Competition Policy and Integration: Levelling or Tilling the Playing Field?

In the early years of the Common Market, competition rules played a vital role in promoting the integration of the west European economy. Now, the EU is calling on the Central and East European Countries (CEECs) to harmonise competition laws much more tightly than has been required for founder or newly acceding member states, such as Greece, even after accession. The Europe Agreements indicated the general obligation and the recent White Paper spelled it out in more depth. The justification is that the Internal Market acquis is implicitly enforced by the European Court of Justice for member states but has to be made explicit in the case of Europe Agreement partners, who do not have obligations of harmonisation under the Rome Treaty. But the asymmetry requires the CEECs to accept all the rules of the Internal Market before accession, with the rest of the acquis communautaire after accession.The fundamental question is how far the CEE’s must harmonise their rules before wholly free trade is possible. Although the EU is asymmetrically abolishing conventional measures of protection, it retains contingent protection on industrial goods as well as agricultural protection. Some have argued that once the CEECs adopt competition rules akin to those in the EU, it will be possible to abolish all anti-dumping duties as the competition rules can then be used to deal with “unfair competition”. This paper argues that the alignment of competition laws should be part of an accession strategy, not a condition for free trade in industrial goods.