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Bank bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession brought into sharp relief the power that the global financial sector holds over national politics, and provoked widespread public outrage. In The Power of Inaction, Cornelia Woll details the varying relationships between financial institutions and national governments by comparing national bank rescue schemes in the United States and Europe. Woll starts with a broad overview of bank bailouts in more than twenty countries. Using extensive interviews conducted with bankers, lawmakers, and other key players, she then examines three pairs of countries where similar outcomes might be expected: the United States and United Kingdom, France and Germany, Ireland and Denmark. She finds, however, substantial variation within these pairs. In some cases the financial sector is intimately involved in the design of bailout packages; elsewhere it chooses to remain at arm's length.
Such differences are often ascribed to one of two conditions: either the state is strong and can impose terms, or the state is weak and corrupted by industry lobbying. Woll presents a third option, where the inaction of the financial sector critically shapes the design of bailout packages in favor of the industry. She demonstrates that financial institutions were most powerful in those settings where they could avoid a joint response and force national policymakers to deal with banks on a piecemeal basis. The power to remain collectively inactive, she argues, has had important consequences for bailout arrangements and ultimately affected how the public and private sectors have shared the cost burden of these massive policy decisions.
Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive.
Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade.
Comment s'impose l'Europe? Par sa production législative et politique uniquement ou également grâce aux divers usages qui en sont faits? Ce livre s'attache à analyser qui s'implique dans l'intégration européenne, comment et dans quels buts. En mettant en évidence le rôle des acteurs en tant que vecteurs de transformations et en développant la notion d'usages de l'Europe, ce travail collectif entend apporter une perspective supplémentaire à l'agenda des recherches sur l'européanisation et l'impact de l'intégration européenne.
In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences.
Comparing bank rescue schemes in France and Germany during the banking crisis of 2008–9, this article argues that collective inaction is a little-studied aspect in the exercise of power in business–government relations. Contrary to studies that focus on lobbying, structural power or the influence of beliefs, the comparison highlights that governments depend on contributions from the financial industry during crisis management. In the negotiations to design bank support schemes, some countries, such as France, succeeded in engaging their financial sector collectively. Such public–private burden-sharing arrangements alleviate the public budget and increase mutual surveillance between banks during government support. In other countries, such as Germany, a collectively organized industry response failed, which forced the government to design an entirely public support scheme. The German government reacted to this perceived imbalance by imposing tighter banking regulation to avoid a repetition of the impotence it experienced in 2008.
Since its reform in 1998, the national association of French employers and industry, MEDEF, appears to be an example of strong interest organisation. Unlike trade unions, the peak business organisation has been stable and unified, especially in terms of membership density. Through a study of the collective action of businesses in France, this article sheds doubt on such an impression and argues that the national business association has been put severely under stress in recent years. Like all encompassing associations, MEDEF comprises a great variety of interests and constantly has to manage its internal heterogeneity. An analysis of the historical and institutional context of its recent reform demonstrates that MEDEF's forceful media campaign should not be understood as a display of actual strength and coherence; rather it is the last resort of collective action that the association can claim legitimately as its responsibility.
This article reviews the literature on lobbying in the European Union. After initial surveys of the landscape of non-governmental actor participation, theoretical investigations have focused on the modes of network governance and later on the phenomenon of Europeanization. Yet studies have increasingly moved away from considering EU lobbying as a sui generis phenomenon. Normalizing the study of interest group participation in the EU and understanding the opportunities and constraints that are characteristic for it has led more and more scholars to adopt a comparative perspective. The most interesting parallels exist between Washington and Brussels, but unfortunately there have been very few attempts to explore the connection between the American literature on lobbying and EU studies. This article makes a first step towards such a comparison and points to concepts common in comparative politics that could provide considerable insight into the study of EU lobbying.
Depuis sa réforme en 1998, le Mouvement des entreprises de France (Medef) apparaît comme une association puissante et unifiée. En étudiant l’action collective patronale en France, cet article met en doute cette impression. Contrairement aux apparences, l’organisation centrale du patronat français se trouve face à des défis comparables à la désyndicalisation des salariés. En tant que fédération, le Medef est constitué d’une multitude d’intérêts divers et doit gérer cette hétérogénéité interne avant de pouvoir agir politiquement. L’analyse du contexte historique et institutionnel de sa réforme récente montre que la nouvelle stratégie de communication politique du Medef n’atteste pas de la puissance ou de la cohérence de l’organisation ; elle est plutôt le dernier domaine d’action publique que l’association peut assumer pleinement sans perdre sa légitimité aux yeux de ses membres.
