ABSTRACT
The year 1989 will go down in the history of Europe as an annus mirabilis. the year when the post-war order came crashing down, bringing with it not only democratic freedoms for the peoples of Eastern Europe, but also great uncertainty about the nature of Europe’s political and security structures in the 1990s. The profound changes in Eastern Europe came at a time when the core regional organization in Western Europe, the European Community (EC), was itself undergoing significant change. The EC is simultaneously attempting to complete its main policy objective of the 1980s-the achievement of a barrier-free internal market by 1992-and to deepen the level of integration by setting off on the road towards economic, monetary and, perhaps, political union. At the same time the Community is faced with pressing demands from European non-member states for new forms of cooperation. The notion of a ‘European Economic Area’ is at the heart of discussions with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Mikhail Gorbachev’s evocative suggestion of a ‘common European home’ and US Secretary of State James Baker’s call for a ‘new European architecture’ testify to the fact that Europe is searching for a new pan-European system to manage inter-state relations for the continent as a whole. The EC is faced with the enormous challenge of deepening the level of integration, while at the same time coming to terms with the revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe and with the fact of German unification.
