This is a beginners guide to the structure, operation and objectives of the European Community. The author has assumed a prior knowledge of economics broadly comparable to that of a first-year university course or a good A level grade in the subject. To the outsider observer the Community frequently presents itself as a complex, remote and not entirely credible organisation, inhabited by politicians and bureaucrats but having little bearing on the daily life of the ordinary citizen. Nowhere is this attitude of faint disbelief more widely held than in the United Kingdom. Yet the facts are that for those of us who dwell in Western Europe it is part of our lives and we, in turn, form part of it.