This article argues that the role the Commission plays in European foreign policies goes beyond the execution of the competences delegated by the member states. The Commission is not just the external negotiator of the EU, it can also use its powers as the guardian of the Treaties to expand its foreign policy competences. The case study of international air transport illustrates how the Commission was able to obtain an external negotiation mandate in June 2003 to which member states were originally opposed. The analysis draws particular attention to the Commission's reliance on the European Court of Justice and to a cognitive strategy centred on the United States. By means of these two tools, the Commission was able to affect the default condition of member state preferences and reorient the focal point of intergovernmental negotiations.
Pour analyser le rôle joué par la Commission dans les politiques étrangères européennes, nous montrons comment la Commission peut élargir ses compétences en utilisant ses droits en tant que gardienne des traités. L’étude de cas de la politique européenne en matière d’aviation internationale illustre comment la Commission a pu obtenir un mandat de négociation externe que les Etats membres lui avaient auparavant refusé. Pour cela la Commission s’est appuyée sur des recours juridictionnels et a employé une stratégie cognitive qui inscrit la question de l’aviation civile dans la concurrence avec les Etats-Unis. Par ces deux moyens, la Commission a su changer les préférences des Etats membres et réorienter le point focal des négociations intergouvernementales.
This article sheds light on the “Europeanisation” of French policy-making – defined as the national adjustment to European integration – and asks whether different policy domains experience the same kind of pressure to adjust. Four sectors representing different policy types are examined: monetary and budgetary policies, public services, agricultural policy and equal employment. This cross-sectional approach reveals different degrees of change and patterns of adaptation, whilst in no case the EU fully supplanted national decision-making. The authors’ conclusion suggests that regulative and redistributive policies are less conflicting with European integration than distributive policies at the core of the French welfare state, but that the latter are also strongly resilient and resistant to radical changes. Patterns of policy changes are highly complex and diversified, and their “path-dependency” is rooted in the political feasibility of public policy at the domestic level.
The effect of European integration on its member states constitutes the new research agenda within the study of European integration. Marked by the "the institutionalist turn" of Anglo-Saxon political sciences, the most dominant theories on europeanisation focus on structural arrangements. Institutional incompatibility between the European and the national level, so the hypothesis, creates pressures for change. Actors are often only considered as mediators of these pressures. Consequentially, few approaches try to explain adaptational change initiated by policy actors in the absence of institutional pressures. Using a political sociology approach, the central concern of this paper is to insist on the political discretion of national actors in translation of European requirements. We believe that understanding not only "adaptation to" but also "usage of" the process of European integration is important to understanding the transformation of European member states. By insisting on usage, we aim at analysing both the strategic interaction of rational actors with the European institutions and the more sociological effect of "usage" - as "daily practice" - on the interest and identities of the actors.
La politique de concurrence
(2009)
POLITIQUES EUROPEENNES offre une vue d'ensemble du système institutionnel, des acteurs, du jeu politique et des modes d'action de l’Union, à la fois dans les domaines où son intervention est ancienne et dans ceux où son influence est plus récente. Agriculture, monnaie, concurrence, mais aussi commerce, enseignement supérieur, social, environnement ou même politique étrangère : l’influence de l’Europe se fait sentir dans un grand nombre de domaines, et pourtant son action reste largement méconnue. Fruit d’une coopération entre politistes, juristes, économistes et sociologues, tous enseignants à Sciences Po, ce manuel sans équivalent en langue française donne les clés pour mettre en perspective les dynamiques de la construction européenne depuis ses origines et pour comprendre les défis auxquels elle fait face aujourd’hui. Conçu comme un support pour des enseignements d’introduction à l’intégration européenne, il propose un panorama clair et synthétique des politiques européennes et de leur développement. Enrichi de nombreux encadrés, zooms, documents et références bibliographiques, il s’adresse aux étudiants, chercheurs et enseignants des premiers et deuxièmes cycles en science politique, droit, économie, administration publique et administration économique et sociale.
