Restructuring in the EU

Abstract

The process of globalization is not surprisingly hampered by the fact that the eventual status of operators in many European countries is subject to change. As previously mentioned, telecoms operators in Europe often emerged in conjunction with postal services, either as government departments or public utilities. Even where they became subject to private company legislation they typically remained majority- owned by the state, as shown in Table 1.1. The process of restructuring can reasonably be said to have originated, firstly, in the privatization of 50.2 per cent of British Telecom of the UK in December 1984 and, secondly, in the publication of the June 1987 Green Paper on the development of the common market for telecommunications services and equipment (CEC, 1987) by the European Commission (Strivens and Martin, 1993a; Weltevreden, 1994).