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EBS Factsheet Series - #1
European Business Summit - Consolidating Corporate Control over EU Policies
1500 business leaders and top level European Union policy-makers will meet in the Brussels Sheraton Hotel for the two-day European Business Summit (EBS) on 9-10 June 2000. The conference promises to be a showcase of the dangerously close liaisons between corporate and political elites in the European Union. Under the heading 'Innovation and Creativity' the EBS aims to promote a corporate political agenda of continued trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation, slashing of labour rights, tax exemptions for electronic commerce, and securing government support and funding for controversial technologies such as genetic engineering.
The corporate groupings which have masterminded the European Business Summit include the Union of Industrial and Employers Confederations of Europe (UNICE) [see fact sheet], the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT) [see fact sheet], and the EU Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham), a grouping of US-based corporations active in Europe. They claim that the event will be 'unique in that it will bring together two milieus that often work side by side: industry and the European institutions.'
The reality is that the connections between business leaders and EU officials are very close and have been so for the last 15 years. This would explain the impressive number of European Commissioners - ten in total, including Commission President Romano Prodi and Commission Vice-President Loyola de Palacio - that are scheduled to speak at the EBS, sharing the podium with the chairpersons and chief executive officers of Europe's major transnational corporations.
The privileged political access enjoyed by business groupings such as the ERT, UNICE, AmCham, CEFIC (Chemical Industry Lobby Group) and others is well documented (see for instance "Europe Inc. - Regional & Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power', CEO/Pluto Press, January 2000). Corporate input into the EU's decision-making is increasingly institutionalised, through joint bodies like the Competitiveness Advisory Group (CAG) and the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD).
A major goal for the EBS is to come up with a set of concrete policy recommendations for the European Commission and EU member state governments. These recommendations "will be monitored, and progress towards [their] implementation reviewed, at the next Summit." [EBS website: www.ebsummit.org] A similar undemocratic mechanism of presenting corporate policy recommendations at top level meetings between corporate and governmental decision-makers, reinforced by a subsequent monitoring of the implementation by the relevant government agencies, has been applied very effectively by the EU-US Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) since its inception in 1995.
The European Business Summit is just the latest forum where chief executive officers and other senior business leaders assume the role of international politicians. By supporting and attending the European Business Summit en masse, the European Commission is acknowledging these captains of industry as politicians -- thus undermining democracy. This is symptomatic of the increasingly dominant, but deeply flawed assumption by the European Commission that business interests are for the common good.
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