European Integration after the Single Act: Changing and Persisting Patterns

With and through the integration thrust of the 1980s, a qualitative change in the interaction between economic and political actors has developed in Western Europe. The Single European Act, now more than a dozen years in force, marks the beginning of this process. The massive underestimation of the meaning of the Single Act on the part of most observers as well as actors involved in the integration process remains nothing less than astounding. In retrospect, the assessment of the actors who understood the Single Act as the first result of a far reaching dynamic has been confirmed. This is true on the economic level, where a fundamental structural change was set in motion in anticipation of the internal market, as well as on the political level. First, elements of integration projects that had been set aside were put back on the agenda in the 1980s, in particular the project of a European monetary union, which became the core of the next policy package, the Maastricht Treaty. The political dynamic after 1986 can also be traced back to changes in the decision-making process at European level that were effected through the Single European Act, especially the further erosion of the ‘veto culture’. In addition, the Commission was able to develop and maintain a strong, proactive role in many areas. Along with this came successive expansions of the circle of involved political actors. The new transnational forms of cooperation, without which the new integration dynamic cannot be explained, developed further. This did not lead to an end of the central position of the individual roundtables of industrialists in Brussels, but they increasingly became one voice among others