What Is the European Union?

The European Union is very much a product of the early 90s of a treaty called the Treaty of Maastricht, the city in the southern Netherlands. There are essentially two ways of seeing what it is. One is to see it as an emanation or sort of practical arrangement by European nation states which doesn't really stand above them but it's just an extension of it. But politically these are still independent nation states which don't benefit from transfers among each other and which still is to their own debts. And I think it's worth recalling what one comment had said about the Martyr Treaty: It's an economic constitution but a political treaty.