British campaigners against European Union plans to outlaw imperial measures like pounds and ounces have claimed victory, according to news reports today. The self-styled ‘metric martyrs’ say they have say they have won the battle to keep Britain imperial, after confirmation from the European Commission’s industry commissioner, Gunther Verheugen, that dual marking of goods in imperial and metric would”continue indefinitely”. Previously the Commission had set a 2009 deadline for the phasing out of imperial measures still widely used in British greengrocers, butchers and supermarkets.
The campaign to keep imperial measures had gathered a head of steam alongside a rash of more fanciful ‘euromyths’ peddled by the UK’s vibrant anti-European press. It has variously been claimed that Brussels would be legislating against curved cucumbers, outlawing the red double-decker buses beloved by Londoners and renaming Scottish kilts as ‘womenswear’. These euromyths so irritated the European Commission that it set up a special website devoted to refuting them.

While pints and miles were always exempt from EU law, pounds and ounces were under threat, and the ‘metric martyr’ campaign was launched following the court conviction six years ago of Sunderland greengrocer Steven Thoburn for using scales that could not weigh in metric units. However, as the Financial Times reports, Commissioner Verheugen’s change of heart is less a victory for ‘Little Englanders’ than an instance of transatlantic regulatory cooperation inaction.

According to the FT, the American Chamber of Commerce in Brussels, which favors a single measurement worldwide, said forcing the change too early”could have severe negative consequences”.”It would be necessary to run two separate production systems – one ‘metric only’ for the EU and another with dual measurements for regions that require it.” Meanwhile, some US states have outlawed metric-only labels.

Weights and measures are probably the most straightforward issue in the growing transatlantic dialogue over regulatory standards, a subject which can get fiendishly technical when it is in the realms of financial regulation, intellectual property or food safety. GMF is fortunate to have transatlantic fellow Richard Salt working on the subject and is also commissioning external research such as this study on data privacy rules by Professor Abraham Newman from Georgetown University.

Technical issues aside, there are three basic ways of approaching the issue of regulatory dialogue. A few years ago there was a good deal of talk, particularly in the US, about ‘regulatory convergence’. While it might sound reasonable that the EU and US could come together on a common set of rules that will make life simpler for citizens and industry on both sides of the Atlantic and in the rest of the world, it very quickly became apparent that ‘convergence’ for US negotiators meant ‘convergence towards the US model’. Understandably, Europeans, wary of the likely watering down of higher EU standards of consumer and environnmental protection, cooled on the idea.

‘Regulatory convergence’ has evolved into the current buzzword of ‘regulatory co-operation’ and this has received a boost under the German Presidency of the EU, a key plank of which was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plan for greater transatlantic economic integration including moving forward with a Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA). The agreement on permitting parallel metric and imperial weights and measures is a good example of transatlantic regulatory co-operation in action.

The third and more controversial approach is ‘regulatory competition’ whereby different jurisdictions adopt different regulatory models and market forces determine which set of standards increasingly globalized industries end up following. Think of the contest between Betamax and VHS during the 1980s or the current battle between BluRay and HD-DVD, but with governments rather than companies as the protagonists. The EU, with close to 500 million citizens, is now a larger market than the US and for the first time in history, the EU and the US carry more or less equal weight in terms of setting global regulatory standards. This competitive model played out on the global stage is interesting because it is by no means inevitable that it will cause a ‘race to the bottom’ as is often argued by critics of globalization. In fact, many companies, when facing the realities of global supply chains and the economies of scale inherent in manufacturing, may choose to adopt the higher standard across-the-board simply because it is cheaper for a global company to meet one single (if higher) standard than to run two entirely separate production processes.

In one distinctive front in this battle over regulatory standards, EU and the US are both working hard to export their own regulatory standards to third countries through bilateral free trade agreements, and with the stalling of the Doha Round of multilateral negotiations at the WTO, we are likely to see much more of this going on. Each believes that this will tilt the playing field in favor of their own companies, which have a vested interest in international adoption of their domestic standards.

Until very recently, the US has been the world’s global standard setter, but the EU has woken up to the realities of its increased market power in the global economy and is using it as an economic counterpart to the more traditional tools of European political and social ‘transformative power’. Whether we will see more co-operation or more competition in the years ahead is hard to tell. Meanwhile the British ‘metric martyrs’ are no doubt raising a pint glass to the reprieve of pounds and ounces, albeit thanks to the flexibility of the global economy.

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