In this Cover to Cover seminar of the Alcide De Gasperi Centre, Grace Ballor presents her forthcoming book 'Enterprise and Integration: Big Business and the Making of the Single European Market' (Cambridge University Press). Revisiting the origins of the Single Market in the 1980s and 1990s, Ballor has employed archival and oral history methods to produce a novel history of European integration, told from the point of view of multinational business.
As part of the Alcide De Gasperi Centre’s "Cover to Cover" seminar series, Dr Grace Ballor will present her forthcoming book Enterprise and Integration: Big Business and the Making of the Single European Market (Cambridge University Press).
In post-Brexit Europe, understanding who benefits from the European Union and its Single Market has become more important than ever. In this history of European integration, Ballor reconstructs the making of the Single Market in the 1980s and 1990s through the lens of multinational business. Drawing on extensive research in institutional and corporate archives, as well as interviews with key policymakers and business leaders, she explores how European institutions came to view big business as an ally in market integration—and how companies themselves responded in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways. From enthusiastic support for liberalisation to resistance against accompanying social and environmental policies, the book reveals how business strategies both adapted to and actively shaped the evolving European and global economic order.
Grace Ballor is Assistant Professor of International Economic History at Bocconi University. Her research focuses on the historical political economy of contemporary Europe, the role of business in European integration, and the evolution of global governance. She has previously held research fellowships at Harvard Business School, the European University Institute, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and earned her PhD at UCLA. She is currently working on a new project on the economic governance of risk.
Professors Daniela Felisini and Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol will act as discussant and moderator, respectively.
The Alcide De Gasperi Centre supports researchers working in areas related to the history of European integration and cooperation. It coordinates networks of historians, facilitates the use of primary sources and increases public interest in the history of European integration.
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