory, and Republika Srpska, holding 49 percent) and three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs). Annex 4 of the agreement is the country's constitution, drafted in English, never translated into Bosnian as an official text. Annex 10 establishes the Office of the High Representative, an international official with so-called Bonn Powers to dismiss elected officials and impose laws by decree. NATO's IFOR (later SFOR, then EUFOR) deploys 60,000 troops to enforce the military annexes. The arrangement is a Westphalian sovereign state on the legal surface and a quasi-protectorate beneath it. Two High Representatives have, in practice, governed by decree for stretches of the post-war period. The three-presidency rotating head of state, the ethnic vetoes in parliament, and the entity-level governments produce a polity that functions and a polity that cannot reform itself. Dayton ends the war and freezes its outcome; three decades later, the freeze is still operative, the High Representative is still in of Video: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke speaks to the PBS NewsHour on the day the Dayton Peace Agreement was initialled at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 21 November 1995, ending the Bosnian war.
- — The NATO Bombing of Serbia. USAF F-117 Nighthawk returns from a strike mission over Yugoslavia during Operation Allied Force, 1999. Place: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo) Figures: Javier Solana, NATO secretary-general issuing the activation order · General Wesley Clark, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe · Slobodan Milošević, Yugoslav president · Bill Clinton, US president · Tony Blair, British prime minister · Yevgeny Primakov, Russian prime minister turning his plane around mid-Atlantic Operation Allied Force The Rambouillet negotiations collapse on 19 March 1999 when the Yugoslav delegation refuses an annex granting NATO forces freedom of movement through all of Yugoslavia. Five days later, at 19:00 UTC on 24 March, Operation Allied Force begins: the first sustained military action in NATO's fifty-year history, conducted without a UN Security Council resolution because Russia and China would have vetoed one. The legal basis offered is a doctrine of humanitarian necessity, articulated as the operation proceeds rather than before it begins. The campaign lasts 78 days. NATO flies approximately 38,000 sorties, drops several thousand precision munitions, kills an estimated 500 Serbian civilians (Human Rights Watch's lower-bound figure) including in the bombings of the Radio Television of Serbia building in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy on 7 May (a CIA targeting error that triggers a diplomatic crisis with Beijing). The Yugoslav army largely preserves itself; the campaign's pressure on the Belgrade leadership comes from infrastructure strikes and Russian withdrawal of diplomatic support. Sovereignty Overridden Milošević accepts NATO's terms on 3 June; the bombing ends on 10 June with UN Security Council Resolution 1244 placing Kosovo under UN administration. Kosovo declares independence in February 2008, recognized by approximately 100 states but blocked from UN membership by the Russian and Chinese vetoes that the 1999 campaign had been designed to bypass. The Westphalian principle of non-intervention codified in UN Charter Article 2.7 (see [[un-charter-1945]]) has, in this case, been treated by NATO as overridable when a Great Power coalition is willing to override it. The precedent is contested across the next twenty-five years. Russia cites it explicitly when annexing Crimea in 2014 and again when invading Ukraine in 2022 (see [[invasion-of-ukraine-2022]]). China cites it as evidence that Western humanitarian rhetoric is a cover for unilateral force. The 2005 Responsibility to Protect doctrine (see [[responsibility-to-protect-2005]]) is the formal post-hoc attempt to put the Kosovo precedent on a multilateral legal basis. Whether that attempt has succeeded is the question that hangs over every subsequent intervention debate, from Libya 2011 to Syria's chemical-weapons crises. Video: AP Archive footage from Belgrade during Operation Allied Force, March 1999. Air raid sirens sound through the streets; tracer fire and explosions illuminate the city as NATO conducts its first sustained bombing campaign against a European capital since 1945.
- — The 9/11 Attacks. The Statue of Liberty stands against the smoke rising from Lower Manhattan, 11 September 2001. Place: World Trade Center, Manhattan; the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia; a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania Figures: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda emir · the 19 hijackers · George W. Bush, US president · Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York · Lord George Robertson, NATO secretary-general invoking Article 5 · Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of American 11 The Morning At 08:46 Eastern Time, American Airlines Flight 11 strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center between the 93rd and 99th floors. At 09:03, United 175 strikes the South Tower. At 09:37, American 77 strikes the western face of the Pentagon. At 10:03, United 93, retaken in part by its passengers after they learn by air-phone what has happened to the other three aircraft, crashes into a field outside Shanksville. The South Tower collapses at 09:59; the North Tower at 10:28. By the time the dust clears that afternoon, 2,977 people are dead, plus the 19 hijackers; the casualties include citizens of more than 90 countries. The hijacking and crashing of four civil airliners into national-monument targets is, in physical terms, a small operation. Nineteen men with box-cutters, four aircraft, perhaps half a million dollars in operating costs. The asymmetry between cost of attack and scale of response will become the defining feature of the war that follows. Article 5 and a War Without an Enemy State On 12 September, the North Atlantic Council invokes Article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first and (to date) only time in NATO's history: an armed attack on one member is to be treated as an armed attack on all. The collective-defense clause, drafted in 1949 against the Soviet Union, is being invoked over an attack by a non-state network headquartered in caves on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Westphalian framework, in which legitimate war is conducted between sovereign states, has been asked to absorb a category it was not designed for. The Bush administration's response is the global war on terror: open-ended, conducted across multiple theatres, against a network rather than a state. Afghanistan is invaded in October 2001 because the Taliban regime is providing sanctuary; Iraq is invaded in March 2003 on grounds that prove false (see [[invasion-of-iraq-2003]]). The legal architecture (the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the 2002 Iraq AUMF, the Guantánamo detention regime, the targeted-killing drone program) treats the world as a single battlespace and sovereignty as a variable subject to security need. The pattern Westphalian war was designed to make rar Video: CBS News Radio coverage from the morning of 11 September 2001, introduced by Major Garrett. Live reports as the second plane strikes the South Tower and the towers fall.
