Читать книгу The Politics of European Citizenship - Peo Hansen - Страница 11

CHAPTER 3

A Citizens’ Europe for Whom?

Social Citizenship, Migration, and the Neoliberal Relaunch of European Integration (1980–1995)

Introduction

With the aim of breaking the deadlock of “Euro-pessimism” and resuscitating European integration, the late 1970s and early 1980s would witness a newly awakened activity at the Community level. Already in 1979 a new monetary and exchange rate cooperation, the European Monetary System, was established (by some seen as reviving the dream of a common currency for the Community), and two years later a discussion got underway concerning a felt need for reform of the Community’s institutions and decision-making procedures. In 1984 the European Parliament followed up on this and adopted the Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union, which called for institutional reforms and the need for a new treaty. Later on that same year the Fontainebleau European Council appointed an Adhoc Committee on Institutional Affairs. The Committee was given the task to inquire into a set of problems that demanded—the member states now seemed able to agree—common solutions within the Community framework. Among these problems counted economic matters concerning competitiveness, growth, and technological development. At the meeting in Fontainebleau, moreover, an Ad Hoc Committee on a People’s Europe was created for the purpose of drawing up strategies specifically addressing how an eventual relaunch of the European integration project would be able to win popular support and legitimacy, and so promote the formation of a European citizenship and identity (see Hansen 2000; CEC 1985a).

The flurry of activity to at once reshape and infuse the Community with new life that marked the early 1980s, and where the Commission’s (1985b) White Paper on the Completion of the Internal Market supplied the finishing touch, was to culminate in the signing of a new treaty, the Single European Act (SEA), in 1986. The SEA, which was ratified in 1987, constituted the first sizeable revision of the Community’s founding treaties. Laying the foundation for the subsequent Economic and Monetary Union and equipping the Community with a policy in the field of science and technology, the SEA also strengthened and expanded the Community’s competence in other important ways. As we will survey below, moreover, the SEA included measures to equip the Community with a “social Dimension” by seeking to boost the compass of social policy at the supranational level.

Most of all, however, the SEA was instrumental in setting in motion and providing the institutional, decision-making, and legal framework for the completion of the Single Market Program (anticipated to be accomplished by 1992), which the Commission’s new president Jacques Delors—drawing on the blueprint contained in the abovementioned White Paper—had spearheaded in 1985. Despite the fact that the internal market and the free movement of goods, capital, services, and persons formed part of the Rome Treaty, these objectives were still far from fully realized. A row of national barriers and other obstacles still prevented the Community from constituting a single internal market. The institutional, decision-making, and legal reforms that the member states agreed on in the Single European Act were thus specifically designed to enable a swift implementation of the Single Market. With the purpose of facilitating the removal of the many national market barriers, the member governments decided to remove the national veto in a number of political-economic areas tied to the Single Market’s function and logic. Hereby the right of veto was replaced by decision making with qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers. This was indeed a big step, both in a real and a symbolic sense, and it is often cited as one of the most critical provisions overall agreed upon in the Single European Act (see Garrett and Weingast 1993: 191).