At the beginning of 1999, most observers expected it to be a relatively calm year for the EU. True, the Euro was born on 1 January, but all the signs were that its introduction would come smoothly. However, as the year progressed, events were anything but smooth.

Comparative Politics went to press shortly after the Parliament had, for all intents and purposes, voted no confidence in the Commission and its President, Jacques Santer. The Commission then resigned and was quickly and easily replaced by a new one headed by former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

While Prodi gained all but universal support, the EU soon faced three unexpected challenges.

First, the Euro lost about 15% of its value (from $1.18 to $1.02) in its first six months. At the very least, the decline of the Euro will hurt European exports. Some observers think it might actually be the first step in the collapse of the monetary system as a whole.

Second, most of the EU countries (as NATO member states) were involved in the war against Serbia over Kosovo. At a summit held as the war was drawing to a close, EU officials acknowledged that they remained militarily dependent on the United States and vowed to strengthen their common security and foreign policy. The EU (or at least Finish President Martti Ahtisaari) got much of the credit for helping negotiate the end to the war in June.

Third, in mid-June, the European voters went to the polls to choose a new parliament. Even though the legislature is more powerful than it used to be, it remains weak. Moreover, most voters make their decisions at the polls on the basis of national, not European issues. In fact, most people donŐt make decisions at all, since turnout is much lower than in national elections, dropping to 23% in Great Britain. Still, the election marked a significant shift rightward. Center-right parties emerged with about 20 more seats than in 1994, while the Socialists lost over 30 seats. The Socialist governments of Tony Blair in Britain and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany took a particularly stiff beating. Among the gainers were anti-European parties farther out on the right, most notably the new Rally for France which outpaced the official Gaullist party.

There was one positive sign. On 9 July, the new Commission was named, replacing the one that resigned earlier in the year after being accused of mismanagement and corruption. Only four of the nineteen members of the new body (the twentieth, President Romano Prodi had been nominated earlier) were holdovers from the earlier Commission. The most prominent of them was BritainŐs Neil Kinnock who will now be vice president for further reform. The fifteen new commissioners are mostly respected politicians in their own right. They include Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, Pascal Lamy, who had been Jacques DelorsŐ chief of staff when he was president of the commission, and Gunter Verheugen, who had been Deputy Foreign Minister of Germany. The center-right parties are threatening to block formal approval of the new Commission, claiming it is tilted too far to the left given the elections, but it was approved long before it officially took office in January 2000.

The rest of 1999 was spent on relatively mundane matters that might, however, have a bearing on the deepening and/or broadening of EU powers in the new century, including the French refusal to import British beef, new regulations that will compel automobile manufacturers to absorb at least some of the costs of recycling cars when they are no longer usable, and the possible entry of Turkey and other countries

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