Moveable Feast: Pressure Group Conflict and the European Community Shipping Policy(Perspectives on Europe S.)

This book is about the development of EC shipping policy in the mid to late 1980s, and the extent to which it squares with traditional theories of regional integration. It notes how the conflicting pressures of national priorities, regional competence-building, and the global political economy affect European shipping, and in doing so, reaches two main conclusions. The first is that the pace and scope of policy integration in certain fields is determined by mobile capital. Member states and Community institutions face systemic constraints in agreeing to social, fiscal and other policies that add costs to business and that may be avoided through disinvestment. The second suggests a series of factors that lie behind formation of peak-level lobbying associations. The study illuminates the submergence of inter-state cleavages beneath inter-group conflict, and shows how new fractures appearing at the European level between social groups may be caused by identifiable global and regional features of the political economy.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Shipping, global investment and regional integration: international shipping in perspective - markets and rules; greener pastures - global shipping regimes as exit destinations; exit, "sotto voce", and power - shipping as the apotheosis of mobile capital; flag neutrality - competition policy and the absence of exit. Part 2 Globalism, regionalism and political interests: integration and the political role of interest; globalism and regional co-operation; conceptual approaches to integration after the Single European Act; capital mobility and private exit; domestic polity or inter-state competition - what sort of system?; regional actors and motivations. Part 3 Collective decline and common response in European shipping: markets and policies in member states; the results of collective decline; toward a common shipping policy. Part 4 Phase 1 of the common shipping policy: the external dimension; elite reactions to the 1985 paper; the response of the Community institutions; the outcome of the negotiational variables and agents - explaining Phase 1. Part 5 Phase 2 of the common shipping policy: building an internal dimension?; splitting the difference - strategy and reaction; the response of Community institutions; variables and agents - explaining Phase 2. Part 6 Conclusions: the 1986 package; the 1989 proposals; the role of actors; new fractures and a wider political system.