The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world and sometimes referred to as the European Community even before it in 1993 was renamed as such) was an international organisation created by the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Its aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

It gained a common set of institutions along with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) as one of the European Communities under the 1965 Merger Treaty (Treaty of Brussels).

Upon the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, the EEC was renamed the European Community (EC) to reflect that it covered a wider range of policy. This was also when the three European Communities, including the EC, were collectively made to constitute the first of the three pillars of the European Union (EU), which the treaty also founded. The EC existed in this form until it was abolished by the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, which merged the EU's former pillars and provided that the EU would "replace and succeed the European Community." This article deals with the independent international organisation which existed prior to 1993.

Norman Manea (born July 19, 1936) is a Jewish Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer in residence at Bard College.

Manea's most acclaimed book, The Hooligan’s Return (2003), is an original novelistic memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.

Manea has been known and praised as an international important writer since early 1990s, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has received more than 20 awards and honors.

Born in the Burdujeni neighborhood of Suceava (Bukovina, Romania), Manea was deported as a child, in 1941, by the Romanian fascist authorities, allied with Nazi Germany, to the concentration camp of Transnistria in the Ukraine with his family and the entire Jewish population of the region. He returned to Romania in 1945 with the surviving members of his family and graduated with high honors from the high school (liceu) Stefan cel Mare (Stephan the Great) in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master’s degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974.

Jeremy King is an American historian, Associate Professor of History at Mount Holyoke.

He graduated from Yale University with a B.A, and from Columbia University with an MA, M.Phil., Ph.D.

He was research fellow at Harvard University, Berlin Prize Fellow, from the American Academy in Berlin, and 2004-2005 Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

He lived in Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. In the summer of 1989, he held an internship at the Hungarian Section of Radio Free Europe, in Munich.