And on the other, as discussed by Greenwood and Cram (1996, 453), business relied on
the EU institutions for information such as standards of service cultures, employment
practices and price traditions. Access to this type of information was clearly crucial for
rationally acting capital actors seeking to minimize the uncertainty of their operating
environment: in order to secure the availability of reliable sources of information,
networking with European institutions had to be pursued. As a result of these resources
dependencies, the Commission and economic elites forged a close relationship that
ultimately evolved into a tight policy community. These observations add strength to
arguments such as Bouwen’s (2002) that the Commission “looks for a policy community
which may provide a source of grass-root and European level information.”
When turning to the development of the MCR, one sees that European
Commission authorities and business leaders felt the need for supranational merger
regulation because market consolidation went hand in hand with (neo-liberal economic)
globalisation and resulted in an exponential growth of mergers throughout the 1980s
(Eberlein 2001). Although the founders of the Community were explicitly concerned
with preventing collusion (cartels) and price discrimination along national lines, explicit
reference to merger control was absent. However, Garrett and Mitchell (2001, 149)
highlight the constraining policy effects of globalisation throughout the 80s and 90s that
forced a re-evaluation for a need for merger control by both the Commission and
economic actors.14 The Commission thus sought to increase its stronghold of power in a
regulatory policy process which was increasingly necessary given global economic
dynamics, without necessarily isolating the very object of their regulation - industrial
interests - if the single internal market was to reach its fullest potential.15 European
industry also realised that if the internal market was to become a tangible entity, massive
corporate mergers and restructuring would become reality and thus sought to gain a
foothold in its regulatory policy-process. Against these backdrops of expectation, support
by both parties of the Commission’s led MCR materialized some 30 years later in 1989.
After the SEA came into force in 1986, the ERT concentrated on shaping the
nature of merger regulations: between 1987 and 1992, members of the ERT’s Internal
Market Support Committee had a profusion of meetings with government and
Commission representatives (Cowles 1995, 519-20). Considering the relationships and