Papers presented by Grace Ballor since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Multinationals and Labor in the Single European Market"

Abstract:

In the late 1980s, the European Commission began to implement social and labor protections and programs to bolster the European labor market as part of its new European Social Charter towards a Social Single Market. How did multinationals respond? This paper examines the reactions of European multinational manufacturers and retailers to these new social protections and how their responses, in turn, shaped labor in the Single Market.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Ruling the Natural World: The Political Economy of Standards and Natural Resources"

Abstract:

Standards are among the most powerful tools of political economy. Norms and technical specifications define commodities, delimit market access, and determine winners and losers – equally reflections of industry and its regulation. This chapter argues that standards also transformed the natural world into an industrialized one of global supply chains, global institutions, and global hierarchies. By tracing the development of standards for natural resources from fossil fuels in the nineteenth century to rare earths in the twenty-first, it historicizes the role of standards in international political economy and engages with criticism of standards as blunt instruments of the anthropocene.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"European Commerce Against European Policy: Retail Associations and the Social Dimensions of the Single Market Program"

Abstract:

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.

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2022 Mexico City

"Infrastructure and Integration: How Europe’s Two Largest Oil Pipelines Shaped the Cold War Economy"

Abstract:

In the late 1950s, the European continent caught in the crosshairs of the Cold War, was further divided by the inauguration of two petroleum pipeline projects. The United States-backed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) built the Central Europe Pipeline System (CEPS), a gasoline network spanning France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany; meanwhile, the Soviet-backed Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) announced plans to assemble the Druzhba Pipeline, a transcontinental artery designed to link oilfields in Russia to refineries in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany. These two massive pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure reshaped the Cold War economy in the twentieth century. CEPS cut through traditional trade barriers, moving fuel across five host countries unimpeded by tax or customs charges. Druzhba likewise carried “red oil” to the edge of the Iron Curtain, prompting NATO to impose ill-fated embargoes on an array of non-military equipment to the Soviet Bloc. What is more, both pipelines outlasted the conflict for which they were built: today, CEPS supplies jet fuel to some of Europe’s largest civilian airports, while Druzhba serves as the backbone of its thoroughly profit-based East-West oil trade. Against the backdrop of current debates over Nord Stream 2, a recently completed natural gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, this paper explores the ways fixed energy pipelines have historically shaped business relations between host and user countries. Drawing on underutilized material from NATO and Russian archives, it argues CEPS and Druzhba both contributed to complex forms of economic integration within their respective blocs, although in ways much different than those their creators had intended. By comparing and contrasting the evolution of two of Europe’s most significant energy projects and their economic effects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this paper offers new perspectives on the economic legacy of the Cold War and on infrastructure as a dynamic factor in shaping global markets.

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

"Accelerating Environmentalism or Racing to the Bottom? Automakers, Emissions Standards, and the Single European Car Market, 1985-1992"

Abstract:

This paper traces the development of the European Community’s common car emissions standards within the context of the 1992 Program to complete the Single Market. It draws evidence from archival documents of European institutions as well as from position papers by industry groups to analyze exchanges between policymakers and business elites, who similarly desired collective “European solutions,” but for very different reasons. The Commission saw emissions standards as essential to creating a common car market in the region and protecting consumers; the European auto industry, represented by its transnational business associations, recognized that common norms would facilitate economies of scale and would also level the competitive playing field. After the 1985 Single European Act (SEA) changed both the architecture of intergovernmentalism and the objectives of market integration, the new dynamics of consensus demanded bargains between member states and firms on both ends of the environmental spectrum, which ultimately coalesced around harmonization rather than around environmental protections. This paper argues that the emissions standards developed by the EC during this period were driven by exogenous competitive pressure and an endogenous desire for market integration. As a result, the standards that finally entered into force in the early 1990s fell pragmatically in between the greenest member states and those most resistant to enforcing environmental protections on their ‘national champion’ firms.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

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

Abstract:

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.

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