"Setting Standards for the Single European Market: Multinational Corporations and European Standards Organizations, 1957-1992"

The Single Market has been the backbone of the European integration project since the Treaty of Rome (1957). That the majority of scholarship on the European Union has analyzed progress toward the Single Market from the level of high politics, focusing on the role of nation states and policymakers in the elimination of tariffs and legal harmonization, leaves a significant gap in understanding the much larger process by which goods, services, capital, and labor became able to move freely across member state borders. This paper analyzes the process of standardization required to transform the customs union of the 1950s into the Single Market of the 1990s and examines the non-state, private-sector actors involved in each of three typologies of regional standardization. By focusing specifically on the influence of multinational corporations (MNCs) on the issuance of formal regional standards by the European Standardization Organizations – CEN and CENELEC, and ETSI – many of which entered Commission legislation, this paper finds that big business played a central role in developing norms for common regional specifications and measures, production and labor processes, safety and environmental standards. By so doing, MNCs shaped the Single Market and influenced the political economy of the region. By repositioning big business at the center of the integration process, this paper contributes a new dimension to integration scholarship and expands the purview of business history from the individual European corporation to the formation of the European Union.