Introduction

The European Union (EU) has emerged as a central actor in global financial governance. At the same time, the global context has become increasingly important for how and to what effect the EU regulates financial markets. Scholars and practitioners cannot make sense of EU rulemaking without studying its links to global financial governance, just as to understand how global initiatives evolve, they have to appreciate the rise of the EU as a global regulatory force. This chapter provides a historical overview of this two-way relationship, chronicling how regulatory integration in Europe has been spurred by global initiatives since the 1980s. Over the 1990s, this integration has made the EU a global regulatory power in its own right. As this chapter details, however, even in the wake of the recent global financial crisis this prominence of Europe has not led it to challenge the dominance of the USA in this field.