ABSTRACT
When I first came to England in 1951 and stepped off a boat at Harwich, there was a gentleman shouting “British passports please! British passports please!”, and those holding British passports quickly proceeded through Customs and were sitting on the train to Liverpool Street, while the rest, all those bloody foreigners, were standing on a drizzling, cold day, waiting endlessly to pass through Customs. When I arrive in England today, I follow the sign at the airport that says “EC Countries and Nationals” and I proceed very quickly and at the same speed as Britons through Customs. This tremendous development is not peculiar to the European Community, and many such developments would have taken place without it, but the founding of the EC has given a special drive and a special importance to European integration. Since 1989, however, the meaning of European integration has changed; now we mean the integration of the former Soviet bloc countries into the Western economic and political system. The EC has become what it always was-a Western European community. We need, then, to distinguish between a number of processes of European integration, one directed towards the integration of the eastern European countries, and another, the consolidation and further development of the European Community itself.
