The Institutionalization of the Treaty of Rome

Neil Fligstein and Alec Stone-Sweet

CCOP Working Paper #2000-05
January, 2000

With the Treaty of Rome, European states designed a set of policy domains related to trade and the regulation of markets, a complex of governmental organisations, and a binding set of substantive and procedural rules to help them achieve the construction of a European Economic Community (Fligstein and McNichol, 1998). Although the Treaty traced the broad outlines of this new Community, it was the purposeful activities of representatives of national governments (Moravcsik 1999), of officials operating in the EC's organisations, like the Commission (Pollack 1998) and the Court (Burley and Mattli 1993; Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1998a; Weiler 1991, 1994), and of leaders of transnational interest groups (Mazey and Richardson, eds., 1993) that subsequently produced the extraordinarily dense web of political and social networks that now functions to generate and sustain supranational governance (Wallace and Young 1998; Héritier 1999; Sandholtz and Stone Sweet, eds., 1998).