Introduction: The Comparative Federalism of Single Markets in Europe and the United States

Abstract The two great “single markets” of the Western world are the result of market-building projects at the heart of American federalism and European integration. This special issue compares the contemporary politics of internal-market openness within these two polities. Common wisdom characterizes Europe’s project as an “incomplete” effort to imitate a wide-open US arena. But if this image is partly correct—Europe remains behind the US in market integration on the ground—it misses that the EU already has a stricter, more systematic and “complete” governing regime for internal-market openness than its supposed American model. Interstate commerce in the US encounters substantial regulatory barriers, some of recent creation, including many that the EU has removed or mitigated among its members. This introductory essay unpacks the institutional, economic, and social elements of single-market projects, surveys social–scientific expectations about how they relate, and highlights the puzzle of the transatlantic mismatch between economic integration and market governance.