Belen Balanya, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma'anit and Erik Wesselius: Europe Inc: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power.

Belen Balanya, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma'anit and Erik Wesselius Europe Inc: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power Pluto Press, 2003, pp. 272 ISBN 0-745-32163-1 (pbk) 15 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-745-32164-X (hbk) 45 [pounds sterling]

With this book, the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)--a campaign group based in Amsterdam--has produced an expose of the increasing influence of corporate power upon contemporary policy-making and political processes at supra-national levels. Focusing on the activities of the corporate lobby groups and of PR agencies, Europe Inc. shows how their agenda of neoliberal globalisation has powered a dangerous dynamic that actively threatens democratic decision-making, environmental sustainability and the social fabric of many societies. Of equal interest to the CEO are the forces of resistance emerging in opposition to the corporate agenda. We should pay tribute initially to the CEO's disclosure of corporate power's growing political influence. Europe Inc. contains detailed discussions of different corporate groupings and their impact on various international organisations, with a range of case studies illustrating the precise tactics that these 'bourgeois societies' have used in given policy areas. Equally valuable is the compilation of anti-globalisation campaign groups and resources, websites and contact points found in the book's appendix. And as a visit to its website makes clear, the investigative work of the CEO is clearly ongoing. At root, the story this book tells is a simple one, told with admirable clarity. The CEO is not concerned here with any theoretical reflection upon its approach, nor in situating its specificity in relation to rival accounts of international policymaking. It is more of a 'hidden history' expose--investigative journalism writ large, as it were. One point is worth making, though. Many on the Left in the 1980s and beyond were insistent that politics and its outcomes were irreducible to 'the economic', illustrating this within the contexts of particular nation states. What the CEO shows us is that simultaneously, but at a higher geographical level, the bourgeoisie was prosecuting 'class struggle from above' precisely by all-too-successfully pressing its economic demands and interests upon policymaking bodies. In other words, this is a demonstration of the exercise of naked class power outside the spheres of parliamentary democracy and popular consent: an anti-democratic process repeatedly uncovered, going on 'behind the scenes', away from public scrutiny in the opaque 'trading rooms' of the EU, WTO, UN et al. To bring this political threat to public awareness is therefore one of the major aims of the CEO'S work. The main focus of its investigations is the growing influence of corporate power on the EU. There are certain deep-rooted factors involved here. The growing economic power of transnational corporations (TNCs), the anti-democratic internal structure of the EU itself, and a clear shift in the perspective of EU leaders towards TNCs are all identified as relevant causes. The substantial transfer of powers away from member states as the EO extends its reach over their social and economic affairs has encouraged this drift further. Correspondingly, the CEO finds an explosion of corporate lobbying in the EU, designed to influence the dynamics of EU expansion and unification according to a well-defined, neoliberal agenda. This new industry involves a range of corporate groupings, a burgeoning PR sector, and new think tanks, all working towards a capitalist future for the continent. The CEO offers well defined portraits of a number of these groups, first among equals being the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), a major force in European politics since the late-1980s, although hitherto under-reported. Like its sibling organisations, the ERT agenda for Europe centres on the free-market provision of all goods and services, international competitiveness as the baseline for policy-making, minimal influence for national governments, and the exclusion of social and environmental protection. This free-market, free-trade framework is a direct assault on the economic, welfare and representative functions of the nation state, centralising economic and political power in the hands of TNCs and the EU. As for the ERT itself, this society of major European capitalists has steadily worked towards the creation and extension of a single unified European market since its establishment in the 1980S, acting as a driving force behind most major policy initiatives in Europe. The ERT'S proposals to eliminate trade barriers and fiscal frontiers and to harmonise regulations were adopted as early as 1986, in the Single European Act. Since then, the group has pushed for and successfully achieved the introduction of a single currency, and the embedding of international competitiveness at the heart of EU policy-making--as seen in the increasing liberalisation of goods and services provision (for example, in the fields of telecommunications, energy, transport, biotechnology and postal services). As the CEO says, this all adds up to a sweeping neoliberal restructuring of European societies. ERT demands that the EU be enlarged and the economies of eastern Europe integrated have also been addressed, vastly increasing the size of the European market and labour force for the profitable benefit of its corporate membership. In pursuing these goals, the ERT has worked both through direct contact with top EU officials and in an advisory capacity on bodies populated by its subsidiary organs (such as the Association for Monetary Union in Europe). Beyond Europe, the CEO documents a parallel shift in the dynamics of international decisionmaking. Here, another layer of corporate lobby groups is found pressing the same neoliberal agenda upon the global economy, actively supported by the EU itself, within bodies such as the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations. The role of the EU here has been primarily one of establishing a joint approach with the USA in creating a 'transatlantic free market'--the prototype for a drastic reordering of the rest of the global economy along neoliberal lines, enforced particularly through the expanding tentacles of the WTO. The proposals cover familiar territory: the removal of all barriers to trade and investment (including any health and environmental safeguards); the establishment of universally valid regulations and standards, set at the lowest possible level, across the free-trade zone; the liberalisation of services, agriculture, biotechnology and government procurement; and the establishment of 'intellectual property rights'.

