Conclusion: Governance and Market‐Building

Abstract

The conclusion summarizes the difficulties of achieving some form of accommodation between the interests of government, business, and society in constructing a single integrated market. The politics of market building is often a contentious process about the best ways to reconcile regulation and free trade. This involves not only the allocation of authority between different levels of government but also an acknowledgement that the corporate strategies are a major determinant of the nature and direction of European market integration. Using private actors for public purposes, the EU has delegated certain regulatory functions to European standards bodies as a substitute for direct government action. Comparisons with the construction of the American single market reveal a counterpart in the European Union, as both legal and regulatory intervention have been crucial in removing persistent obstacles to trade, and institutional arrangements have involved the strategic use of the private sector to integrate ‘uncommon’ markets.

Big Third-Party Certifiers and the Construction of Transnational Regulation

“…This aspect—the requirement that producers in certain “sensitive” sectors employ third-parties to assess compliance with essential safety requirements (by testing and inspecting products or production)—was another source of conflict among member states in the 1980s. Some member states would not recognize the competence of third-party bodies from other member states, which resulted in producers having to submit their products for a new set of tests and inspections every time they wished to sell in a “new” country, which simply displaced the original conflicts between member states (Egan 2001, 126). This secondary problem gave rise to a complex construct for independent third-party certification, set out in the so-called Global Approach (Galland 2013).…”

Les arènes de la normalisation internationale à l’épreuve de la participation : le projet INTERNORM

“…D'autre part, l'objectif d'éliminer les obstacles « non-nécessaires » au commerce engage à remplacer les normes établies dans le seul cadre national par les normes internationales existantes. 2 Au niveau régional, c'est en Europe que le partage des compétences entre pouvoirs publics et organisations de normalisation a été instauré le plus clairement (Egan, 2001). D'une part, il existe des organisations de normalisation régionale, tel que le Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN).…”

The Political Standardizer

“…In this vein, some authors point to the need to invent deliberative mechanisms for “publicly responsible self-regulation” (Joerges, Vos, & Schepel, 1999, p. 27). Others instead point at the need for stricter control of competencies delegated to the technical standardization bodies (Egan, 1998; Egan, 2001).…”