ABSTRACT
Even before the dramatic events in eastern Europe of 1989, it had become evident that the European Community had found, in the 1992 programme and the SEA, a new integrative dynamic that had lifted it out of the doldrums of the 1975-85 decade. Though the SEA disappointed many commentators at the time, who compared it unfavourably with the more extensive plans for a European union enshrined in the draft treaty drawn up by the European Parliament in 1984, from 1986 onward the European Community has gone from strength to strength. Many of the supposed omissions or compromises of the SEA are now back on the negotiating table; particularly because in December 1990 at the European Council in Rome, the EC convened two more IGCs with a view to concluding treaties on both EMU and political union by the end of 1991. In the period since the SEA was ratified the EC has made significant progress towards achieving the completion of the internal market by the 1992 deadline. Furthermore the EC was able, in 1988, to agree on a new and more equitable budget package and to make a further effort to reform the CAP-though not enough to satisfy its major critics within the GATT. Perhaps even more importantly the EC has found itself thrust into the limelight at the very centre of European politics as a result of the end of the cold war and of the post war division of Europe.