- — The Invasion of Iraq. U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad, 9 April 2003. Place: Iraq; ground assault from Kuwait, naval and air support across the Persian Gulf Figures: George W. Bush, US president · Tony Blair, British prime minister · Saddam Hussein, Iraqi president (captured December 2003, executed December 2006) · Hans Blix, UNMOVIC chief inspector · Colin Powell, US secretary of state · Dominique de Villepin, French foreign minister The Case That Was Not There On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell addresses the UN Security Council with vials, satellite photographs, and intercepts, presenting the case that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction and is reconstituting a nuclear program. The presentation is the centerpiece of the US public diplomacy for war. Powell later, after leaving office, calls it a blot on his record. France, Germany, and Russia indicate they will not support a second resolution authorizing force. The US and UK abandon the attempt at Security Council cover and proceed without it. UN weapons inspectors leave Iraq on 18 March; the air campaign begins on 20 March; the ground invasion follows within hours. Baghdad falls on 9 April. The statue of Saddam in Firdos Square is pulled down by a US Marine recovery vehicle with a small Iraqi crowd present (a tableau, much-reproduced at the time, that later inquiries showed had been managed at least in part by US press handlers). Saddam's regime is dismantled within weeks. No weapons of mass destruction stockpiles are found. The Duelfer Report of 2004 confirms there were none to find. What the War Cost the System The Coalition Provisional Authority dissolves the Iraqi army and the Baath Party in May 2003, decisions widely understood within the year as the engine of the insurgency that follows. The war's direct US military fatalities reach approximately 4,500; Iraqi civilian deaths estimated by Iraq Body Count exceed 200,000, with academic estimates including indirect deaths running considerably higher. The US occupation does not end until December 2011; ISIS rises in 2013 in the territorial and institutional vacuum the invasion produced; US troops return in 2014. The 2003 war is the clearest Westphalian violation by the system's leading power since 1945 (see [[un-charter-1945]]). The invasion is conducted without Security Council authorization, on a pretext later established as false, against a state that had not attacked the invading powers. Kofi Annan calls the war illegal from the UN podium in 2004. The unipolar moment's strongest claim, that the lead state would underwrite the liberal order rather than disregard it, is the war's most expensive casualty. The 2008 financial crisis and the Russian return to revisionism both happen against an international backdrop in which the US claim to Video: APTN footage of the opening of the air campaign over Baghdad, 21 March 2003. Explosions over the skyline, columns of smoke, and the presidential palace on fire as Operation Iraqi Freedom begins.
- — The WTO Founded. Delegates at the WTO Ministerial Conference, Hong Kong, December 2005. Place: Centre William Rappard, Geneva (headquarters); negotiated through the Uruguay Round 1986–1994, concluded at Marrakesh, April 1994 Figures: Peter Sutherland, last GATT director-general and first WTO chief · Renato Ruggiero, second director-general · the trade ministers of 123 GATT contracting parties signing the Marrakesh Agreement on 15 April 1994 From GATT to WTO The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had operated since 1948 as a provisional treaty framework, never the institution its drafters intended (the 1948 Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization had failed to win US Senate ratification, the same reef on which the League of Nations had broken in 1919; see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]). The Uruguay Round, opened at Punta del Este in 1986 and concluded at Marrakesh in April 1994, replaces the provisional GATT with a permanent World Trade Organization. The new body has 123 founding members, a director-general, a secretariat in Geneva, and (decisively) a binding dispute-settlement mechanism. The WTO's mandate is far wider than tariffs on goods. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) covers banking, telecommunications, education, and health. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) sets minimum patent and copyright standards globally, with major consequences for pharmaceutical access in the developing world. The Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) constrains domestic-content rules. The Westphalian state's regulatory sovereignty over its own economy has, Binding Dispute, Eventual Paralysis The Dispute Settlement Body's Appellate Body, a standing seven-member panel, issues binding rulings that member states accept by default unless all members vote to reject (the so-called negative consensus rule, which makes rejection mathematically nearly impossible). Member states accept that their domestic regulations, when challenged as trade-distorting, can be overturned by a panel sitting in Geneva. The most ambitious institutional encroachment on Westphalian economic sovereignty ever attempted is, for fifteen years, the operative law of world trade. China accedes to the WTO on 11 December 2001, the largest single shift in the global division of labor since the British abolition of the Corn Laws. The Doha Development Round, opened the same year, deadlocks and is never concluded. The United States, from 2017 onward, blocks all Appellate Body appointments; by December 2019, the body lacks a quorum and ceases to function. The WTO survives as a forum and a rule-book; its enforcement teeth, the feature that made it different from the GATT, have been quietly drawn. The unipolar moment that created the institution and the unipolar moment that hollowed it out are the same arc. Video: World Trade Organization commemorative film marking three decades since the WTO began operations on 1 January 1995, succeeding the GATT under the Marrakesh Agreement. Ambassadors and director-general staff reflect on its founding. The subject dates from 1995; this photograph was taken in 2005.
