The Constitution of a Transnational Policy Field: Negotiating the EU Internal Market for Products

The EU internal market has predominantly been studied in terms of changes in delegation of authority and division of labor between EU institutions and member states. However, this EU internal focus ignores that already in 1987 the completion of the internal market was substantially left to the private European standardization organizations (ESO). The paper addresses two fundamental challenges in this transnational, public-private, and internal-external delegation of authority. First, it involves a governance challenge, because private actors are directly involved - but to a certain extent outside EU political and administrative control - in the constitution of the internal market. Second, the delegation raises important analytical questions concerning the identification of the institutional locus of European integration, when the realization of the political goals with the internal market is dependent on an inter-organizational coordination between the EU and ESO. Applying the analytical concept of a `policy field' the analysis shows how the completion of the internal market fundamentally challenges institutionalized conceptions of the role of politics in constituting markets.