1. General presentation

Under the presidency of Mr Alexis Dejou, the last French president, the IEC laid the foundations for cooperation with ISO and the IUT, which was strengthened by the creation of joint bodies (World Standardization Co-operation WSC, group of ISO, IEC and IUT presidents) and, in the IT field, by the setting up of JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee 1).

The Single European Act provided for the establishment of a Single Market from 1 ^er January 1993. In response, CEN, CENELEC and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) joined forces.

To eliminate technical barriers to trade, the Commission of the European Communities has drawn up a number of regulatory texts: directives.

A number of them leave it to standardization to define, for a specific field, the technical...