ABSTRACT
The European Community (EC) represents a unique development in the world: a new structure of relations between states. It has often been referred to as ‘the Common Market’ because it is a single trading entity: goods moving between the member countries are not subject to tariffs, while imports from the rest of the world enter under uniform conditions. But it is much more than that: it plays an important political and social role, in addition to its economic purposes. Moreover, the EC is set to develop much further in the 1990s.