What role do firms play in the making of EU trade policy? This chapter surveys the policy domain and lays out the instruments firms can employ to influence decisions on trade. It underlines that European trade policy is characterized by a high degree of institutional complexity, which firms have to manage in order to be successful. In particular, the European Commission works intensively to solicit business input in order to gain bargaining leverage vis-à-vis third countries and the EU member states. This reverse lobbying creates a two-channel logic of trade policy lobbying in the EU. Corporate actors have a very good chance of working closely with the European Commission if they can propose pan-European trade policy solutions. This can be either trade liberalization or EU-wide regulatory restrictions on trade. Demands for traditional protectionist measures, especially those that reveal national interest divergences, are difficult to defend at the supranational level. Protectionist lobbying therefore goes through the national route, with corporate actors working to block liberalization by affecting the consensus in the Council of Ministers. The chapter illustrates this two-channel logic by studying business–government interactions in agricultural trade, textiles and clothing, financial services, and telecommunication services.
The rise in inequality has been explained with reference to organized groups and the lobbying of the financial sector. This article argues that the image of politics as organized combat is contradicted by empirical evidence on lobbying in the United States, and does not travel well to Europe. The power of finance does not operate through
organized political influence. Rather, politics in the interest of capital unfolds as a structural feature of advanced economies over time. Tellingly, at the height of the financial crisis, one of the most promising strategies of institutions seeking government support
was not organizing for combat, but collective inaction. Our challenge, then, is to explain how the power of finance has built up and is playing out in creating inequality. A more structural, less agency-focused perspective highlights how the rise of finance has been supported by actors that few would accuse of being finance-friendly, such as the European center-left parties and consumers. Reconceptualizing the power of finance has important implications for political solutions to rising inequality.
Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true as well: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the four papers gathered here propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy, and call for broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts, and the sovereign debt crisis, the symposium builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? This paper analyzes comparatively what explains government responses to banking crises. Why does the type of intervention during financial crises vary to such a great extent across countries? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone.
Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business-government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision-makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy-makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks have strong interbank ties and collective negotiation capacity were able to develop solutions with a greater burden sharing from private institutions.
The highly politicized debate about the recent Alternative Investment Fund Manager (AIFM) Directive of the European Union led many observers to suspect an ideological battle between countries seeking to impose transnational regulation on financial service industries such as hedge funds and liberal market economies insisting on the benefits of market discipline in order to protect their financial centers. The battle that appeared to particularly pit France against the United Kingdom can thus be interpreted as an example of a regulatory paradigm shift in the aftermath of the crisis. This article cautions against such an ideas-centered account of financial regulation and points to the economic interests that drove the French and German agendas. However, contrary to the assumptions of traditional political economy approaches, national preferences were not simply defined by the aggregate of a country’s economic interests. Rather, industry success in shaping government positions on alternative investment regulation crucially depended on how a given industry fit into the government’s
overarching geo-political agenda. By highlighting this feedback loop between government strategy and industry lobbying, the paper proposes a strategic analysis of financial regulation, as opposed to accounts that consider positions to be pre-determined by ideas or socioeconomic structures.
Cet article s'intéresse à l'influence de la sociologie dans l'analyse de l'action publique européenne. Nous revenons notamment sur la notion "d'usage" que nous avons développée auparavant et plaidons pour une prise en compte plus systématique de l'action stratégique dans l'analyse des transformations européennes. Nous analysons les évolutions récentes des études européennes vers une prise en compte plus systématique de l'imbrication sociale des acteurs, ce qui permet d'étudier leur rationalité sans tomber dans certains pièges des approches du choix rationnel trop réductrices. L'analyse de l'action intentionnée permet de mettre en lumière trois dimensions spécifiques des transformations européennes : (1) les processus non contraignants et informels, (2) les effets de la circulation des acteurs entre les différents niveaux du système européen, et (3) l’importance des coalitions ambiguës et parfois inattendues qui se forment, souvent malgré des divergences profondes sur les objectifs à atteindre.
Business–government relations on trade issues are generally characterized as protectionist lobbying or – less often – lobbying for the liberalization of markets. However, with the evolution of the trading system, negotiations today concern not just market opening, but also the regulatory frameworks that structure international trade. This transformation has important consequences for the ways in which private interests can contribute to trade negotiations. Instead of simply trying to exert pressure, businesses and other private actors now form working relationships with governments based on expertise, learning, and information exchange. This article illustrates these new forms of public–private interactions with examples from the USA, the European Union, and Brazil.
