In the copyright field, the White Paper promised that a consultation document would be published in 1985 (it eventually appeared in 1988) which would deal amongst other things with the protection of computer software. The Single European Act, which also flowed from the 1985 White Paper, introduced qualified majority voting for single market measures. It introduced a new Article 100a EEC, which as amended by the Maastricht Treaty now provides:

1997 ◽  
pp. 140-140
Keyword(s):  
Computer Software ◽  
Maastricht Treaty ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Single Market ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Consultation Document ◽  
Qualified Majority ◽  
Single European Act

Community-minded members accepting an extension of integration (higher overall budget) as the means of resolving a problem. Indeed, taken together with the incident over farm prices already discussed, it demonstrates the extent to which even Britain – the apparently ever-reluctant European – had under Margaret Thatcher become sucked into the Community ‘game’. Fontainebleau has to take its place as one of the most significant meetings of the European Council. It resolved a long-standing dispute which was jeopardising progress on a whole range of issues, cleared the way for Spanish and Portugese accession, and set in motion the process which was to lead to the signature of the Single European Act (SEA). None of this could have happened without agreement between France and Germany. Fontainebleau marked the re-emergence of what was earlier termed the ‘Franco-German axis’. Removal of the long-standing budgetary problem obviated the danger that Britain would simply obstruct all progress, and this brought one immediate bonus. Even though Thatcher’s predilections and policy priorities ensured that Britain would still not normally be centre stage, she was heavily committed to the notion of ‘completing’ the Community as a trading and commercial entity by establishing a single market. In the short run, Thatcher could thus work with Mitterrand and Kohl on what may be considered the first phase in their mission to regenerate the Community. They also gained a major long-term ally in the person of Jacques Delors, whose appointment as the next Commission President was also agreed at Fontainebleau. The term ‘founding fathers’ is normally used in a Community context to refer to those who inspired the original treaties in the fifties and who led the institutions at the commencement of the process of integration. As the Community developed thereafter, many individuals played important roles, but it is hard to think of occasions prior to the appointment of Delors where any were indispensable, save perhaps for Roy Jenkins in the case of the establishment of EMS. Delors, a former civil servant and government minister, was to be President of the Commission for a decade, which witnessed the SEA and the implementation of the 1992 programme, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the inclusion of Portugal and Spain and successful negotiations for membership of Austria, Finland and Sweden. A convinced federalist, Delors was to become virtually synonymous with the Community during the decade 1985–95. With the three largest countries onside, it was logical for the new Commission to make the single market its major policy priority when it took office at the beginning of 1985. The establishment of internal free trade,

2006 ◽  
pp. 83-83
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servant ◽  
Maastricht Treaty ◽  
Single Market ◽  
Community Context ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Single European Act ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Commission President ◽  
Policy Priority

The European Union and International Outcomes

1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Jupille
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Maastricht Treaty ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Institutional Factors ◽  
The European Union ◽  
External Relations ◽  
Qualified Majority ◽  
International Bargaining ◽  
Bargaining Positions ◽  
The Eu

Analysts of the European Union (EU) and international bargaining have generally failed to appreciate how the shift within the EU from unanimity to qualified majority voting has affected European bargaining positions and international outcomes. I analyze the international effects of changes in EU decision-making rules with a simple spatial model and assess the utility of the model in two cases of environmental bargaining that span the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. The EU can decisively shape international outcomes by concentrating the weight of its fifteen member states on a single substantive position and rendering that position critical to any internationally negotiated agreement. The findings generalize to numerous areas of EU external relations and suggest that analysts should attend specifically to the EU and more generally to domestic and regional institutional factors in explaining international bargaining outcomes.

