Organised Interests and the European Internal Market

Relationships between interest groups and the European Community have generally been regarded as more pluralist than neocorporatist in character. In part, this is because of a prevailing view of Euro interest associations as weak ‘federations of federations’, often unable to agree and act upon meaningful common positions. Evidence from the pharmaceutical industry suggests that such a blanket generalisation cannot be sustained, not least because of the commonality of regulatory experiences across member states, and prior experience of the industry in transnational political action. These have been reproduced at the EC level to the point of a Euro private interest government. There are, however, other forms of interest representation besides the ‘super federation’, and a cursory examination of one area—biotechnology—reveals the multiplicity of these. Of interest is that here it is the Euro organisations themselves rather than an aggregation of national concerns which have been of prime importance in engaging the European level, a feature of the development of biotechnology at a time of the enhanced competence of the EC in the shape of the Single European Act. This may suggest the pattern for the future in newly emerging arenas of industrial activity. Only one of the many Euro aggregations in biotechnology—a direct firm membership forum—has proved to be an effective interest outlet. What appears to be a challenge to the possibility of the existence of a neocorporatist structure through a Euro federation in fact shows the importance of Euro federations in the creation of appropriate transnational representational structures, which may develop reciprocal relationships with the Commission which are characteristic of neocorporatist patterns. The explanatory power of neocorporatist ideas in revealing the dynamics of completing the internal market should therefore not be dismissed.