Observers generally assume that firms which engage in lobbying know what they want. Business—government relations and especially the corporate political activities of network operators during the basic telecommunication negotiations of the World Trade Organization present a slightly different picture. European monopoly providers benefited from the old international regime and initially ignored trade discussions in their sector. In the course of negotiations, however, they became part of a three-level game, which obliged them to consider national, European, and multilateral objectives simultaneously. In the course of these complex negotiations, their preferences evolved. Because governments advanced independently on the liberalization project, companies adapted their policy stances from reluctance to support for the negotiations. This article thus cautions against treatments of lobbying that consider preferences as exogenously given.
Studies of lobbying try to determine the influence and power of non-governmental actors on public policy. Although influence is very difficult to measure empirically, many continue to push for better research design to solve the problem. Through case studies of business-government relations in the United States and the European Union, this article argues that the difficulties with power and influence concern not only their operationalisation, but they also reflect conceptual confusions. Trying to determine the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of a policy issue can be misleading, since power also structures apparently harmonious exchange relationships. The perceived success of business lobbying in the cases studied depended on the governments' receptiveness to their demands, which in turn depended on strategic advantages they saw for themselves in international negotiations. Even when business appears to lead the dance, it is more promising to look at resource distribution and the interdependence of both sides, instead of assuming the domination of business power over policy outcomes.
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business–government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British, and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden-sharing from private institutions.
The financial crisis revealed the vulnerability of states with financialized economies, but also the extraordinary measures they had recourse to in order to reign in market forces. This chapter argues that this paradox is based on another contradiction: the ambiguity of government–finance relations. While financial institutions are considered to be the culprits of the recent crisis, they were also necessary to support government action and enable a quick recovery. Undoing the ties between banks and states is thus not only a response to conflicts of interests. Uncoupling banks from states through European financial integration also contains risks for future crisis management.
The chapter shows how European internal market regulation expanded and was transformed from a limited and often non-binding set of policies to an integrated and wide-ranging framework. Incremental but profound change was possible because critical junctures, in particular judgments by the European Court of Justice, allowed the European Commission and its allies to advance new policy proposals with new default positions. This affected the preferences of major member states, created new coalitions, and also led to the emergence of new actors. Feedback loops reinforced the orientation of previous agreements and created changes that most observers would have qualified as impossible three or four decades earlier.
The future of international political economy: Introduction to the 20th anniversary issue of RIPE
(2013)
Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true, too: deep moral–political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources and the design of policy devices. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the short papers presented here by Philippe Steiner, Cornelia Woll, Wolfgang Streeck and Marion Fourcade propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy and call for a broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts and the sovereign debt crisis, the discussion forum builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
The virulent European Union hedge fund debate led many observers to suspect a paradigmatic battle between liberal market economies and countries in favour of tighter regulation. By contrast, this article points to the economic interests that drove government agendas. However, national preferences were not defined by the aggregate of a country's economic interests, but by very specific stakeholders only, despite the existence of opponents with considerable resources. This article argues that the unequal success of financial lobbyists depended on how their demands fitted into the government's overarching negotiation strategy. The primacy of government objectives, in turn, resulted from the high saliency of financial regulation and hedge funds in particular.
How can we explain an international agreement that appears to run counter to the declared objectives of one of the key players? This article examines the US–EU Open Skies agreement signed in 2007 and asks why Europeans accepted the agreement after having rejected a comparable version three years earlier. Theoretical approaches that explain time inconsistency in international negotiations tend to focus on reasons why states can be constrained to accept suboptimal solutions. In multi-level bargaining, principal–agent and bureaucratization theories focus on loss of control and constructivists suggest that governments can become trapped in rhetoric. This article shows that paradoxical agreements can be voluntary and explains them by showing the rationale behind multi-games that include ambiguity about the future. In particular, increasing the flexibility of the agreement allowed negotiators to escape present-day constituent pressures by remaining ambiguous and betting on shifting coalitions.
