Justice and home affairs: the Treaty of Maastricht as a decisive intergovernmental gate opener

The introduction of ‘cooperation in the fields of justice and home affairs’ in the guise of Title VI of the Treaty on European Union can be regarded as one of the most momentous innovations of the Treaty of Maastricht. In 20 years it has turned from a loosely framed and largely intergovernmental cooperation framework into a fundamental treaty objective which has generated over 1400 texts adopted by the Council and a range of new EU institutional structures such as Europol and Eurojust. This article will show that the Treaty of Maastricht — although it did not provide for clear objectives, adequate legal instruments and effective decision-making procedures in the JHA domain — nevertheless marked at decisive breakthrough for this policy-making domain. It did so by opening the entire domain for regular institutionalised cooperation between the member states, allowing for the development of a common perception of the challenges and a gradual agreement on basic objectives and principles which a few years later — when the Treaty of Amsterdam had removed some of the legal and institutional obstacles left in place by the Maastricht Treaty — allowed for an extraordinarily rapid development of what is now the Union’s ‘area of freedom, security and justice’.