The article examines the features of the approaches of France and Germany to the political and institutional dimension of European integration in the 1990s. The authors show that in the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a qualitative acceleration of the processes of European construction, a significant contribution to this process was made by the FRG and France. Analyzing the approaches of the two countries to changes in the political and institutional sphere of integration processes associated with the adoption of the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties, the authors emphasize that these international acts became possible largely due to the mutual compromises of the two leading countries of the European Union and an active German-French political cooperation. The article shows the coincidences in the approaches of Germany and France to the evolution of the institution building of the EU. At the same time, the authors pay attention to the specifics of the proper German and French points of view, what distinguished the positions of the two European powers in the institutional and political sphere.