ABSTRACT

The mid-1980s saw a qualitative shift in the importance of the European Community in European political and economic life. At the beginning of the 1980s it appeared that the EC had stagnated, permanently enmeshed in a series of protracted intergovernmental disputes, particularly in relation to the problems of Britain’s budgetary contribution. Of the main areas of EC policy, the Common Agricultural Policy absorbed an excessive proportion of the Community’s budget, its technology policy was oriented primarily to the increasingly irrelevant technology of nuclear power, and its regional policy was little more than a mechanism for redistributing small amounts of tax revenue between the richer and poorer regions of the Community. At the same time, institutionally, the European Parliament was an irrelevance, and the actions of the Commission were very effectively constrained by the exercise of the veto in the Council of Ministers (George 1985).