Vehicle of Influence: Building a European Car Market

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Speech by Raymond Levy before a hearing of the European Parliamentary Committee on External Relations and the Political Affairs Committee on relations between the European Community and Japan, held in Brussels, 16 and 17 September 1991 (author ’s transcription and translation). The tone of the speech was moderate compared to some of the more apocalyptic (and anti-Japanese) statements made by industry representatives in private communications. 2. What is now known as the European Union has been known by other names.The original European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), founded in 1952, was joined by the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958 (together with Euratom, an unsuccessful attempt to regulate atomic power on a regional basis). These three entities came to be known as the European Community (EC) by the late 1980s. The name was then changed to the European Union (EU) by the Treaty of Maastricht, 1992. In the interest of maximum clarity, the term EU will be used throughout to refer to all the various European Communities,notwithstanding the fact that the term EC was in general use when many of the events to be analyzed below actually occurred. 3. On the rule changes adopted by the SEA see Garrett 1992; and Nugent 1994,304– 29; for an overview of the legislative processes within the institutions of the EU see also, among many others, Peters 1991; Lodge 1994; and Keohane and Hoffmann 1991. 4. It is important to note that while the new trade theory does call into question the role of comparative advantage, it has failed to yield insights as broad and robust as neoclassical trade theory—its models tend to be sensitive to turbulence in the underly ing assumptions. It follows that while strategic behavior may help states and fi ms “snatch rents,” there is no guide available as to what, precisely, such a policy might look like. 5. Of course some economies would have more exposed sectors than others —the Commission att empted t o measur e this sometime aft er the SEA was sig ned (CEC 1990b). However, ceteris paribus, greater adjustment is accompanied by greater potential welfare gains, and such economies should gain as much as, if not more than, others. The political t rade-off, as opposed t o the pur ely economic one, is addressed in m uch greater detail in chapter 2. 185 6. I make no attempt to rely on the extensive sociological and cultural explanations for institutions (see, for example, Dobbin 1994; and Finnemore 1996). The micro-foundations offered by economic theories of industrial organization are more in keeping with the rational actor framework generally adopted in this project.That is not t o say that other theories have nothing to add to this kind of analysis, only that in the int erests of parsimony I stick to one kind of approach with a view to discovering how much it can explain. 7. The ability to be an informal agenda setter is available to anyone—political entrepreneurs of all kinds can attempt to promote issues and solutions (see Kingdon 1984). However, at some point in the social al location of resources actors must enter the appropriate institutionalized bargaining arena and submit to the constraints embodied in its rules.Who formally makes proposals within that context enjoys, ipso facto, significan power. 8. The principal-agent literature is extensive and cannot be addressed here to good effect. Suffi e it to say that due to the difficul y of monitoring and credibly threatening to sanction agents,“shirking” or drift occurs when an agent pursues goals separate from those assigned to it (among many others, see McCubbins and Schwartz 1984; and Moe 1987). In the context of the EU, the Commission may have considerable room to maneuver due to the complexity of its tasks and the di vergent preferences of its multiple principals (Pollack 1997). A considerable underlying problem with this literature is that given rational actors with perfect information it is impossible t o distinguish betw een successful monitoring and perfectly calibrated shirking. 9. In a coordination game with distributional consequences coordination may not be realized due to an inability to agree on any particular solution. In this context a “focal point”or“prominent solution”can solve the problem, where it has credibility, and an impartial international institution, such as the EU, could be the source of the required credibility (see, of course, Schelling 1980; for a discussion in the c ontext of the EU see...