Les accords de cooperation union europeenne/Etats-unis en matière de concurence : vers une internationalisation du droit de la concurrence?

The different "rounds" of Multilateral Trade Negotiations have achieved, years after years, to reduce and remove traditional trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas, as well as non-tariff barriers. As tariffs came down and quotas increased or totally disappeared, traders who wanted to use the new trade opportunities ran into the trade impeding effects of domestic rules and procedures that, even if do not formally discriminate between imported and domestically produced goods, may still create trade barriers.Recently, trade negotiators have therefore come to see differences between the national laws of trading partners as possible sources of non-tariff barriers, and started to focus on competition laws in particular. An harmonization of competition rules would avoid barriers resulting from divergences between these rules and would avoid their extra territorial applications.At the same time this idea emerged in the International community's mind, two of the main trade and economic partners decided to use the bilateral way to start a real cooperation on the competition field. The European Community and the United States of America entered into an Agreement in 1991, completed by second one in 1998. These two agreements have been applied for a few years now and have been effective in many ways, but have also shown their limits.Therefore, the focus is now standing on multilateral solutions and partners have started to consider the idea of "internationalizing" competition laws and policies but, to achieve that goal, many problems will have to be resolved first, such as deciding which international organisation is going to be in charge of competition matters and what set of rules is going to be applied by this organisation.This Thesis analyses this process and tries to bring a few answers to those difficult and delicate questions involving not only legal, but economical, political and diplomatic issues