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stagnation, and they used the carrot of the advantages of a single market to try to convince the sceptics. As the next chapter will show, the SEA foreshadowed virtually the entire contents of the later Maastricht Treaty on European Union, but ratification of the latter was much more difficult once the detail was spelled out. Any notion that Maastricht could somehow have been brought forward by five years is quite unreal. Whilst ratification by all members, including Portugal and Spain who joined the Community on 1 January 1986, was never in any real doubt, the Danish Parliament or Folketing actually rejected the Treaty – a decision overturned by a subsequent referendum. With the ratification of the SEA, Community developments become part of contemporary history. As our own perspectives shift, analysis of cause and effect becomes that much more difficult. In the period between the SEA and the Treaty on European Union, the major internal factor affecting the Community was the commitment to implement the single market. The way in which the idea of the single market captured public imagination is unrivalled by any other Community initiative since its beginning in the fifties. Some excitement was even generated by the notion of implementation by a particular year. Back in Chapter 2 reference was made to functionalism, and also to some of the early academics who wrote about the integration process. According to Ernst Haas, the functional approach to integration was all about the transfer of loyalties and expectations from the nation states to the new supra-national institutions. Some thirty years later, the single market initiative is almost a classic of functionalist strategy. In the immediate aftermath of the signature and ratification of the SEA, the major task was to bring about implementation of the single market by the end of 1992. The single market programme involved a vast amount of technical work leading to a plethora of legislative measures. This in turn brought the Commission back to centre stage perhaps for the first time since the crises of the mid 1960s. At the time of the Milan European Council, the Commission had presented a white paper on the implementation of a single market. With the signature of the new treaty, it fell to the Commission to draft some 300 legislative measures and to seek to steer them through the Council. This process was to mark the emergence of Delors as a major ‘player’ in the Community and as perhaps the most significant President of the Commission: certainly the first to become almost a ‘household name’. A major obstacle to implementation of the single market was posed by the economic gap between richer and poorer states. The southern or Mediterranean members argued that the commitment to cohesion enshrined in the SEA had
DOI link for stagnation, and they used the carrot of the advantages of a single market to try to convince the sceptics. As the next chapter will show, the SEA foreshadowed virtually the entire contents of the later Maastricht Treaty on European Union, but ratification of the latter was much more difficult once the detail was spelled out. Any notion that Maastricht could somehow have been brought forward by five years is quite unreal. Whilst ratification by all members, including Portugal and Spain who joined the Community on 1 January 1986, was never in any real doubt, the Danish Parliament or Folketing actually rejected the Treaty – a decision overturned by a subsequent referendum. With the ratification of the SEA, Community developments become part of contemporary history. As our own perspectives shift, analysis of cause and effect becomes that much more difficult. In the period between the SEA and the Treaty on European Union, the major internal factor affecting the Community was the commitment to implement the single market. The way in which the idea of the single market captured public imagination is unrivalled by any other Community initiative since its beginning in the fifties. Some excitement was even generated by the notion of implementation by a particular year. Back in Chapter 2 reference was made to functionalism, and also to some of the early academics who wrote about the integration process. According to Ernst Haas, the functional approach to integration was all about the transfer of loyalties and expectations from the nation states to the new supra-national institutions. Some thirty years later, the single market initiative is almost a classic of functionalist strategy. In the immediate aftermath of the signature and ratification of the SEA, the major task was to bring about implementation of the single market by the end of 1992. The single market programme involved a vast amount of technical work leading to a plethora of legislative measures. This in turn brought the Commission back to centre stage perhaps for the first time since the crises of the mid 1960s. At the time of the Milan European Council, the Commission had presented a white paper on the implementation of a single market. With the signature of the new treaty, it fell to the Commission to draft some 300 legislative measures and to seek to steer them through the Council. This process was to mark the emergence of Delors as a major ‘player’ in the Community and as perhaps the most significant President of the Commission: certainly the first to become almost a ‘household name’. A major obstacle to implementation of the single market was posed by the economic gap between richer and poorer states. The southern or Mediterranean members argued that the commitment to cohesion enshrined in the SEA had
stagnation, and they used the carrot of the advantages of a single market to try to convince the sceptics. As the next chapter will show, the SEA foreshadowed virtually the entire contents of the later Maastricht Treaty on European Union, but ratification of the latter was much more difficult once the detail was spelled out. Any notion that Maastricht could somehow have been brought forward by five years is quite unreal. Whilst ratification by all members, including Portugal and Spain who joined the Community on 1 January 1986, was never in any real doubt, the Danish Parliament or Folketing actually rejected the Treaty – a decision overturned by a subsequent referendum. With the ratification of the SEA, Community developments become part of contemporary history. As our own perspectives shift, analysis of cause and effect becomes that much more difficult. In the period between the SEA and the Treaty on European Union, the major internal factor affecting the Community was the commitment to implement the single market. The way in which the idea of the single market captured public imagination is unrivalled by any other Community initiative since its beginning in the fifties. Some excitement was even generated by the notion of implementation by a particular year. Back in Chapter 2 reference was made to functionalism, and also to some of the early academics who wrote about the integration process. According to Ernst Haas, the functional approach to integration was all about the transfer of loyalties and expectations from the nation states to the new supra-national institutions. Some thirty years later, the single market initiative is almost a classic of functionalist strategy. In the immediate aftermath of the signature and ratification of the SEA, the major task was to bring about implementation of the single market by the end of 1992. The single market programme involved a vast amount of technical work leading to a plethora of legislative measures. This in turn brought the Commission back to centre stage perhaps for the first time since the crises of the mid 1960s. At the time of the Milan European Council, the Commission had presented a white paper on the implementation of a single market. With the signature of the new treaty, it fell to the Commission to draft some 300 legislative measures and to seek to steer them through the Council. This process was to mark the emergence of Delors as a major ‘player’ in the Community and as perhaps the most significant President of the Commission: certainly the first to become almost a ‘household name’. A major obstacle to implementation of the single market was posed by the economic gap between richer and poorer states. The southern or Mediterranean members argued that the commitment to cohesion enshrined in the SEA had
ABSTRACT