EUROPE 1992 AND STRATEGIC CHANGE IN THE INTERNATIONAL AUTOMOBILE-INDUSTRY

Western Europe is the world's largest automobile market and also the major region of automobile production. Until 1986, with the arrival of Nissan, the automobile industry in the region was shared between a mixture of US transnational producers and indigenous European producers, some of which also operate plants outside Europe. It is an industry in which, although a substantial degree of corporate integration has occurred, the impact of historical circumstances is still evident in its current locational structure. The creation of a Single European Market after 1992 will remove at least some of the internal barriers to full transnational integration by the European-based automobile producers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the strategies of the three major groups of volume automobile producers in Europe in the context of the changing European situation. A basic question to be posed is whether the Single European Market is likely to stimulate major strategic changes amongst automobile manufacturers or whether we are more likely to see a continuation of existing strategies. The potential implications of the recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe add further complexity to the situation.