The making of the Single European Act reconsidered: IPE, UCD and the challenge of supranationalism

Recent UCD-inspired International Political Economy (IPE) approaches have tried to explain short-term economic and political events by expanding the theory of UCD towards an enhanced operational toolkit. This recent ‘policy turn’, I argue, has progressed empirically without having clarified prior analytical and methodological steps, both regarding the general premises of UCD, as well as in relation to foreign policy analysis, and the field of international politics. This article unpacks important blind spots of UCD’s emerging IPE framework by emphasising the crucial role of the supranational institutional level in foreign policy formation. By historicising the run-up to ratification of the 1986 Single European Act (SEA), I show that the SEA emerged as an interactive compromise, based on diverging state interests and, yet strongly managed by the overarching agency of the Commission of the EEC. While the multiplicity of advanced capitalisms, or the ‘unevenness and combination’ of diverging national European interests, cannot explain this outcome, I demonstrate that the SEA’s ratification process was decisively driven by dynamics emerging from within the European sphere, created by tensions between Commissioner Jacques Delors and President François Mitterrand. Unable to capture competing strategies on the national vs. supranational level, UCD-IPE’s current framework fails to grasp the process of foreign policy formation. By redrawing the contours of the SEA with a radical historicist methodology, this study stands as a contribution to the field of the Historical Sociology of International Politics, exploring how structural processes are politico-diplomatically managed and resolved within the wider field of international politics.