After the Franco-Prussian War, free trade nostrums actually declined in influence and national governments tended to throw their energies into the creation of industrial cartels capable of “defeating” those of other nations. After 1987 or so, neo-liberal ideology has tended to deprive European states of their first-best system of “enhanced-bourgeois” management, and left all the political initiative in the hands of monolithic, professionally-managed firms. So European politics has taken on some of the unfortunate aspects familiar to US voters.

First, there’s a confusion that arises in using the term “economy” or “economic” to refer to industrial systems. European nations are widely believed–perhaps rightly–to have risen to industrial strength on industrial policies that were managed in large measure by an exceptionally proficient civil service. Because European enterprise was largely a bourgeois affair (as opposed to the quasi-military style of industrial management in US & some German enterprises), individual European firms tended to have small technical cadres for implementing technical plans, but almost nothing for direct financial management of production. This was, however, an integral part of US-based firms.

This function of financial supervision of production (to optimize efficiency) was either weak or else carried out by a combination of agents outside of the European enterprise, such as lenders or the government. There was a deeply ingrained conservativism in European industrial management, whereas US industrial management tended to aggressive, confident, and pro-active. This can be good and bad; I suspect most readers will be quite familiar with the negative results. I merely mention this in order to explain why US enterprise developed its now-familiar outline.

Anyway, European enterprise tended to respond to major trade crises by transferring managerial control away from the old bourgeois families to an American-style quasi-military managerial bureaucracy. This was done to solve certain problems but it has very unfortunate side-effects–such as the growth of an US-style political establishment.

There is a need, therefore, for a pan-European industrial management that could, for example, enable Stiftungen to be far more successful at competing and propagating.