Bureaucratic Diplomacy: Technocratic Cooperation in Transatlantic Trade Relations

Abstract

Cooperating on Competition in Transatlantic Economic Relations: The Politics of Dispute Prevention. By Damro Chad. Basingstoke (England); New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 214 pp., hardcover, $69.95 (ISBN-13: 978-1403987143). Bureaucrats are perhaps the unsung heroes of international cooperation. Widely politicized transatlantic disputes surrounding the 1997 Boeing-McDonnell Douglas and 2001 General Electric-Honeywell mergers have grossly distorted our perception of transatlantic trade relations, Damro claims in Cooperating on Competition in Transatlantic Economic Relations . In reality, competition regulators in the US and the European Union have cooperated extensively since the 1990s, sharing information, taking into consideration each other's interests in cases of concurrent jurisdiction, and even promoting rule convergence. After decades of adversarial relations, a framework of bureaucratic cooperation is now in place that prevents the bulk of possible EU–US conflicts over mergers. What makes this framework successful, according to the author, is precisely that it stays below the political radar of legislators and the media. Regulators have designed cooperative mechanisms that allow technocracy to prevail over politics while carefully respecting the boundaries of administrative discretion. This, in a nutshell, is Damro's argument. The bulk of the literature on international cooperation focuses on non-discretionary and legalistic forms of dispute settlement and formal international organizations. More recently, non-governmental actors have risen to prominence in studies of international cooperation. But Damro draws our attention to cooperative agreements negotiated and implemented by regulatory agents , who deliberately seek to depoliticize their sphere of action. Competition regulators, he shows, eschew possible conflicts by choosing non-treaty mechanisms of cooperation that do not require any organizational apparatus of their own. Damro thus refines existing theories …