The most important contribution of neo-functionalists to the study of EU policy-making was their conceptualization of a ‘Community method’ of policy-making. As Webb pointed out, this ideal-type Community method was based largely on the observation of a few specific sectors (the common agricultural policy (CAP), and the customs union, see Chapters 4 and 15) during the formative years of the Community, and presented a distinct picture of EC policy-making as a process driven by an entrepreneurial Commission and featuring supranational deliberation among member-state representatives in the Council. The Community method in this view was not just a legal set of policy-making institutions but a ‘procedural code’ conditioning the expectations and the behaviour of the participants in the process. The central elements of this original Community method, Webb (1977: 13-14) continued, were four-fold:
1. governments accept the Commission as a valid bargaining partner and expect it to play an active role in building a policy consensus.
2. governments deal with each other with a commitment to problem-solving, and negotiate over how to achieve collective decisions, and not whether these are desirable or not.
3. governments, the Commission, and other participants in the process are responsive to each other, do not make unacceptable demands, and are willing to make short term sacrifices in expectation of longer term gains.
4. Unanimity is the rule, necessitating that negotiations continue until all objections are overcome or losses in one area are compensated for by gains in another.
Issues are not seen as separate but related in a continuous process of decision such that ‘log-rolling’ and ‘side payments’ are possible.
This Community method, Webb suggested, characterized EEC decision-making during the period from 1958 to 1963, as the original six member states met alongside the Commission to put in place the essential elements of the EEC customs union and the CAP. By 1965, however, Charles de Gaulle, the French President, had precipitated the so-called ‘Luxembourg crisis’, insisting on the importance of state sovereignty and arguably violating the implicit procedural code of the Community method. The EEC, which had been scheduled to move to extensive qualified majority voting (QMV) in 1966, continued to take most decisions de facto by unanimity, the Commission emerged weakened from its confrontation with de Gaulle, and the nation-state appeared to have reasserted itself.