ABSTRACT
To identify the political opportunity structure, this chapter defines the policy paradigm and what community actors make of it by mobilizing the formal and informal resources available. The political opportunity structure of the early 1980s included a new round of enlargement negotiations. Work towards the objective of European Union was now occurring within a new political opportunity structure: a market-oriented policy paradigm was matched by a solved budget problem and the will of some to further expansion of the acquis. Market policy then was considered as a short-range policy towards the long term aim of political union which had been part of the citizenship acquis as an overarching goal of community politics since the 1970s. The constitutional means necessary to apply the white paper were thus clearly pronounced: the "Luxembourg compromise" was to be abolished, based on the constitutionally approved change of the formal resources of the acquis, a demand the Single European Act was precisely to achieve.
