Sigfrido Ramirez Perez

The European Committee for Economic and Social Progress: Business Networks between Atlantic and European Communities

Political scientists usually assume that European business began to influence policy-making in a major way only with the Single Market Programme of the 1980s.1 However, many of the formal and informal networks that were active then, like the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), resulted from long-standing transnational contacts that developed over several decades in post-war European integration and transatlantic relations.2 From shortly after the war, leading managers operating in multinational companies – in particular within the automobile industry – were among the major private actors directly involved in the crucial milestones of European integration, such as the European Recovery Programme, also known as the Marshall Plan, the Schuman Plan3 and the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC).4 These automobile managers were also major initiators of European business networks, which they institutionalized in the form of private associations with the explicit aim of influencing policy-making not just to protect the interest of their own companies,5 but also to shape the process of European integration. Neo-functionalists studying the role of such transnational business networks in the early periods of integration put too much emphasis on the degree of the networks’ formal integration.