1992 and All That

Abstract

Commenting in 1982 on the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the weekly journal The Economist remarked that ‘A 25-year-old in a coma is a pitiful sight’. In the same year, a study by five international political scientists, all enthusiasts for the European ideal, was predicting that if nothing were done Europe was facing the disintegration of its most important achievement since the Second World War. National administrations, they warned, were obstructing and delaying every stage in the Community’s decision-making process; the Commission was suffering the ills which afflict all bureaucracies, building its own fiefdoms and baffling the outside world with a jargon of an obscurity which the languages of other countries had taken centuries to achieve; for the ordinary people of Europe the Community had become a distant and soul-less organisation.