Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War by David Cronin London: Pluto Press, 2013. 216 pp. (ISBN: 9780745333328)

Authors

Steve McGiffen

Abstract

David Cronin’s book is based on years as a journalist in Brussels looking at the way in which the European Union’s institutions really work. This reviewer spent thirteen years working at the European Parliament and, before that, five years sharing his time between academe and work as an advisor to a Member of that same Parliament. Cronin and I have come to very much the same conclusions. If our analysis is not largely reflected in that of the vast majority of academic ‘experts’ on the European Union, it has become almost ubiquitous out there on the streets and in the workplaces of Europe. The European Community may have been founded, in part at least, for its ostensible purpose of preventing a return to the warlike past. As the European Union, however, it has been hijacked by corporate interests which have sought to institutionalize a particular form of the capitalist system, a hyper-exploitative form which has been called ‘neoliberalism’. In this, as Cronin demonstrates in page after page of solid evidence, they have largely succeeded.

Recommended Citation

McGiffen, Steve (2015) "Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War by David Cronin London: Pluto Press, 2013. 216 pp. (ISBN: 9780745333328)," The Journal of International Relations, Peace Studies, and Development: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/agsjournal/vol1/iss1/9