Enterprise and Integration: Big Business and the Making of the Single European Market (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
Europe’s Single Market Program, launched in 1985 and completed in 1992, was an unprecedented project of international political economy. It equally promised a recovery from the crises of the 1970s, a reassertion of Europe’s economic power in the face of rising global competition, and a fulfillment of the promise of “ever closer union” member states made in Rome in 1957. While the framework of the 1992 Program to complete the internal market was the result of grand bargains and intergovernmental compromises, businesses were both central to the market’s design and essential to its achievement. Enterprise and Integration: Big Business and the Making of the Single European Market (under contract with Cambridge University Press) reconstructs regional market integration through the lens of multinational corporations. It uncovers the role of European companies and business interest associations in shaping the contours of the Single Market and in repositioning Europe in the global economy, especially amid the opening of Eastern Europe and the increasingly political dimensions of economic and monetary union. Drawing evidence from corporate and international institution archives in six countries as well as oral history interviews with prominent executives and policymakers, it finds in the strategies of European companies the original successes and shortcomings of the market, which remains the cornerstone of the European Union and its single currency. This granular approach enables the book to challenge conventional narratives about the relationship between globalization and regionalization and intervene in ongoing debates about neoliberal vs. social Europe. As a result, Enterprise and Integration contributes an economic and business history of contemporary Europe and its place in the world.