In the European Community agreement on
common goals has frequently been reached only
after long-drawn-out negotiations and carefully
cobbled-together compromises. But the original
aim of the 1957 Treaty of Rome – that all obsta-
cles which impeded the free movement of goods,
capital and services, such as insurance and
banking, within the Community of 360 million
people should be lifted – had still not been entirely
met in the early 1990s. The Europe of the twelve
members of the Community was still fissured by
customs frontiers and blocked by mountains of
paper forms as well as hidden obstructions.
Nevertheless, the three major continental West
European nations – Germany, France and Italy –
backed the drive for closer union. Britain was
more reluctant to hand over control to the
Commission in Brussels, whose president from
1985 was the former French minister of finance,
Jacques Delors. Margaret Thatcher stood at the
forefront of those who believed that to elevate
the Commission as the ultimate source of power
would be profoundly undemocratic and that the
European Parliament was too weak to play the
role of existing national parliaments.
Which direction the European Community took
depended on the decisions reached by the heads of
government of its member states. It had always
been so and essentially it remained so in the early
1990s. This was not the intention of the founding
fathers, who wanted to move towards the closer
integration of Western Europe. They laid down
that, after an early stage during which unanimity
would be required in the Council of Ministers, the
‘qualified majority’ voting formula would come
into play. This meant that if France, Germany and
Italy were agreed, the other three original mem-
bers – Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg –
would be outvoted. Moreover, the three smaller
powers acting together would not achieve enough
votes to get a measure passed unless they could
gain the agreement of at least two of the other
three. In other words, neither Germany, France
nor Italy had enough voting power on its own to
veto a decision all the others were agreed upon. De
Gaulle scuppered any such notion of diminished
sovereignty in 1965: he boycotted the Community
for seven months and returned only when the so-
called Luxembourg Compromise was agreed on in
January 1966. This gave each member the right to
veto any decision affecting its vital national inter-
ests – and the interpretation of ‘vital national
interests’ was left to the member state and could
include such matters as the price of barley.
The successive enlargements of the European
Community have altered the mechanics of ‘qual-
ified majority’ voting, but the national veto was
still in place in the early 1990s. The periodic
summit meetings of the heads of government –
accompanied, since 1974, by their foreign minis-
ters – were given the formal name of European
Council. They convene three times a year, and
their decisions set the guidelines. At the Council
of Ministers, more detailed agreements areChapter 75
THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY