The Evolution of European Merger Regulations and the Power of Ideas: A Pan-institutional Interpretation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to generate an understanding of the evolution of European competition policy in the context of the globalising economy of the 20th and early 21st centuries by analysing the role of ideas in influencing merger policies. Normally competition policy is framed by legal and economic studies as the set of regulations leading market competition according to criteria of efficiency and/or economic welfare. By advancing this analysis, the paper investigates on how abstract economic concepts and theories on the one hand, and material interests such as welfare and efficiency on the other, by influencing political actors’ understanding of reality, have shaped the decision-making process behind specific European competition policies. My analysis develops on the basis of what I call a pan-institutional methodology, a synthesis of an institutional understanding of competition policy and sociological theories of isomorphism. Pan-institutionalism reveals that the corpus of ideas, which favoured the neoliberal transformation that invested European institutions in the 20th and early 21st century, can be identified as German Ordoliberal and the Chicago paradigms of competition policy. To a degree, this latter US-originated approach has been internalised by Europe through formal and informal institutions, and adapted in light of the major oil crises of the 80’s. At the same time however, the reliance of Europe on the traditional Ordoliberal understanding of market practices has prevented a total harmonisation of EU competition policies with the American ones.