ABSTRACT
In Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, mergers served nation-states as they sought to enhance competitiveness by creating "national champion" companies. Mergers also decisively contributed to the creation of the first cross-border European multinationals in the early twentieth century, but the most intense wave in Europe started in the late 1970s and continued through to the first decade of the twenty-first century. European multinational companies started to expand, to create bigger, more optimal size firms able to take advantage of economy of scale by producing for the entire vast European Community market. Mergers often led to the building up of enormous corporate empires that employed tens- and hundreds-of-thousands of employees, operated in several branches of the economy in many countries, and, especially in the case of the banking industry, owned enormous assets that were greater than the GDP of their home countries. The transformation from national to pan-European company structures began in the financial sector.
