European Commerce Against European Policy: Retail Associations and the Social Dimensions of the Single Market Program
The European Community’s Single Market Program, launched in 1985 with the plan of completing a
regional internal market by 1992, promised firms economies of scale, access to a large consumer
market, and initiatives to support the regionalization of business. But as the European Commission
under Jacques Delors introduced consumer, labor, and environmental protection policies for the
market in the late 1980s and early 1990s, European retailers perceived more constraints than
advantages. In fact, they argued that such social market policies betrayed the original objectives of the
1992 Program. This paper historicizes the efforts of European retailers to establish business interest
associations for the purposes of exchanging information about regional policymaking and exerting
collective influence on the Commission’s draft legislation. It also uncovers the ways retailers formed
regional buyers’ clubs to maximize their margins and insulate their businesses from the constraints the
internal market might impose. As a result, this paper finds that European commerce, one of the sectors
most fragmented along national lines in the early-1980s, had, however inadvertently, become
politically and operationally regionalized by the 1990s.
