On 1 January 2003, we shall celebrate ten years of the European internal market. Since that date in 1993, the free movement of goods, services, capital and people within the European Community has been assured. Almost 300 European laws, known as directives, paved the way for that revolution. But the internal market has not been without its difficulties and its failures.

My first experience of the internal market came, paradoxically, in the French National Assembly back in 1986. We had just ratified the Single European Act. I was a new Member of Parliament – young, enthusiastic and pro-European. I was very surprised to see that many of the legislative bills the government was presenting to us were drawn up in blissful ignorance of the fact that the European institutions were preparing, discussing and ultimately adopting directives governing the single market. On supervision of the financial market, on free movement of labour, on freedom of establishment, on the validity of foreign diplomas, we in Paris were quietly unravelling what was being patiently knitted together in Brussels – not out of political malevolence but because of the condescending ignorance of the European Community demonstrated by our top politicians, parliamentarians and administrators. For this reason I formed a parliamentary joint committee, open to all parties, which was christened ‘Penelope’ to symbolise the constant weaving and undoing of the European tapestry and as an acronym of Pour l’Entrée des Normes Européennes dans les Lois Ordinaires des Parlements d’Europe (‘for the entry of European rules into national acts of parliament in Europe’). We decided to verify systematically what we called the ‘Euro-compatibility’ of national legislative bills with draft directives that were currently under examination and even with the directives that had already been adopted. If we found any incompatibilities, we tabled amendments to make the bills Euro-compatible. For example, we tabled what we called the ‘Mazarin amendment’ in opposition to a bill reforming the French administration which perpetuated the requirement of French citizenship for postal workers and public gardeners, even though the Single European Act had opened access to administrative employment to all nationals of Community countries. In spite of the reference to the text of the EEC Treaty and the cited example of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, or Giulio Mazzarino, the Italian who served as first minister of France under the young Louis XIV, the National Assembly disdainfully rejected our amendment. This turned out to be a futile rearguard action, because France was forced to ‘capitulate’ on transposing a directive a few years later.

This experience has more than purely anecdotal value. It testifies to the political and psychological difficulty involved in converting the national political establishment to the European way of thinking. Even today, the national administrative authorities are patently reluctant to apply even the most firmly established Community law. To take two recent examples in which I was closely involved, I had to pursue a case all the way to the Minister of Justice because the Bar in Bayonne refused to admit a Belgian lawyer, while a young Spanish student who had been on an Erasmus scholarship and was recruited by a large research organisation in Madrid was told that he would need to satisfy formal requirements over a period of at least two years before the degree he obtained in Scotland could be recognised in his own country.

The internal market started off like the work of Penelope, but after ten years it is sometimes more reminiscent of the labour of Sisyphus!

Alain Lamassoure, 19 December 2002