[From the introduction] The idea that we are living in the age of the regulatory state has dominated the study of public policy in the European Union and its member states in general, and the study of the utilities sectors in particular.1 The European Commission’s continuous drive to expand the Single Market has therefore been a free-market and rule-oriented project, driven by regulatory politics rather than policies that involve direct public expenditure. The dynamics of European integration are rooted in three central concepts: free trade, multilateral rules, and supranational cooperation. During the 1990s EU competition policy took a ‘public turn’ and set its sights on the public sector.2 EU legislation broke up national monopolies in telecommunications, electricity and gas, and set the scene for further extension of the single market into hitherto protected sectors. Both the integration theory literature (intergovernmentalist and institutionalist alike) and literature on the emergence of the EU as a ‘regulatory state’ assumed that this was primarily a matter of policy making: once agreement had been reached to liberalise the utilities markets a relatively homogeneous process would follow. The regulatory state model fit the original common market blueprint better the old industrial policy approaches. On the other hand, sector-specific studies continue to reveal a less than fully homogeneous internal market. The EU has undergone momentous changes in the last two decades, which have rendered the notion of a homogeneous single market somewhat unrealistic.
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