Cornelia Woll

Lobbying in the European Union: From sui generis to a comparative perspective

Abstract This article reviews the literature on lobbying in the European Union. After initial surveys of the landscape of non-governmental actor participation, theoretical investigations have focused on the modes of network governance and later on the phenomenon of Europeanization. Yet studies have increasingly moved away from considering EU lobbying as a sui generis phenomenon. Normalizing the study of interest group participation in the EU and understanding the opportunities and constraints that are characteristic for it has led more and more scholars to adopt a comparative perspective. The most interesting parallels exist between Washington and Brussels, but unfortunately there have been very few attempts to explore the connection between the American literature on lobbying and EU studies. This article makes a first step towards such a comparison and points to concepts common in comparative politics that could provide considerable insight into the study of EU lobbying.

Economic patriotism: reinventing control over open markets

We analyse how tensions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates have led to the phenomenon of economic patriotism. As discrimination in favour of insiders, economic patriotism goes beyond economic nationalism and can include territorial allegiances at the supranational or the local level. We show how this prism helps to understand the evolution of political intervention in open economies and present the ambition of this collection.

Saving the Banks The Political Economy of Bailouts

How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business–government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British, and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden-sharing from private institutions.

Lobbying under Pressure: The Effect of Salience on European Union Hedge Fund Regulation†

The virulent European Union hedge fund debate led many observers to suspect a paradigmatic battle between liberal market economies and countries in favour of tighter regulation. By contrast, this article points to the economic interests that drove government agendas. However, national preferences were not defined by the aggregate of a countrys economic interests, but by very specific stakeholders only, despite the existence of opponents with considerable resources. This article argues that the unequal success of financial lobbyists depended on how their demands fitted into the governments overarching negotiation strategy. The primacy of government objectives, in turn, resulted from the high saliency of financial regulation and hedge funds in particular.

National business associations under stress: Lessons from the French case

Since its reform in 1998, the national association of French employers and industry, MEDEF, appears to be an example of strong interest organisation. Unlike trade unions, the peak business organisation has been stable and unified, especially in terms of membership density. Through a study of the collective action of businesses in France, this article sheds doubt on such an impression and argues that the national business association has been put severely under stress in recent years. Like all encompassing associations, MEDEF comprises a great variety of interests and constantly has to manage its internal heterogeneity. An analysis of the historical and institutional context of its recent reform demonstrates that MEDEFs forceful media campaign should not be understood as a display of actual strength and coherence; rather it is the last resort of collective action that the association can claim legitimately as its responsibility.

Politics in the Interest of Capital A Not-So-Organized Combat

In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences.

From National Champions to Global Players? Lobbying by Network Operators During the WTO's Basic Telecommunication Negotiations

Observers generally assume that firms which engage in lobbying know what they want. Business—government relations and especially the corporate political activities of network operators during the basic telecommunication negotiations of the World Trade Organization present a slightly different picture. European monopoly providers benefited from the old international regime and initially ignored trade discussions in their sector. In the course of negotiations, however, they became part of a three-level game, which obliged them to consider national, European, and multilateral objectives simultaneously. In the course of these complex negotiations, their preferences evolved. Because governments advanced independently on the liberalization project, companies adapted their policy stances from reluctance to support for the negotiations. This article thus cautions against treatments of lobbying that consider preferences as exogenously given.

The State: The Bête Noire of Neo-liberalism or its Greatest Conquest?

Neo-liberalism has had one central message for the state: scale back, cut back, cut out, transform. This brings to mind Winston Churchills reply to an opponent who asked, ‘How much is enough?’ to Churchills repeated push to spend increasingly more on defence in the 1930s. Churchills rejoinder came in the form of a story about a Brazilian banker with whom he had just had lunch. The banker had received a cable informing him of the death of his mother-in-law and asking for instructions. He cabled back: ‘embalm, cremate, bury at sea; leave nothing to chance’. This take on neo-liberalism – as burying the state – is certainly exaggerated because neo-liberalism comes in many different forms with many different policy applications. Only the recommendations of the most radical strands come close to the Brazilian bankers response to his mother-in-laws death. Yet the story as a metaphor for neo-liberal views of the state nonetheless somehow rings true. This is largely because neo-liberals have been more anti-state in their rhetoric than in their actions. The state has been neo-liberalism’s bete noire, as its main focus of attack, because neo-liberals – whatever their differences – have viewed the state as consistently doing too much in the wrong ways with the worst consequences not only for the markets but also for democracy, by endangering individual freedom through its interventions. As a provider of public goods, the state had to be scaled back to leave room for the market, which would assure more efficiency. However, the state has also been neo-liberalism’s greatest conquest, as its main locus of action, because it has been primarily through the state that neo-liberals have been able to realize their vision(s).

The Future of International Political Economy: Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Issue of RIPE

An anniversary issue provides an inescapably inviting opportunity to reflect on the past, evaluate the present, and contemplate the future. Eschewing the self-congratulatory rhetoric of traditional anniversary celebrations, we have devoted this 20th anniversary issue of RIPE to contributions that critically examine the academic discipline of international political economy, focusing on our collective challenges and limitations as much as on our achievements. As every author knows, it is the thoughtful, constructive, and above all critical review that ultimately pushes us to produce better scholarly work. The global financial crisis mandates such a reassessment, as did the fall of communism that birthed this journal. [First paragraph] (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World, by Giorgio Riello

The move towards global history is now commonplace in history departments across the world. For scholars of international political economy, it is easy to understand the importance of transcending national boundaries in order to account for the evolution of social and economic relations across centuries. The thematic rather than regional focus of world history helps to reveal dynamics across civilizations that intricately link their evolutions, sometimes even in the absence of political decisions. Commercial relations fall in this category and a series of excellent historical studies examine economic development, social, technological and scientific evolution by focusing on specific commodities such as salt or oil. Cotton by Giorgio Riello, Professor of Global History at the University of Warwick, is an impressive work in this tradition. Riello tells the story of cotton production and trade as much as he tells the story of Asian manufacturing, European industrialization, triangular trade relations and slavery through the lens of cotton. He vigorously argues against schoolbook accounts that attribute key moments of economic development to the decisions of small groups of people in specific locations. Rather he analyzes how the global history of cotton explains change, underlining that it was most often protracted and multidimensional, contrary to the revolutionary vocabulary typically employed in the analysis of capitalism. The global history of cotton covers roughly one thousand years (circa 1000 today) and the book is organized in three parts. A first part focuses on cotton production dominated by South Asia, with India at its core (100