ABSTRACT
When the European Economic Community (EEC) was established by the Treaty of Rome1 it was clearly intended by its founders to form part of a move towards greater integration amongst the states of western Europe. The preamble to the original Treaty famously refers to the signatories’ desire to foster ‘an ever closer union amongst the peoples of Europe’. The mode chosen to advance this process focused on the mechanisms of trade and production, grounding the whole enterprise in so-called ‘low politics’.2 The decision to pursue a common market was, to some extent, a second-best option; it had been forced on the original Member States because of their lack of success in two attempts to launch integration in the spheres of high politics, namely, a failure to ratify the Treaty establishing a European Defence Community and the still-born Statute for a European Political Community. Forty years of experience with the process of economic integration demonstrated that integration of the Member States’ economies could not be confined to that domain alone; as a result, the activities of the EEC tended increasingly to spill over into other fields such as social policy, environmental policy and education and training. These changes came about through a variety of routes, including policy initiatives on the part of the Commission, ad hoc projects developed by subsystems of Member States and the judicial activism of the Court of Justice.3 They were formalised in amendments to the founding Treaties and provided the platform for a relaunch of the unsuccessful drives for political union and a common security policy attempted in the 1950s. However, because of this history, as we shall see, the process of the economic integration still retains centre stage. In terms of the legal dynamics of European integration, the internal market (as the common market is now known) provides the conceptual foundations in the development of the laws of the European Union.
