Experts and the Crisis of Competition Policy: At the Origins of the “More Economic Approach”

The shift towards a “more economic approach” is a crucial development in EU Competition policy since the beginning of the 21^th Century. This new trend was preceded by years of instability. This paper intends to look at the origins of this controversial debate, by looking at the role of academic experts in the 1980s. The paper will show that the “more economic approach” stems from a renewed debate on the crisis of the European competition policy which begun in the early 1980s. New economic arguments coming from the US disrupted the prevailing German-dominated debate. It will also illustrate the dual role of academic experts in this new field of public intervention: to establish its theoretical justification, and to define its practical tools of implementation. As a result, the function of experts is not solely to legitimate a European policy, but also sometimes to feed its critics, and eventually to propose different paths of evolution. Lastly, the blurring frontiers of expertise and decision-making process in the Competition policy areas will be emphasized. Academic experts are frequently advisors for the Commission, or for companies involved in trials. They could even be former or current EEC officials. A sample of key academic experts and forums of academic discussion will be studied from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s in order to trace the circulation of ideas and actors, to reconstruct the transnational (and frequently transatlantic) networks, and finally to assess their impact on the decision-making process.