"Exploring the Motivations for Transnational Business Associations: The Case of Europe"

This paper questions existing explanations of the existence of European business federations. Conventionally, economic historians have emphasised the role of cartels while political scientists have focussed on lobbying of EEC/EU institutions. Both are at best partial explanations and there has been a tendency to underplay the role of information exchange, it is argued here. The paper draws on a dataset of European business federations (federations of national business associations) based on listings in two sources: the annual Yearbook of International Organizations and an occasional publication by the European Commission, the Répertoire des organisme communs, which later became the CONECCS database. Using this data allows us to question the chronology and geography of these European business federations as set out in the existing literature and, hence, the underlying assumptions of the motives for the creation and maintenance of these organisations and, ultimately, Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action (1965).
It is suggested that there is evidence, often presented in the existing literature but then either ignored or downplayed, that supports an alternative explanation around the importance of ‘soft’ information and its exchange or sharing among the members of these organisations. Moreover, this fits with a different strand of theoretical explanations of collective action in which such organisations can be viewed as arenas of trust-building and reciprocity. This approach can be found in the work of Elinor Ostrom (A Poteete, M Janssen and E Ostrom Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (2010), Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (2011)) amongst others.