Thatcherism would not prove to be quite the exception it sometimes appears to be from the continental vantage point. Herman Schwartz was among the first political scientists to grasp that heavy international market pressures – which in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain had brought about “not only a shift toward ‘less state’ but also a shift toward a different kind of state” – were also being felt elsewhere with varying degrees of force. The need to accommodate regime change would eventually prove to be universal. Geopolitics, size and international exposure, the state of the domestic economic and political systems, and the intentions, ideas, and abilities of national leaders would all influence outcomes.

Such outcomes varied. A tradition-conscious France would regroup in order to rebound; a modernization-minded Spain would rally the left politically in order to reform from the right; and a complacent Germany would try to rule quietly in order to let Europe relax. There would be other national combinations as well, each motivated in part by a need to reform the welfare state or a desire to modernize. Member-states both new and old would try to use the Community in order to introduce hard-to-impose change – sometimes as excuse, other times as agent, often as both. The relationship between the EC and the individual nations varied from country to country and thus must be examined on a case-by-case basis.