Dr. Koen van Zon

Exploring Brussels’ corridors. Towards a history of corporate lobbying in the European Community, 1958-1992

During my stay at the Project House Europe, I will study the historical role of corporate lobbies in EU decision making processes. The problem with corporate lobbying in the EU was, then as now, that business actors enjoyed access to decision making processes at moments and venues that were outside the purview of other stakeholders. This privileged the financial and economic influence of private interests over public interests, made policy making processes opaque and difficult to control, and produced outcomes that reproduced or even reinforced social and economic inequalities. Corporate lobbying has therefore long been argued to detract from the EU’s democratic legitimacy. Just as it was a difficult phenomenon to address then, studying the history of corporate lobbying is challenging, because there are rarely paper traces to corroborate informal encounters between business actors and EC officials. The premise of this project is that this presents historians not with an unsurmountable methodological challenge, but an obligation to study the dynamic between EC institutions and private interests. It raises the question how corporate lobbies and European institutions have changed in relation to each other over time.

Biographical Note

Koen van Zon works as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University on the research project Consumers on the March: Civic Activism and Political Representation in Europe, 1970s to 1990s. He completed his PhD thesis at Radboud University Nijmegen on a study of the building of the representative institutions of the EU. As a historian of European integration, he is interested in questions that concern the intersection between capitalism and democracy – in other words: how has the interaction between EU/EC institutions and societal actors shaped the governance of Europe’s economy?