European Community , says a lot about the added value of the European project , despite the decision to neglect the goal of political unity and to leave the levers of sovereignty and direct relations with citizens in the hands of the Member States . The political project was therefore the political driving force that also propelled the integration process of the common market . However , at the same time , the ambition intrinsic to the project , combined with the weakness of European states , individually , and the need to find ever closer forms of union , led to the construction of the common market itself clashing with the need to increase EU competences and to find common forms of political management , if not yet governance . In this sense , the decision to call upon European citizens – at the time still simply citizens of their respective countries – to elect their common political representatives permitted the governments to acknowledge the deeper reality of the European project and , at the same time , created the instrument that helped it to evolve in a truly supranational direction .
The history of these 10 elections , explained and analysed in this book , and the history of the 45 years of integration that have elapsed since the first European election in 1979 , have confirmed the predictions and theses of the federalists , but have also witnessed very strong resistance on the part of the Member States to sharing certain areas of political sovereignty . This resistance led them to generate a system that strengthened the intergovernmental method – precisely in the face of the need to expand common policies . Decision-making mechanisms thus became exponentially more complicated , and certainly not only , as many believe , because of enlargement , although this also had a strong influence .
First of all , the European Parliament constituted a point of no return with respect to the issue of Europe needing to have a government of a federal nature , and therefore one that is supranational , sovereign in its sphere of action and democratic , in that it is accountable to its citizens and directly legitimised by them . Its very
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