This article argues that the global liberal outlook of the major European maritime powers and the international framework of international organizations and regimes already in place made any strictly regional Common Shipping Policy, under the auspices of the European Community, superfluous. Alliances among Shipowners and associations ran across the member- and non-member divide, and were informed by global economic considerations such as the oil shock, competition from South East Asia and structural changes in the sector, rather than integrationist efforts. Instead, the Commission came to act as an interlocutor alongside a liberal alliance, with particular European aims within a global context. This alliance was an unlikely one, seeing Greek–Norwegian hopes in Britain as a possible guarantor of a liberal shipping regime within the enlarged Community in the early 1970s. In the end, the European response to the crisis and structural changes of the 1970s proved unsatisfactory, and only those who fully embraced the ‘new’ rules of the game (like Greece) reaped the benefits of the structural changes.