ABSTRACT
The decision to complete the home market by 1992 placed the Community’s economic order high on the EC agenda. During the stagnation and low growth of the 1970s, foreign policy co-operation (EPC) was regarded as the model for future European co-operation. The resurgence of formal integration in Western Europe by the mid-1980s owes much to what is known in popular parlance as the ‘1992 programme’. An ambitious legislative programme, it aims to abolish the remaining barriers to economic exchange among the member states of the European Community by the end of 1992. Flanked by EC policies on research and development, the completion of the internal market is central to the achievement of sustained economic recovery in Europe. The apparent dynamism of the programme has contributed to renewed confidence in the EC and has fuelled demands for further economic integration in the form of economic and monetary union. A genuine internal market requires such a development. This chapter analyses the changes in the international political economy and in domestic economic policies in the member states that moulded the internal market programme. Attention then turns to the issue of the ‘nonEurope’, the Single European Act and the Cecchini Report. The internal market programme itself is examined from the perspective both of the White Paper and of its dynamic effects on the private sector. The wider dimension of the 1992 programme is addressed in the final section of the chapter.
