"Explaining International Anti-Trust Competition: the EU vs. the US"

Stacey, Jeffrey. (2005) "Explaining International Anti-Trust Competition: the EU vs. the US". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. Those scholars engaged in charting the EU’s informal sphere may yet save the regionalism sub-field from a similarly blind fate. In doing so they have the potential to substantially deepen our understanding of the world’s most prominent political experiment to date, for the quotidian outcomes of EU governance may not be fully comprehended without an understanding of the recursive relationship between the EU’s formal and informal rules (the latter of which tend to be as consistently adhered to by EU actors as the former). This paper seeks to aid in this endeavor. It will do so firstly by anchoring the later empirical sections in the theory of rational choice historical institutionalism (RCHI), a necessary grounding that attempts to avoid a somewhat common trend of regionalist scholarship-viz. describing empirically without explaining theoretically. This theoretical hybrid of two of new institutionalism’s three variants seeks to compensate for the individual weaknesses of RCI (rational choice institutionalism) and HI (historical institutionalism) while accentuating their strengths. In essence, RCHI theory is based on rationalist assumptions but takes account of the increasing returns of political phenomena. Secondly, the paper will attempt to map a nascent area of research in the empirical section, viz. that of the effect of external informal rules on the EU’s internal governance. It will subject RCHI’s hypotheses to the ongoing cross-Atlantic dispute between the American and EU antitrust authorities, which reached a boiling point when the Commission vetoed the merger between GE and Honeywell in 2001. As a result, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Commission agreed to a code of best practices for regulating mergers, which is now being put to the test with regard to the EU’s regulation of Microsoft among other multinational behemoths. Thus, this paper will examine external informal dynamics of the EU, which in more general terms has the potential to become a growth area for future regionalism research.

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