Though hardly recognized as such at the time in a workaday world of men and women absorbed in the worthy task of simply getting by, the drive for European integration – after lying dormant for nearly two decades – revived in the early 1980s with what seems like explosive force. The burst of energy then unleashed would have immediate impact but would also drive change into the coming millennium, alter the context of political and economic development in Europe, and open the door to the new era whose contours are only now taking shape. It re-launched Europe for a second time. Such big events rarely have simple causes. The progress of integration required strong leadership and wise statesmanship as well as a setting propitious to development. The transformation of European institutions grew out of a process of reciprocal interaction with counterposed and complementary national and international events. Brussels became a dynamic agent of change in an ever more complicated three-level game.

Much happened in the nearly six years between adoption of the Single European Act (SEA) of 1986 and the conclusion of the Treaty of European Union (TEU) at Maastricht in December 1991. The EEC started off as a customs union – a market with a common external tariff but still fragmented by a host of nontariff barriers and with no common institutions except the Common Agricultural Policy. By the end of the 1990s the same organization – now confusingly referred to as either the European Community or the European Union – had developed into an embryonic economic and monetary union stripped of many such NTBs, had generated several powerful common institutions, was headed toward the adoption of a single currency, and had begun to wield certain statelike powers. After 1986, regulations drafted in Brussels had the force of law in the member-states.