No Commitment to “Free and Undistorted Competition” in Draft EU Constitution?
The Financial Times reports:
The European Union’s 50-year-old commitment to “undistorted competition” has been scrapped from a list of the bloc’s objectives in a French coup that lawyers argue could undermine Brussels’ fight against protectionism and illegal state aid. Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, secured the change, on the eve of an already tense Brussels summit to allay concerns in his country that the EU has become too “Anglo-Saxon”. The surprise move came as EU leaders gathered in Brussels to try to agree a revamped version of the bloc’s moribund constitutional treaty. The new text would update the Union’s rules and create a new EU president and foreign minister. Mario Monti, the former EU competition commissioner who clashed with Mr Sarkozy over the French bail-out of the engineering giant Alstom, said the change would undermine the Commission’s role as an antitrust watchdog, including taking on multinational giants, including ones based in the US. … In the original constitution, one of the Union’s main objectives was listed as “an internal market where competition is free and undistorted”. France has now persuaded Berlin to put a full stop after the words “internal market” in the new treaty. … By contrast “full employment and social progress” will remain Union objectives, offering possible cover to a country wanting to prop up a failing company or engineer a merger of “national champions”.(HT to Damien Geradin for the link).
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June 24th, 2007 at 11:42 am
For those who want further details see:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/president/focus/council_062007_en.htm
Scroll down to press releases and click on Presidency conclusions. Deep in Annex I, on p 24 of the English version, you will find the re-wording for the replacement of Article 2. NB footnote 16 and the, to my mind, gnomic Protocol.