Policy Formulation, Implementation and Feedback in EU Merger Control

A concentration which creates or strengthens a dominant position as a result of which
effective competition would be significantly impeded in the common market or in a
substantial part of it shall be declared incompatible with the common market.⁹

Which actors were involved when the MCR rules were formulated and why did they
participate? In order to understand the dynamics between actors, analysis of events
related to the Single European Act are necessary.

As the literature notes, the 1992 Programme led to a massive repositioning of
firms within the EU because multinationals realised that centralisation of market
regulation would significantly reduce business transactions costs. Individual companies
as well as Euro-groups were consequently some of the most vocal proponents of the 1992
Programme and these actors’ demands for a privileged policy-making access has been
well documented.¹⁰ In turn, these demands were “met with concomitant supply of access
to the policy-process by political actors in EU institutions seeking policy expertise”(Hix
1999, 206). The formation of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT)¹¹ in the
1980s is a solid illustration. Because member states and Community officials were
incapable of unilaterally launching a Single Market initiative, economic leaders could
shape the rules of the market in which they would operate. In fact, it was ERT chairman
Wisse Dekker’s 1985 proposal for a five-year plan to re-invent Europe that precipitated
the Single Market: the Commission President, Jacques Delors adopted the ERT’s
proposal which would later result in Industry Commissioner Cockfield’s White Paper
which was the basis for the SEA.¹²

Herein lay the roots of a self-supporting relationship that was later manifest in
negotiating the MCR: on the one hand, as discussed by Rose (2000, 7) and Cowles
(1995), capital actors knew that EC institutions, increasingly responsible for shaping the
regulatory environment, were understaffed and in need of expertise and thus private
interests actively politically organised themselves in order to shape the Community’s
policy agenda.¹³ Rose cogently argues that with the Single Market, actors such as
manufacturers, organised labour and even member state governments

increasingly find their scope for manoeuvre limited by EU regulations, and
are therefore forming policy networks to bring pressure to bear on Brussels
to adopt policies defined in terms of economic interests instead of national
interests (Rose, 2000, 7)

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