Chillin'Competition

The Annual Conference of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation took place last week. I am very much grateful to the organisers for honouring the legacy and achievements of Professor Heike Schweitzer.

The script of the keynote I delivered can be found here. It focused on the Ordoliberal tradition, which Professor Schweitzer continued, and which I came to appreciate and study thanks to her. Its core insights come across as particularly relevant at this juncture. Ordoliberals’ concern with unchecked (private and public) power and its impact on democracy resonates more than it has in decades.

Paradoxically, the zeitgeist appears to be moving away from what I call the Ordoliberal compact, that is, an approach to policy-making that revolves around an independent authority that is constrained by law and is subject to judicial review (and which is behind the unlikely and resounding success of European competition policy since the 1950s).

This technocratic approach to competition policy is increasingly questioned. An emerging body of literature deems it excessively narrow and (unduly) insulated from the broader political landscape. Similarly, legal constraints on administrative action have come under critical scrutiny.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, moving away from the Ordoliberal compact may weaken competition authorities vis-a-vis powerful private (and public) actors. In addition, it may affect the effectiveness and credibility of enforcement.