Lobbying on both sides of the Atlantic has experienced a considerable boom in the last 50 years and one could be led to believe that the two industries look increasingly alike. Lobbyists have become highly professionalized and master a multitude of venues and levels of political authority. Direct representation of companies or other stakeholders co-exists with associational representation in both Washington DC and Brussels, even though peak associations play a greater role in Europe. The use of some instruments is different, however, in particular financial contributions and legal tactics, which are central in the United States (US) and much less common in the European Union (EU). What is more, observers of lobbying in the US and the EU have noted the markedly different lobbying styles: frequently aggressive advocacy approach in the US and a more consensus-oriented informational lobbying in the EU. While US groups and lobbyists oftentimes defend their immediate interest by trying to exert pressure on public officials, EU representatives seem to be more soft-spoken in their approach and are said to work in a more constructive manner with bureaucratic and political representatives. After developing a description of what makes up the respective styles, this article discusses cultural and institutional explanations cited in the literature. Rather than seeing lobbying styles as culture traits, it discusses the institutional constraints affecting lobbying behavior. In particular, the passage rate of proposals, the fragmentation of public media, the electoral structure and the transparency of political negotiations create different incentive structures in the US and the EU. However, lobbying styles are more than the cumulative effect of these different elements. They are linked to the nature of the political system, of which the institutional constraints are a reflection. The US, a fully established federal system, relies on majority decision-making. This creates an adversarial culture and ‘winner-takes-all-politics’. The EU, by contrast, functions as a complex inter-governmental system with a high degree of supranational centralization. The resulting tension between integration and inter-state bargaining creates a system that relies on consensus-building. In this context, the access of private actors to supranational institutions depends on their contribution to the creation of problem-solving policy approaches. As long as the EU has to rely on the acceptance of its policy outputs for its legitimacy, we are bound to find many individual mechanisms that will trigger a more soft-spoken lobbying style in the EU. The differences between the US and the EU styles will thus appear as instances of a particular political culture, even though they are based on a range of institutional mechanisms, which are in turn a consequence of the construction of the respective political system. In conclusion, the article discusses the implications of this distinction for understanding change over time.
We analyse how tensions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates have led to the phenomenon of economic patriotism. As discrimination in favour of insiders, economic patriotism goes beyond economic nationalism and can include territorial allegiances at the supranational or the local level. We show how this prism helps to understand the evolution of political intervention in open economies and present the ambition of this collection.
Why did the services directive proposed by Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein lead to such virulent reactions in France? This article examines several potential explanations focusing on political economy, public opinion and the timing of events. While all of these elements contribute to the difficult political context, they are insufficient to explain the importance of the backlash against the directive in France. We therefore focus on party politics and argue that political elites had an interest in exploiting the directive in the context of a leadership crisis within the French socialist party. The case study bears lessons about the domestic potency of European policy issues: they can pose a real challenge to centrist parties, which have insufficiently addressed them in their party platforms.
This article examines the importance of action-theoretical considerations in European studies. By outlining the notion of ‘usage’ of the European Union, we argue for a more systematically sociological consideration of strategic action in the study of European transformations. The recent turns towards constructivism and comparative political sociology allow analyzing the rationality of political actors without falling in the trap of overly reductionist rational choice assumptions. Concentrating on intentional action helps to reveal the importance of three aspects of the multi-level polity: (1) informal and non-constraining procedures; (2) the effects of ways in which actors move in between the different levels of the European political system; and (3) the ambiguous and often surprising coalitions that come together despite often considerable disagreement over their final goals.
Neo-liberalism has had one central message for the state: scale back, cut back, cut out, transform. This brings to mind Winston Churchill's reply to an opponent who asked, ‘How much is enough?’ to Churchill's repeated push to spend increasingly more on defence in the 1930s. Churchill's rejoinder came in the form of a story about a Brazilian banker with whom he had just had lunch. The banker had received a cable informing him of the death of his mother-in-law and asking for instructions. He cabled back: ‘embalm, cremate, bury at sea; leave nothing to chance’.
This take on neo-liberalism – as burying the state – is certainly exaggerated because neo-liberalism comes in many different forms with many different policy applications. Only the recommendations of the most radical strands come close to the Brazilian banker's response to his mother-in-law's death. Yet the story as a metaphor for neo-liberal views of the state nonetheless somehow rings true. This is largely because neo-liberals have been more anti-state in their rhetoric than in their actions.
The state has been neo-liberalism’s bête noire, as its main focus of attack, because neo-liberals – whatever their differences – have viewed the state as consistently doing too much in the wrong ways with the worst consequences not only for the markets but also for democracy, by endangering individual freedom through its interventions. As a provider of public goods, the state had to be scaled back to leave room for the market, which would assure more efficiency. However, the state has also been neo-liberalism’s greatest conquest, as its main locus of action, because it has been primarily through the state that neo-liberals have been able to realize their vision(s).
