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institutions beyond the Commission and to a limited extent the Council, but also the
exclusion of organised labour. As Hoar (2000) argues, Brussels was.... a real ‘dialogue
city’ for business and policy-makers,” when it came to MCR negotiation. In the MCR’s
creation, both parties agreed that these goals might not benefit everyone, including
workers. As leaders of DG Competition would later state with regard to the goals of the
MCR,
It may be that, in the short term, efforts to improve the
competitiveness of firms by means of mergers or acquisitions involve
restructuring and thus loss of jobs. However, this does not change
the fact that improving firms’ competitiveness on the global market
is the only effective way to ensure the growth needed to create
business (DGIV 2001).
Further evidence of labour’s exclusion is seen in a Commission statement on the
amendments produced by the 1997 MCR Review: “This followed wide-ranging
consultations with Member States, the competent competition authorities and the
business community”(Commission 1998, 49). The absence of organised labour may be
attributed to the possibility that labour - as a consequence of the restricted nature of the
EU policy process - has sought to make political representation through work councils in
large firms. By doing so this has strengthened the transnational social identity of the
firm. However, while business clearly benefits from these political alliances in terms of
EU credibility and labour relations, the EU labour movement only participates as a
second best option (Coen 1998, 81).
In sum, although the creation of the MCR seems a direct result of closed,
collective action by representatives of capital and the Commission in general that can be
explained based on the self-supporting private interests of both actors, how ‘extendable’
are the characteristics of the developed community when actual merger decisions based
on MCR rules were taken? We thus turn to detailed analysis of one of the first major
cases when MCR rules were implemented.
The Implementation of the MCR: The Nestlé/Perrier Case and The ‘Micro’ Merger
Policy Community
While the previous section examined the policy-process when the MCR was
formulated, this section examines which actors were involved when the MCR rules were