Introduction: Exploring Post‐crisis Trajectories of European Corporate Governance
| Author | Alan Dignam,Michael Galanis |
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2014.00653.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 41, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2014
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 1±5
Introduction: Exploring Post-crisis Trajectories of European
Corporate Governance
Alan Dignam* and Michael Galanis**
This special issue comes at a time of particular complexity for the `so far'
successful integration project that is the European Union. After over half a
century of unprecedented cooperation and unification efforts by an expand-
ing number of states that have been willing to surrender sometimes small and
other times larger parts of their sovereignty for the common purpose of
safeguarding prosperity and, more importantly, peace in a continent with a
long history of war and misery, the project seems to have reached its first
existential crossroads. Shortly after its most decisive unification initiative,
the Economic and Monetary Union of some but not all member states, a
private and, in turn, public financial crisis unfolded that has set the stage for
a political choice between two totally antagonistic trajectories: a return to
increased state sovereignty and protectionism
1
or further economic (and
therefore further political) unification.
The crisis has signalled an imperative need for a realistic reassessment of
economic regulation and single market structure more generally. This cannot
leave corporate governance unaffected and therefore relevant policy and
institutional elements need re-evaluation to deal with recent structural
failures. Uncertainty about the efficacy of economic governance and cor-
porate governance specifically is particularly pronounced in Europe due to
its institutional peculiarities as a union of (semi-)sovereign states and
fragmented private sector governance systems. This not only makes the EU
an interesting case study, but also renders the re-evaluation and coordination
1
*School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, 67±69 Lincoln's Inn
Fields, London WC2A 3JB, England
a.dignam@qmul.ac.uk
** School of Law, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13
9PL, England
michael.galanis@manchester.ac.uk
1 For an interesting selection of essays on the interactions between European protec-
tionist tendencies and corporate governance see U. Bernitz and W.-G. Ringe (eds.),
Company Law and Economic Protectionism: New Challenges to European
Integration (2010).
ß2014 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2014 Cardiff University Law School
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