The European Community and 1992

Not much attention was paid in March 1985, when the European Council, whose members include the chiefs of state and government of the 12 member states, decided that it should constitute a single market by 1992. After all, the European Community had been established in 1957 with the goal of a common market, and many people believed that the goal had been reached; tariffs within the Community had been abolished, a common external tariff put in place and a controversial common agricultural policy instituted.

Those who knew better realized that Europe remained a maze of border controls, government subsidies to national industries, closed national systems of procurement in military and other key public sectors, and national regulation of industrial standards, copyrights, transportation, banking, insurance and health requirements for the entry of goods. Thus, many were discouraged; after all, the goal of a full economic union had been proclaimed in the early 1970s but never met.

Americans in particular had been enthusiastic about European unity in the 1950s and 1960s-often more so than many Europeans-because they had a vision of a United States of Western Europe, symbolized by the name of Jean Monnet. They grew disheartened when Charles de Gaulle, in the 1960s, was able to destroy that dream and force his partners, in the so-called Luxembourg compromise of 1966, to stick in effect to the rule of unanimity. The Community settled down into one more international organization in which diplomats and bureaucrats haggled over technicalities. American curiosity moved to other parts of the world.

By 1988 it had become evident that this time, something new had indeed happened in Western Europe. Three months after the council's 1985 decision, the European Commission, which is the executive branch of the Community and consists of 17 officials selected by the national governments but independent of them, published a White Paper that listed no less than 300 areas for action, with deadlines for proposals by the commission to deal with them. Ever since, the commission has been turning out directives, and the Council of Ministers, which takes most of the final decisions, has examined and usually adopted them. It was the White Paper that set the deadline of 1992 for the achievement of a truly common market. By the middle of 1989 about half of the obstacles had been removed-or at least ordered to be removed.