ABSTRACT
Since 1986, till the end of the first Delors Commission at the end of 1988, no EC policy field— other than the internal market programme itself—can claim to have been as high profile as SME policy. At the outset it is necessary to establish how and why this priority arose—in other words, the chronology and the origins and rationale of SME policy. The political priority given to this policy became most apparent in 1986: in January, following the accession of Spain and Portugal to the Community, the European Commission conferred on one of its new Spanish members, Abel Matutes, specific responsibility for SMEs; in June an independent SME Task Force (with a staff of approximately forty) was established in the Commission; and on 3 November the Action Programme for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises was unanimously adopted by the Council. Matutes’ concept of a ‘Europe of enterprise’ was underlined in the Council Resolution of 30 June 1988 on ‘the improvement of the business environment and action to promote the development of enterprises, especially Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in the Community’. The first point to note is that, during this period, SME policy underwent a learning process during which the concept of enterprise subsumed that of SMEs and cross-national networking emerged as the major theme of the EC's policy.
