The politics of big business in the European Community: Setting the agenda for a new Europe

This study documents the mobilization, purpose, access and power of three major multinational enterprise (MNE) groups in European Community (EC) policymaking in the early 1980s: the European Enterprise Group, the European Round Table of Industrialists, and the EC Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce. The findings reveal how big business mobilized to shape the rules, institutions and norms of the EC regulatory framework when both Member States and traditional business groups failed to do so. Based on extensive interviews and primary source data, the research demonstrates that large firms were not important policy actors in the formative years of the Community. European big business only began to pay attention to Community policymaking in the mid-1970s when the expansion of EC authority into trans-sectoral regulatory policies threatened to impose substantial costs on the MNEs. The mobilization and political activities of big business in the 1980s led to two major developments in Community policymaking: (1) big business--and not the EC Member States--largely was responsible for setting the agenda for the Single Market Program of 1985; and (2) MNEs have transformed traditional European-level business groups by replacing structures based on national federations with organizations in which individual firms often play the primary political roles. This study also reveals that traditional theories of European integration cannot account for the actors and process of EC market regulation policies. Neither neofunctionalist nor intergovernmentalist theory can explain the mobilization and activities of multinational firms in the early 1980s. Drawing on the two-level games literature, this study provides an alternative theoretical model, supragovernmentalism, to explain the actors, processes and dynamics of EC regulatory policies. According to supragovernmentalist theory, European big business and other societal interests engage in multi-level games to set and influence the EC's regulatory agenda and to limit the policy options available to Member States of the Community. Finally, the study demonstrates the growing capacity of big business in general to constrain the autonomy of nation-states. Through the creation of business alliances, MNEs increasingly participate in multi-level games to shape the rules, institutions and norms of the global political economy.