Why Did Europe Develop More "Single" Market Governance than America?

• In Event: Governing without Max Weber: Legal, Security, and Single-Market Power in the EU

Abstract

The European Union resembles federal states like the United States, Canada, or Australia in deriving much of its authority from a “single market” project. However, most social-science theories lead us to expect that an international organization could not exert as much authority as federal states do over their internal markets. This expectation is supported by widespread empirical portrayals of the E.U. single market as an “incomplete” imitation of an American model. We show that the common wisdom mischaracterizes both sides of this comparison. Europeans have removed many interstate barriers that Americans retain, due to EU single-market rules that are unambiguously stronger and more systematic than those inside the U.S. These redescribed outcomes confound leading theoretical explanations in political economy, and we offer a new explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the rising movement of neoliberalism connected to different political coalitions in each arena. European neoliberals struck deals with Europeanist institution-builders, while American neoliberals allied with champions of “states’ rights.” These coalitions generated institutional path dependence and ideational “knowledge regimes,” editing continental European neoliberalism to prioritize central authority to eliminate interstate barriers, while American neoliberalism sought weaker federal authority and legitimated many of the same barriers.

Authors

• Matthias Matthijs, Johns Hopkins University

• Craig A. Parsons, University of Oregon

• Benedikt Springer, University Of Oregon