ABSTRACT
The EU began as an economic community, and economics is still the EU’s most important policy fi eld. The European Community started fi rst with the European Coal and Steel Community and later became a customs union, subsequently forming a common market and a common economic and monetary union. The reasons as to why the economic integration of Europe has developed so effi ciently as compared to other societal fi elds are twofold. First, national governments had strong and overlapping interests on which to form a common economic union. Second, it is argued that economic issues are more easily institutionalized than other societal issues:
Europe developed in “small” steps which legitimated the belief that a common market would lead to economic success. Through a rationalization effect of the common market, all countries should gain an advantage from a growing national product. By isolating the economy from other societal and political spheres, the traditional inner and social policy order of the nation states remained stable, even though a policy of competition sometimes necessarily intruded in these spheres. Economic and socio-political adjustments were externalized to the member countries and their socio-political confl ict management, which absorbed the burdens as well as the implemented new regulations and de-regulations of the old structure.