– most likely to be resisted by the United Kingdom, especially if there were no solution to the budgetary problem. At the very beginning of the decade the need for institutional reform generated an interesting, if odd, initiative from Germany and Italy – the so-called Genscher-Colombo plan, named after their respective foreign ministers. This emerged during 1981, when France was preoccupied with elections which produced a Socialist government with Mitterrand as President. The key features of the plan were development of political co-operation, which would be given an organic link with the Community through the European Council, and a procedure whereby qualified majority voting would be implemented in accordance with the treaty. The plan forms part of the background to the Single European Act, which is discussed below, but initially the auguries for any real change in voting methods did not seem very bright. The Genscher-Colombo plan disappeared into the Solemn Declaration on European Union produced by the Stuttgart European Council in 1983. The latter’s vision on majority voting was contained in a somewhat innocuous assertion that ‘the application of the decision-making procedures laid down by the Treaties is of vital importance’. However, there were some indications

2006 ◽  
pp. 81-81
Keyword(s):  
Majority Voting ◽  
European Council ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Qualified Majority ◽  
Socialist Government ◽  
Single European Act ◽  
Voting Methods ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Colombo Plan ◽  
Foreign Ministers

The Single European Act

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Dinan
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Technology Policy ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Single Market ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Intergovernmental Cooperation ◽  
Legislative Authority ◽  
Single European Act ◽  
Major Reform

The Single European Act (SEA) of 1986 was the first major reform of the founding treaties of the three original European Communities, the forerunners of the European Union (EU). The main purpose of the SEA was to facilitate implementation of the Single Market Program by the end of 1992, notably by making it possible for national governments to enact the necessary legislation in the Council of Ministers by means of qualified-majority voting (QMV). To complement the shift of decision-making from unanimity to QMV, the SEA also increased the legislative authority of the European Parliament by introducing the cooperation procedure. This was intended to help close the EC’s perceived democratic deficit, or at least to prevent it from widening. The SEA included changes in other policy areas as well as the single market, such as cohesion policy, environmental policy, research and technology policy, and intergovernmental cooperation on foreign policy (European Political Cooperation). The SEA, and the Single Market Program with which it is closely associated, became synonymous with the acceleration of European integration in the late 1980s. Procedurally and substantively, the SEA set a precedent for other, far-reaching treaty reforms, especially the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Jacques Delors, who became commission president in 1985, is widely credited with having engineered the SEA. The leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom may have played a more important role, especially as the SEA emerged out of a complicated intergovernmental conference, which culminated in a meeting of the European Council in December 1985. From the perspective of more than three decades later, with the EU facing serious setbacks, the SEA looks like a shining light in the history of European integration.

1992: Removing the Barriers

1989 ◽  
Vol 129 ◽  
pp. 43-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
AD van de Gevel ◽  
David G. Mayes
Keyword(s):  
European Commission ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Internal Market ◽  
Single Market ◽  
Member States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Conflicting Objectives ◽  
Single European Act

In the four years that have elapsed since the publication of the European Commission's White Paper on ‘Completing the Internal Market’ in June 1985 understanding of the issues involved in removing the various physical, fiscal and technical barriers to having a ‘single market’ in Europe has developed considerably. The public debate has gone through a series of phases, starting with scepticism, strikingly translated into enthusiasm and almost euphoria during 1988, to be replaced with serious concerns about many specific areas as general principles have come to be replaced by detailed proposals by the European Commission. The member states signed the Single European Act in 1986 for a variety of motives and it is often only when explicit proposals are tabled that the conflicting objectives and detailed implications become obvious.

Getting the Core: A Neo‐institutionalist Approach to the EMU

1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam L. Campanella
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Monetary Union ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Maastricht Treaty ◽  
Convergence Criteria ◽  
The North ◽  
Single European Act ◽  
Effective Role ◽  
Set Up ◽  
New Institutions

THE NEW REGIONALISM, MANIFESTED IN EUROPE BY THE SINGLE European Act and the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and in North America by the signature of the North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA 1993), is centred on strategic policies and new institutions, the aims of which are to achieve a more effective role in global competition. In Europe, the shift is marked by the impending process of monetary union and the creation of its related institutions. The new approach agreed in the Maastricht Treaty sets out four requirements for eligibility to membership of monetary union. Convergence criteria embodying the judgment of financial markets about future inflation, exchange rate and fiscal policy appeared to be the second best choice for governments seeking to institutionalize their commitment to inflation-avoiding policies. The whole mechanism is meant first to provide the region with a credible monetary institution able to win over the financial markets and secondly to set up bulwarks to the inflation-prone pressures of domestic sheltered interests. Thirdly, the aim is to commit member countries, through a so-called targeting exercise (in Keohane's words) to accomplishing the agreed objectives with monetary discipline and macroeconomic adjustment.

