At the Heart of Integration: Understanding National European Policy

Abstract

After World War II European integration became crucially necessary for the reconstruction of the nation-states of Europe, if not for their outright ‘rescue’, as Alan S. Milward (1992) argued somewhat provocatively in his book European Rescue of the Nation-State. The nation-states founded the present-day European Union (EU), and they are still its main supporters. The economic difficulties of reconstruction and the decolonization shock of the 1950s complicated integration. In the 1970s international economic slumps, turbulence in the currency markets and political crises impeded greater progress in integration. These problems in turn led to repeated attempts to reassert the nation-state and national sovereignty within the present-day EU. Subsequently, rapid industrial and technological development across the world and the emergence of new economic and trading powers onwards required the full implementation of the common market in the form of the single market programme, combined with increased pooling of national sovereignty in the Single European Act (SEA) and the Maastricht Treaty on European Union.