The 1970 and 1975 Budget Treaties: Enhancing the Democratic Architecture of the Community

Abstract

The treaties signed in 1970 and 1975 are often called the Budget Treaties, and they have so far lived a fairly anonymous life in histories of the EU/EC. Despite their somewhat mundane name, there is good reason to pay closer attention to them because the creation of these treaties can tell us something new about how choices for democratic and institutional design have been made. The 1970-treaty gave the European Parliament (EP) its first new powers since the Rome Treaty in respect of the community’s budgetary process, and these were further strengthened in the 1975-treaty. The latter treaty also gave birth to the European Court of Auditors (CoA), called the financial consciousness of the community (Kutchner 1977). We now know that the EP has been granted further powers in every subsequent treaty amendment, a development that reached a zenith with the 2010 Lisbon Treaty where the EP was granted co-decision status in practically all policy areas. But what retrospectively looks like a continuous development could not have been predicted in the first half of the 1970s.