This volume illustrates how European integration developed from a Franco-German partnership prospectus in 1950 into a Community of 25 states currently constituting the European Union (EU) whose main tenets are the pursuit of peace, economic stability, socio-economic well-being, democracy, the safeguarding of human rights and the upholding of the rule of law.

This book also illustrates how Malta fitted into this grand design without overlooking the fact that as early as the first half of the 20th century local politicians saw Malta as the rump of a larger nation state that could be either neighbouring Italy or imperial Britain. In the early post-war years it was the turn of much larger Western European countries to realize that they were too small to fend for themselves. With the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in 1989, even the once Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries were attracted by the prospects of EU accession, thus turning integration into a truly pan-European phenomenon.

Pollacco's publication provides the reader with an up-to-date historical account of Europe's integration process from its inception to the fifth enlargement of 1 May 2004 when Malta acceded the Union together with nine other states.

Mr Pollacco lectures in 'History of European Integration' at the University of Malta.