Three routes led from the Single European Act (SEA) to the Maastricht treaty. The functionalist approach went by Air. The theory holds that – once put into currency and institutionalized – the integration idea has reverberating, reciprocal, and dynamic spillovers that drive the process onward. This approach, the way of Monnet, Hallstein, and Delors, went through both the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Commission and would (if Delors had his druthers) debouch into a “European social and economic space.” Another approach, liberal intergovernmentalism, was by Land and passed milestones at the European Economic Community, the European Council, and the European Monetary System, each of them a Grand Bargain sealed by heads of state that advanced the integration process from one stage to the next. Finally, one might travel by SEA, promoting competition and eliminating barriers to the movement of goods and factors of production. The Common Market and the Single European Market marked this course, a hard one to chart, even though the route it followed – liberalization – was widely agreed to be the proudest achievement of the integration process prior to the great changes that swept Europe in the 1980s.

The economics of integration are not well understood. The static models of neoclassical economics cannot account for change over time. Nor do the conditions they posit exist in a Europe of welfare states.