Perspectives on Competition Law: Problems and Solutions

This essay suggests that it does not follow that competition between jurisdictions is good merely because competition between economic operators in pursuit of economic goals is a good thing. The result, as the discussion on television indicated, may simply be a jurisdictional mess, as Dr. Markus Wagemann put it. You end up with all sorts of people seeking to pursue their own values: cultural values, regional values, and linguistic values; and the economic operator simply does not know where he or she stands in this jurisdictional competition. This point can perhaps be completed by simply mentioning a remark made to me by Klaus Dieter Ehlermann, the former Director General of Competition and of the legal service of the Commission: ‘It is the lawyers who make the good distinctions; politicians only make the distinctions that are convenient for them.‘ It is important to begin by making sure what we are talking about. My second point arises out of Professor Dr. Friedl Weiss\u27s paper. From the vantage point of a judge, we are increasingly faced, not with a hierarchy of norms, but a competition between norms of apparently equal value. This essay then reflects that this is not the first time we have experienced a world in which there was the fullest competition between lower level jurisdictions. Third, this essay considers the importance of taking state aid into account. This essay concludes that greater jurisdictional autonomy leads to greater barriers to trade