American influences on EEC competition law: two paths, how much dependence?

This chapter examines the influence of the US in the development of European competition law in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that European actors did in fact draw upon US antitrust ideas and that the history of European competition law was informed by a continuous transatlantic dialogue. Directorate-General for Competition (DG IV) officials and competition-policy experts formed part of a wider transatlantic landscape of intellectual exchange. In contrast, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and its judgments often disregarded or (implicitly) opposed American ideas. Such resistance or indifference may lie in the fact that the ECJ was motivated by a quest for an autonomous, non-derivative understanding of competition law as part of an effort to express its constitutional mission of laying the building blocks for a collective European identity.