The end of 2012 will herald the twentieth anniversary of 'deadline 1992', the projected date for the completion of the EU's internal market. Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 references to '1992' have been deleted from the Treaties, and so it may be tempting to suppose, rather more than twenty years since the first contribution on the Free Movement of Goods to this section of the Quarterly,1 that this is old news. Isn't the law governing the internal market in general and the free movement of goods in particular now well settled?
Since the expiry of the deadline for the completion of the internal market at the end of 1992, the Commission has shifted its focus away from piloting an intense rule-making burst through the Community legislative system. As part of its quest to establish reliable methods for managing the internal market, the Commission is now overtly concerned to improve the quality of those adopted laws, for example by securing simplification and consolidation, and it is intent on investigating more rigorously how a closer match may be made between the relevant laws on paper and their practical application on the ground.1 In short, the Commission is focusing its energies on ensuring that the legal framework which has been adopted is treated by commercial operators and consumers in the market as a viable and trustworthy basis for an integrated market. Accordingly much of the Commission's work since the last survey of the law relating to the free movement of goods has been at first sight relatively unglamorous. It largely concerns soft law initiatives and attempts to improve administrative co-ordination designed to underpin the practice of market management, both vertically (Commission/Member State) and horizontally (Member State/Member State). This forms the core of the strategy for the internal market covering the next five years, published on 24 November 1999.2 Nonetheless, even though these initiatives might not immediately strike the lawyer accustomed to a fountain of legislative activity as worthy of close inspection, it is clearly the case that the Commission regards its medium-term mission to stabilise the management of the internal market as best pursued by a gradual approach designed to improve practical compliance.
1. From "Sunday trading" to Keck and MithouardThese Current Developments surveys have consistently been driven to consideration of the Court's attempts to fix the outer limits of Article 30 of the EC Treaty, beyond which national authorities remain exclusively competent to regulate their markets without fear of legal challenge based on Community rules governing the free movement of goods. The high-water mark of judicial interventionism came in the so-called "Sunday trading" cases where the United Kingdom was required to justify against standards recognised by Community law rules governing shop opening hours despite the fact that such rules, although inhibitive of commercial freedom, posed no demonstrable obstacle to the construction of an integrated marketing strategy for the whole territory of the Community.1 In Criminal Proceedings against Keck and Mithouard2 the Court sought to curtail the reach of Article 30. A French rule prohibiting resale at a loss was held unaffected by Article 30. The Court overruled previous decisions, probably including the pair dealing with Sunday trading, although the Court was not explicit. Its intention to refocus the law of the free movement of goods on measures hostile to market integration, rather than those merely oppressive of commercial freedom, was reflected in the formula:
The Surveys of the law of the free movement of goods carried in the Quarterly since 1989 have followed a largely consistent pattern. The Court's case law interpreting the nature and purpose of Article 28's legislative institutions. The readier the Court is to treat national measures as barriers to trade, the deeper the incursion of EC law into national regulatory autonomy. And vice versa. The Wider the scope allowed to the possibility to justify barriers to trade, the more room for manoeuvre is handed back to national regulatory autonomy—and the more weight is placed on the process of legislative harmonization or, increasingly, other forms of policy coordination at EC level as the way to advance integration. And vice versa. All these trends are in view in the period covered by this survey. The complex institutional rhythms reveal that the creation of the internal market was not a short-term project that was completed in 1992, nor even an enterprise that gently begged to have a few loose ends tidied up before being triumphantly pronounced historical fact. In reality the internal market, as an exercise in creating a unified economic space underpinned by a constitutionalized system of supra-State legal rules in a politically fragmented but interdependent environment, is one manifestation of the extraordinary exercise in multi-level governance which is evolving in Europe. Systems of this complexity do not stop fluctuating; 'free' markets are politically contested.
The Commission has spent time in 2003 celebrating the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the internal market. In this context the use of deadlines is misleading. The building of an internal market is more process than event. Many significant pieces of legislation entered into force at the end of 1992, but many pre-dated that moment and others again havebeen agreed subsequently. And the Court's interpretation of relevant provisions of the Treaty was not fossilised at the end 1992, but rather its dynamic evolution continues to exert influence over the process of market-building. The Commissionsperfectly well aware of this. It admits that the Internal Market will never be 'completed'.1The core mission is to promote and sustain improved economic performance, not to hit crude targets. Nonetheless dissemination of propaganda possessesbase appeal in all political systems and the Commission has taken the trouble to emphasise the gainsthat have accrued from the process of integration, while also devoting attention both to remaining gaps and strategies forplugging them. In making its case the Commission is confronted by the unavoidable absence of reliable data on what would have occurred had the internal market not been pursued in the chosen manner. Sector by sector, it is difficult to demarcateadvantages accruing from the '1992' initiative from those that would have occurred in any event or which are attributable to other factors such as global trade liberalisation. Moreover, the essence of the internal market programme is that benefits will be felt not only in the short term, but also in the long term, and accordingly, in line with Chairman Mao's reported refusal to assess the importance of the French Revolution on the basis that it was too soon to tell, measurement of the impact of the internal market project cannot yet be decisive. However, in its reportThe Internal Market—Ten Years without Frontiers the Commission insistedon demonstrably favourable macroeconomic consequences.2It highlighted price reductions and improved productivity. Its simulation results suggest that real Gross Domestic Product would have been 1.4 per cent lower in 2002 without the internal market programme. The level of employment would have been 0.86 per cent lower. Moreover further gains are expected of the former, though not the latter, type in future.
