Europe Inc.: Regional & Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power

Providing an insight into the systematc ways in which transnational corporations - working through lobby groups - have succeeded in influencing a wide range of policies of the EU and other international institutions, such as the OECD, WTO and the United Nations, this book covers the major players in these anti-democratic practices and analyses the structural and political factors which have enabled corporate political power to dominate. In their analysis of the EU’s current neoliberal economic strategies - which involve promoting deregulation and privatisation in virtually all areas and subordinating every policy field to the objective of international competitiveness - the authors focus on the activities of corporate lobby groups and corporate state alliances. These include bodies such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT), the Transatlantic Business Dialogie (TABD), the International Chamber (ICC), and the Association for Monetary Union of Europe (AMUE). The featured case studies examine corporate influence on transport, biotechnology, climate change policies, as well as key economic globalization projects such as the Transatlantic Economic Partnership and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.