European or National? The Community’s New Merger Regulation

Abstract

Abstract Since September 1990, mergers taking place in the European Community (EC) have been regulated under a new merger regulation. After sixteen years of unsuccessful negotiations, undertaken with varying degrees of enthusiasm and occasional hostility, the EC member states agreed, in December 1989, to this new system of community-wide merger regulation, based around the Competition Directorate of the European Commission. The negotiation of this regulation raised questions reaching to the heart of current debates about the future economic and political development of the Community, and particularly issues of national sovereignty. These questions will continue to be debated. A central plank of the new merger regulation is to be reassessed in the years to 1994. The new merger regulation has, however, been broadly welcomed, and its practice mostly uncontroversial. UK Trade Minister, John Redwood, called the regulation ‘very important . . . providing more certainty for companies about who exactly is determining the fate of their mergers’. Leon Brittan, the European Commissioner responsible for competition policy, emphasized the link between merger control and the single market programme, and that the European Community has ‘for the first time a single framework in which take-overs and mergers with a Community dimension can be dealt with, recognizing the importance of maintaining fair competition throughout the single market’.