The Maastricht Treaty restricted political cooperation within the EU to the two areas of justice and home-affairs policy and the common foreign and security policy. The accompanying institutional reforms within the EU were initially postponed until the summit in Amsterdam, and it was in the Treaty of Nice that agreement was eventually reached on the institutional framework for this cooperation. As a direct result of this process, the European Police Office (Europol) and the Anti-Fraud Office OLAF were created in 1999 within the European Commission. As far as the common foreign and security policy is concerned, the Union has had its own military intervention forces, known as 'battle groups' since 1999. Nevertheless, it has to be said that the EU still attaches higher priority to economic cooperation than to political integration.

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