18. Internal Policies

This chapter provides an overview of four internal Union policy areas that have come to significantly affect the lives of European citizens. It begins by introducing the Union's Economic and Monetary Policy. This policy is not only responsible for the creation of a common European currency—the euro—which has become a leading world currency; it recently provoked enormous controversy over the powers of the European Union to interfere with national economic choices. The chapter then moves to ‘Social Policy’; this is an important internal policy for a continent that prides itself on being the ‘social continent’. It also explores the Treaty title on ‘Consumer Protection’, which has had an enormous impact on national contract laws. Finally, the chapter looks at the Union's regional or cohesion policy.