ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s, as Dennis Swann noted in the previous chapter, the European Community began to emerge from the doldrums. In 1984 the European Council, meeting at Fontainebleau, reached an agreement that was to mark the beginning of the end of the budget wrangle that had bedevilled the EC for some ten years.1 The British government had made the achievement of equitable budgetary arrangements an absolute condition to be fulfilled before any further development of the EC could be permitted. The decision to complete the internal market by the end of 1992 was taken in principle at the Brussels European Council meeting of March 1985. The Cockfield Report, which detailed some 300 measures necessary to achieve this objective, was accepted at the next European Council meeting held in Milan in June 1985. At this meeting the European Council also decided, despite the objections of Britain, Denmark and Greece, to hold an IGC under the forthcoming Luxembourg presidency to consider the revising the Rome Treaty and drafting a treaty on political cooperation and European security.2 The IGC resulted in agreement on the SEA3 which was eventually ratified in July 1987, following referenda in Denmark (1986)4 and Ireland (1987). In February 1988 Jacques Delors as President of the European Commission was able to say that the ‘third stage of the rocket’5 was in place when the European Council accepted his financial package, after further refining of its budgetary and CAP reforms. This package provided for substantial increases in EC structural funds which were to be increased from ECU 7 billion in 1987 to ECU 14 billion in 1993. The idea was to provide elements of compensation to those member states that were likely to initially lose out as a result of the completion of the internal market.
