Integration Without Membership: Normative Hegemony of EU Competition Procedures in the Eastern Partnership? - Procedural Aspects of Competition Law in the EU Association Agreements with the Eastern Partnership Countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia)

Abstract

This paper was presented at the 2019 Oxford Conference: Transplanting the EU Competition Framework – Trends and Challenges: Eastern Europe, https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/events/transplanting-eu-competition-framework-trends-and-challenges-eastern-europe This paper assesses the procedural rules of competition law in the 2014 Association Agreements between the EU and Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. It will underline the main similarities and differences of the provisions, their implementation, and their effects. This paper will examine, if and to what degree the procedural competition rules in the Association Agreements are influenced by the European Union and what this implies for the three Eastern Partnership countries. The first chapter will illustrate the importance the EU puts on procedural aspects of competition law. The EU system is sophisticated, and the practice has been carefully developed through legislation and case law. The state of procedural competition law in the Eastern Partnership countries is deficient, which is largely owed to the fact that the three countries do not have such a longstanding experience with competition enforcement like the EU. The second chapter will show that the procedural competition provisions of the three Association Agreements oblige the three Partnership countries to generally align their procedures with basic principles of EU procedural competition law. Only the Ukrainian Agreement goes further by demanding a transposition of Art. 30 of Regulation 1/2003 and therefore a specific approximation to the EU acquis. The enforcement mechanisms of the procedural competition rules in the three Agreements are weak, but the three countries have been anyway more or less compliant with their obligations. Even a certain degree of over-transposition can be witnessed. In the third chapter, this paper will show that the EU acts as a limited normative hegemon when it comes to the provisions on procedural competition law in the Association Agreements. This naturally bears some risks for the Partnership countries, who could be overburdened with the respective obligation. In the end, the imposition is kept at its limits and the duties demanded by the Agreements are also beneficial for the countries, who anyway needed to improve their procedural competition law system and their effective enforcement of competition law in practice.