Europe and the Globalization of Antitrust Law

This article looks at the European experience with competition law against the backdrop of the globalization of antitrust law. Antitrust is no longer the province of the United States alone or of a small group of industrialized states. It is increasingly an international phenomenon that operates in some fashion in many states. It impacts economic activity to an increasing extent and in an increasing number of ways, and it has become a major policy concern of governments and of business decision-makers almost everywhere. European experience with competition law plays a central, and increasingly important, role in this development, and thus it is important to understand that experience. My central thesis is that images of European competition law are often seriously distorted. I suggest that these distortions can both hamper effective lawyering in transnational contexts and impede the process of developing an international legal framework for the protection of competition. My objective is to identify some of these distortions and indicate their significance for international lawyering and for the evolution of competition law and policy. Note that I will refer to images of European competition law experience that are widely held in the United States, but these images are also often highly influential elsewhere, including in Europe itself