- — Responsibility to Protect. Heads of state and government convene at the UN Security Council Summit during the 2005 World Summit, the meeting that endorsed the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Place: UN General Assembly, World Summit, New York Figures: Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general · Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, ICISS co-chairs (2001) · the 191 heads of state and government adopting the World Summit Outcome From ICISS to Paragraphs 138-139 The Responsibility to Protect doctrine originates with the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), convened by Canada in 2000 after Kofi Annan's two sovereignties speech challenged the General Assembly to reconcile Westphalian non-intervention with the post-Rwanda, post-Srebrenica conscience of the system. The ICISS report, published December 2001, reframes sovereignty as responsibility: a state's sovereign immunity derives from, and depends on, its discharging the responsibility to protect its own population from mass atrocity. If the state fails or is itself the perpetrator, the responsibility shifts to the international community. Four years of diplomacy convert the ICISS framework into a formal General Assembly text. The 2005 World Summit Outcome, adopted by consensus by all UN member states at the 60th anniversary summit in September 2005, includes paragraphs 138 and 139 setting out R2P. The doctrine is restricted to four crimes (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity), requires Security Council authorization for any coercive measures, and is framed as a complement to rather than a replacement for the Charter. Libya, Then Syria R2P's first explicit operational invocation is UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of 17 March 2011, authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya from the Gaddafi regime's threatened assault on Benghazi. NATO's air campaign that follows is widely judged to have exceeded the protection mandate and become a regime-change operation. Russia and China, who had abstained on 1973, draw the lesson that R2P is a vehicle for Western unilateralism dressed in multilateral cover. Their vetoes on Syria from 2011 through 2024 are the direct consequence. R2P is the most explicit modification of Westphalian sovereignty (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]] and [[un-charter-1945]]) ever formally adopted by the United Nations. The doctrine survives in the diplomatic vocabulary; its operational record is one major invocation (Libya), one major non-invocation (Syria), and a long subsequent silence. The contradiction at the heart of liberal hegemony, between the universalist claim and the Great Power vehicle that carries it, is folded into R2P from the start. The 2008 financial crisis closes the window in which the contradiction could be papered over. Video: Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan reflects on the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine at the 2005 UN World Summit, recorded at the University of Ottawa Centre for International Policy Studies, 2011.
- — The Maastricht Treaty. Memorial stone outside the Limburg provincial government building in Maastricht marking the signing of the Treaty on European Union, February 1992. Place: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Figures: Jacques Delors, European Commission president · Helmut Kohl, German chancellor · François Mitterrand, French president · John Major, British prime minister (opt-out) · the foreign and finance ministers of the twelve member states Three Pillars The Treaty on European Union, signed at the Provinciehuis in Maastricht on 7 February 1992 by the foreign and finance ministers of the twelve European Community states, restructures the European project on three pillars. The first pillar is the European Communities themselves, now renamed the European Union, with new competences in education, public health, consumer protection, and (decisively) economic and monetary union. The second pillar is the Common Foreign and Security Policy. The third is Justice and Home Affairs, covering asylum, immigration, and judicial cooperation. Two of the three pillars are explicitly intergovernmental; the first is supranational, with binding effect through the Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The treaty also creates European citizenship, granting every citizen of a member state the right to live, work, and vote in local elections in any other member state. The Westphalian principle that a state defines who counts as a member of the political community (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) is, for the first time at scale, layered with a transnational citizenship that overrides it. The Currency and the Opt-Out The most consequential commitment is monetary. The treaty schedules the introduction of a single currency in three stages, with convergence criteria (3 percent deficit, 60 percent debt-to-GDP, inflation within 1.5 points of the three best performers, exchange-rate stability) that member states must meet to join. The euro will enter accounting use in 1999 and circulation in 2002. The deepest pooling of sovereignty above the Westphalian state in the system's history is being scheduled, in a treaty article, with deadlines. Britain negotiates an opt-out from the single currency, and Denmark a referendum-driven opt-out shortly after. The opt-outs preview, in 1992, the contradiction that will surface in Brexit. A state can pool monetary sovereignty or retain it; it cannot do both. The Maastricht text registers the choice as a footnote; twenty-four years later (see [[cracks]] era) the footnote becomes a constitutional crisis. Video: European Parliament retrospective on the signing of the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht, 7 February 1992, using archival footage of the ceremony at the Limburg provincial government building. The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2015.
