From Luxembourg to Maastricht [antikvár]

Preface To take stock of the results of the Single European Act, signed by the governments of EC member states in February 1986 in The Hague and entered into force on 1 July 1987, is of major usefulness. The Single Act has by now become part of the European Community's everyday reality and practice, its institutions and member states governments have learned to live with it. More than that, after the Maastricht European Council in December 1991 and the signing of the European Union Treaty on 7 February 1992, the Community has moved on to a next and perhaps decisive stage of its integration process. Compared to the far-reaching content of this new Union Treaty and to the equally far-reaching adaptations they will necessitate, the Single European Act, meanwhile "digested" by the Community system, was an intermediate though by no means minor step in the ongoing and yet unachieved integration process. At the time of the signing of the Single Act, hardly anyone expected the provisions of the Act to contain those institutional innovations which were deemed to be necessary to complete the internal market, let alone to launch the EC into a new political dynamic. Yet, five years after the entry into force of the Single Act, the now much debated term "irreversible" quite certainly applies to the completion of the internal market, most of the remaining legal obstacles having to do more with national implementation of Community rules than with inadequate decision-making on the Community level. Indeed academics are heavily divided over the important question as to whether the success of the internal market programme can be entirely or at least partly attributed to the procedural and institutional changes introduced by the Single Act or whether converging economic policy priorities of member states with side-payments for those which demanded compensations for the complete opening up of their national markets were decisive. The present balance sheet of institutional performance concludes that institutional and procedural adaptations to the Community system had an important part in the overall satisfactory performance of the EC since 1986. Institutions and procedures are no substitute for policy, but to underestimate their function would be equally wrong. Institutions are interposed between actors and policy outcomes, they shape the actors perceptions, their strategies and their conduct. Different institutional arrangements will thus produce different outcomes, and modifications i