The Transatlantic Economic Partnership set up by the EU and the us is one institutional expression of this strategy. More powerful still is the WTO, whose successive rounds of trade negotiations, shaped by Western corporate interests and the EU, have 'locked in' increasing areas of the globe within the neoliberal framework. Through a series of agreements covering service provision, investment decisions and property rights, the WTO is securing corporate control over the developing world and reshaping its social and environmental landscapes in accordance with free-market dogma. The global reach of corporate power has not stopped there. The CEO also discusses the changing role of the United Nations, now increasingly an ally of global business, and the formidable lobbying efforts that have gained access for groups like the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to UN official programmes. The resulting joint ventures to 'improve' foreign direct investment flows and integrate more of the world's population into the global market economy are recasting the free market as the 'solution' to world poverty, rather than it being seen as a contributory factor of it. Even more alarming has been the corporate response to the environmental agenda, and its hijacking of international debates over sustainable development and climate change. Here, new lobby groups such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Global Climate Coalition have been created with the express purpose of placing business needs at the heart of environmental debates--their members being, of course, some of the world's worst polluters. In an era of Earth Summits and growing scientific concern over climate change, the corporate lobbyists have worked hard to install market-based solutions as the appropriate strategies--favouring 'carbon emissions trading' and 'technology transfers' in place of binding limits on greenhouse gas/CO2 emissions, which would threaten continuing capitalist production and profitability. Its success here has, says the CEO, effectively prevented any meaningful advances and let the major corporate polluters 'off the hook'. So emboldened, the corporate environmental lobby is now proposing a return to nuclear power as the key to a sustainable future. So in the face of the global capitalist juggernaut, what does the CEO suggest is to be done? I think this brings us to the weakest aspect of the book: a set of strategic recommendations that fall far short of achieving the 'roll back of corporate power' that they and the wider anti-globalisation movement are aiming for. The authors' strongest argument concerns the emergence of new forms of resistance and communication in the face of the internationalisation of decision-making. Contemporary campaigns against GM food, WTO agricultural policies and global investment strategies, launched around the world, offer the prospect of effectively challenging corporate power. In particular, they see the successful movement against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the late-1990s as indicative of a new form of internationalised struggle, uniting many different groups of actors in disparate geographical settings via the coordinating potential of the internet. Here, us and Canadian NGOS' discovery of hitherto secret OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) negotiations on MAI was rapidly posted on the internet, sparking off a mass of oppositional campaigns in different countries, including lobbying of national governments, public educational strategies, demonstrations and international NGO strategy meetings. Now it is true, as the CEO says, that this campaign derailed the OECD proposals. Equally true, as they acknowledge, is that the corporate campaign for unfettered investment by transnational corporations continued in other international forums (such as the WTO). Which brings us to the nub of the argument. Is this new strategy of international protest sufficient to reclaim our rights, lives and communities, as the CEO suggests? Or do its internal diversity, diffuseness and e-struggles eventually falter through a lack of any central organising force--a force once embedded within the political party? And further, what 'decisive structural powers' can be wielded by its members (to force the capitalists to yield), providing the material base for its political challenge? Ancient questions, maybe; but they are questions to which the CEO and the wider movement of which it is a part need to find effective answers.