ABSTRACT
The explanation for the involvement of trade unions in European Community (EC) policy-making lies in a general theory of the Community not as a bilateral arrangement between Community institutions and member states but rather as a complex polity engaging also a wide range of supra-and sub-national actors in social (and other) policy formation and implementation. The emergence of the European social dialogue in the mid-1980s was dictated by the conjuncture of the 1985 Single European Market programme being threatened by the UK veto on the development of a parallel social dimension.
