European Union: institutions, policy, economy and law. Exclusive and shared competence; areas of supporting actions

The draft constitution classifies the respective competences of the European Union and of the Member States. The division of competences was never mentioned in any of the previous treaties.
The constitution identifies three categories of competence: exclusive competence, shared competence and supporting competence. The union can enjoy exclusive competence in specific area when it alone is able to legislate and adopt acts. The Member states have a chance to intervene in this area only if empowered to do so by the European Union. The next type of competence- shared competence is appropriate in areas, where the competence is shared between the Member States and the union (areas of freedom, security, justice). The third type is supporting, coordinating or complementary competence. There are settled areas, where the European Union has to carry out actions to support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States, without thereby superseding their competence in these areas.1 For instance, there are areas like employment, economic policy, social policy, where the Union has competence to promote and ensure the coordination of national policies.
In the next section of this essay, the main attention will be paid to explore the exclusive competence, in more specific terms, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). One of the aims of this essay is to notice the way how Latvia and other new member states of the European Union will join to the EMU, and the problems, which disturbs to make this process successful. But at first it is necessary to shortly describe the EMU and its main principles.
In 1998 there was established European Central Bank with its main mandate- to promote the price stability. In 1999 the EU states introduced the single currency- Euro, a move seen as the most important creation in the world currency since the advent of the United States dollar.