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

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.