Why, after remaining dormant for so long, did the European integration process suddenly revive, get moving, and then, just as mysteriously, stop in its tracks? The two extant general theories – intergovernmentalism and functionalism, both deriving from American political science – get only partly at the answer. Although the Big Bargains of intergovernmentalism did create the new diplomatic, political, and institutional contexts that define successive stages of integration, the theory says little about the nature of the choices made and even less about the outcomes arrived at. Both were quite different in each of the two Big Bargains of the Delors era. The adoption of the Single European Act was a choice for the market, a judgment on the part of the member-states to shift decision-making authority away from national political institutions as well as government-regulated economies and toward that abstraction, buyers and sellers. It represented an acknowledgment that the model of the national mixed-economy welfare state had had its day.

The adoption of the Maastricht treaty also involved the transfer of policymaking power away from the member-states, but this time to a different kind of entity: a central-bank directorate. It was as if the heads of government had placed the European patrimony in a trust in order to protect it from spendthrift heirs; the act acknowledged that they did not feel competent to serve as trustees for those who had elected them. Neither of the Big Bargains either increased the individual or collective influence of member-states or bolstered the power of Brussels, and both involved buck-passing.