Aktuelle Entwicklungen in der EU-Sozialpolitik: effizientere Entscheidungsfindung durch Mehrheitsentscheidungen und differenzierte Integration?

IG ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Miriam Hartlapp
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Member State ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Qualified Majority ◽  
Differentiated Integration ◽  
Aktuelle Entwicklungen ◽  
Organizational Heterogeneity

Design and adoption of common social policy is conditional. Limited competencies, institutional and organizational heterogeneity among member states, and ideological-programmatic majorities in the institutions of the European Union (EU) have led to far fewer new legal instruments in recent decades. One of the key challenges is the unanimity requirement in the Council, enshrined in the Treaties in areas of great member state sovereignty. In 2019 the Commission proposed to allow a transition to qualified majority voting. This paper discusses what the transition entails in legal and procedural terms and highlights three key advantages it holds. To this aim it provides an overview of the policy areas and instruments that the Commission would like to transfer to qualified majority voting. It outlines how the potential that majority voting offers for EU social policy could be exploited better with more ambitious initiatives and discusses differentiated integration as an alternative.

2. The constitutional base of the Union

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-41
Author(s):  
Margot Horspool ◽  
Matthew Humphreys ◽  
Michael Wells-Greco
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Maastricht Treaty ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Treaty Of Lisbon ◽  
Single European Act ◽  
Treaty Of Amsterdam

This chapter discusses the Treaties which together represent the primary law of the European Union; its constitutional base. These include the Single European Act 1986; the Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) 1993; the Treaty of Amsterdam (signed June 1997, entered into force 1 May 1999); the Nice Treaty (adopted December 2001, entered into force 1 February 2003); and the Treaty of Lisbon (signed December 2007, entered into force 1 December 2009).

theoretically achieved back in the 1960s, meant the abolition of all barriers. In practice, the latter had remained a pious aspiration so long as a whole host of technical, fiscal and other barriers existed. Early in 1985 the Commission produced a white paper on establishing a single market. This, together with the report by the Dooge Committee, established at Fontainebleau to examine institutional issues, formed the major agenda when the European Council met in Milan in late June 1985 and took the crucial decisions which were to lead to the negotiation and signature of SEA. The Milan European Council was an early demonstration of the new Franco-German axis. Analysis of these events should properly focus on three critical features. First, the European Council confirmed its assumption of direct responsibility for all major decisions. In 1984 this involved enlargement and the budget. In 1985 it embraced ‘completion’ of the Community itself in the shape of the single market. Second, the actual decision to hold an inter-governmental conference (IGC), which would give a treaty base to foreign policy co-operation and revise some of the institutional arrangements, was taken by a majority despite opposition from Britain, Denmark and Greece. Italian Prime Minister Craxi as President of the European Council played a key role in this. Third, despite objections to developing European structures and institutions, Britain attached sufficient importance to the single market to accept a majority decision on the IGC. The lead up to the IGC had been long and tortuous, but the actual negotiation of the SEA was relatively simple. The IGC met in September, and by January an agreed text had emerged. The treaty itself is analysed in the next chapter. Its main features were agreement to implement the single market by the end of 1992, the establishment of a legal basis for Political Co-operation and a number of institutional reforms. Whilst not formally repudiating the Luxembourg compromise with its apparent extension of the national veto, member states seemed to have reached some understanding that in future the spirit of the original treaties would apply. The point is underlined by the fact that virtually all the provisions relating to the single market would be implemented by majority vote. In the immediate aftermath of the ratification of the SEA, some observers drew attention to the gap between aspirations expressed by Parliament in its Draft Treaty and the actual achievement. Although true, such comments are wide of the mark. In the negotiating process Parliament was little more than a bystander with the right to be heard. The member states were anxious to achieve a relaunching of the move towards unification after a period of apparent

2006 ◽  
pp. 84-84
Keyword(s):  
Majority Vote ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Single Market ◽  
European Council ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Member States ◽  
Institutional Issues ◽  
Actual Negotiation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right

Qualified Majority Voting

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan S. Felsenthal ◽  
Moshé Machover
Keyword(s):  
Majority Voting ◽  
Qualified Majority
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