Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Western European countries launched a process of highly institutionalized economic integration in the aftermath of World War II. This began with the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), in which the six founding member states (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) agreed to share responsibility for regulatory policy-making in their crucial coal and steel sectors. Although seemingly narrow and highly technical, the new Community was of immense political importance. It epitomized both Franco-German rapprochement and the member states' willingness to pool cherished national sovereignty in order to resolve otherwise intractable problems. The legacy of close cooperation and shared sovereignty animated the inauguration in 1958 of the European Economic Community (EEC), the next major building block of today's European Union (EU). With its core objective of a common market in which goods, services, capital, and people would move freely across national borders, the EEC was a hugely ambitious undertaking.The course of European economic integration was anything but smooth over the following two decades. Only in the late 1980s, with the launch of a new legislative program, did national governments make a concerted effort to go beyond the customs union (established in 1968) and achieve the original goal of a common market, now called the single market. In ... log in or subscribe to read full text