Why Europe’s Single Market Surpassed America’s

April 22, 2021 talk with Matthias Matthijs, Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. This talk was hosted by Stanford University's The Europe Center (TEC). Anna Grzymala-Busse, professor of political science and director of The Europe Center, introduced the speaker and moderated the Q&As. Prof. Grzymala-Busse is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

Which has more of a “single market,” the United States or the European Union, and why? Most scholars and policy-makers will expect easy answers. Surely interstate exchange faces fewer regulatory barriers in the fluid American arena than between European countries. We argue that this common wisdom profoundly mischaracterizes both polities. The US never attempted to complete a project remotely like Europe’s SMP. Europeans have now removed or mitigated a lengthening list of barriers that Americans retain. Across the “four freedoms” of goods, services, persons and capital, today’s EU unambiguously claims and actively exercises more authority to require interstate openness than the US has ever considered. Existing explanations that privilege economic flows, institutional path dependence, or cultural attitudes struggle with these actual outcomes. Our explanation highlights contingent connections that political movements in each arena forged between ideas about markets and governance, channeling the 20th-century “return to markets” into contrasting varieties of neoliberalism.