The Eu's Role in Global Competition Policy in a Changing World

Competition policy aims to prevent firms’ anticompetitive behavior—such as forming cartels to fix prices or to share markets—in the marketplace. Since its inception in the Treaty of Rome, competition policy has been one of the main pillars of the European Union’s (EU) efforts to build its internal market. In addition to its contribution to the EU’s single market, the European Commission’s Directorate General (DG) Competition has also had an important external role, which it has fulfilled by extraterritorially applying EU’s competition laws, forging bilateral cooperation agreements in competition policy, working actively in multilateral institutions, and diffusing EU’s competition law model to its neighborhood and the rest of the world. This paper explores DG Competition’s evolving role in the global competition regime in the context of growing economic power and activism of countries such as China, India, Brazil and a number of mid-range emerging economies in the last decade. These emerging powers not only have increased participation and weight in the world economy, but also have become active players in shaping global economic regulations such as in competition policy. This paper explores the evolving role of DG Competition and the EU’s competition policy in a rapidly changing competition scene, problematizing whether and to what extent the EU can continue to play the role that it has traditionally played in this policy area internationally.