This chapter examines business lobbying at the WTO. It argues that the role of companies in multilateral trade is tightly linked to the evolution of the trading system, with the most decisive influence during the creation of the WTO institutions. In an initial phase, business lobbying concentrated on tariff barriers. As the GATT expanded its scope during the Uruguay Round, large US companies became very active participants and crucially shaped the agenda, in particular with respect to service trade and intellectual property rights. In other areas, however, active lobbying was less effective, most notably investment protection and textiles. With the establishment of the WTO, lobbying has begun to partially shift to the supranational level. Some relationships exist between the WTO secretariat and companies, but the most important new pillar of political activity relates to dispute settlement. At the same time, the WTO secretariat tries to reach out to a more diverse set of stakeholders. In many ways, the influence of global companies on WTO affairs is much more indirect today than it was during its creation.
In the late twentieth century, the rise of neo-liberal economics appeared to some to signal the withdrawal of the nation state from key areas of economic life in the industrialized world. However, this was always an illusion. The recent financial crisis has demonstrated clearly that states remain the actor of last resort when the business system begins to collapse. International efforts at coordination have been dwarfed by the fiscal policies of states to stimulate their economies. These revival efforts reveal the underlying differences which remain between states and how economic policy-making in crisis responds most directly to threats to the national system. This chapter examines these processes and how they can be combined with continued commitment to a neo-liberal global order and efforts at global coordination.
Abstract : Many observers agree that the multilateral liberalization of service trade was a response to the intense lobbying efforts of financial service companies. In contrast, many of the firms that were affected by the General Agreement on the Trade of Services did not know where their interests lay in the multilateral negotiations and only began to work with their governments very late in the process. This paper shows that the preference evolution of service companies - both the first movers and the late comers - cannot be explained with reference to material rationality only. As a radically new trade issue, service trade was a realm of great uncertainty for business and they relied on social devices rather than pure economic calculations to determine how to position themselves on liberalization. In times of uncertainty, the differential logic of social embeddedness and the institutional constraints of a firm's national setting are therefore a more appropriate indicator for business demands than material incentives arising from the global economy.
The legal order is the legitimate foundation of liberal democracy. Its incomplete enforcement of the law can therefore appear dysfunctional, reflecting weak institutions, state capture, and corrupt practices. This paper casts doubt on such categorical assessments by systematically examining the reasons for and intentions behind incomplete enforcement. It argues that law enforcement is part of the political process that is deeply affected by the constellation of actors concerned. Choices over law enforcement produce social order that is analytically distinct from the production of legal norms and their formal implementation. By analyzing different types of partial enforcement, its rationales, and intended effects, we propose an approach that studies law enforcement as an integral part of public policy analysis and of the study of socioeconomic orders.
When Ursula von der Leyen spoke about a “Geopolitical Commission” when she took office in 2019, the disruption brought about by the year 2020 could not quite be predicted.
Faced with the world’s upheavals, caught up in between Sino-American rivalry, it is essential to assess and question the Union’s position in the world and its perspectives for the future. At the heart of this endeavour is a debate on the meaning of European strategic autonomy.
As part of the Groupe d’études géopolitiques’ publications, following a major interview with the French President and a long analysis written by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, we have asked some twenty scholars, observers and experts from multiple horizons, nationalities and fields of expertise to position themselves on a scale from 0 (“the EU has become less strategically autonomous”) to 5 (“the EU has become more strategically autonomous”), explaining their mark with a short text
A Rejoinder by the Author
(2016)
Large companies are increasingly on trial. Over the last decade, many of the world’s biggest firms have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption charges, financial fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues or sanction violations, ending in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines, well above the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalization, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome sea-change showing that multinational companies are no longer above the law. For legal experts, the trend is noteworthy because of the extraterritorial dimensions of law enforcement, as companies are increasingly held accountable for activities independent of their nationality or the place of the activities. Indeed, the global trend required understanding the evolution of corporate criminal law enforcement in the United States in particular, where authorities have skillfully expanded its effective jurisdiction beyond its territory. This paper traces the evolution of corporate prosecutions in the United States. Analyzing federal prosecution data, it then shows that foreign firms are more likely to pay a fine, which is on average 6,6 times larger.
Usages et travail politiques : une sociologie compréhensive des usages de l’intégration européenne
(2004)
Conclusion
(2004)