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Schweitzer, Heike --- "Competition Law and Public Policy: Reconsidering an Uneasy Relationship – The Example of Article 81" [2009] ELECD 198; in Drexl, Josef; Idot, Laurence; Monéger, Joël (eds), "Economic Theory and Competition Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Economic Theory and Competition Law

Editor(s): Drexl, Josef; Idot, Laurence; Monéger, Joël

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206312

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Competition Law and Public Policy: Reconsidering an Uneasy Relationship – The Example of Article 81

Author(s): Schweitzer, Heike

Number of pages: 17

Extract:

9. Competition law and public policy:
reconsidering an uneasy
relationship ­ the example of
Article 81
Heike Schweitzer*

1 INTRODUCTION

The development of an internal market with undistorted competition is
one of the central fields of activity of the EU (Article 3(1)(g) EC), and has
long been one of its seemingly uncontroversial goals. The debate about the
relationship between this goal and other goals listed in Articles 2 and 3 EC
that are not competition-related has been a reminder of the political ten-
sions that the application of competition rules can raise at times. The
battles surrounding the Draft Constitutional Treaty and later the drafting
of the Lisbon Treaty have revealed how strongly these tensions are per-
ceived by some Member States. Upon French initiative, the new Article 2
Treaty of the European Union (TEU), confirming the establishment of an
internal market as one of the Union's goals, will no longer contain a refer-
ence to a `system of undistorted competition' as was originally foreseen.1
Although the British government in turn insisted on annexing a Protocol
to the TEU which will specify that `the internal market as set out in Article
2 of the Treaty on the European Union includes a system ensuring that
competition is not distorted',2 and the Protocol has formally the same legal


* Dr. iur., LL.M. (Yale), Professor of Law, European University Institute,
Florence.
1 The future Art 3(3) TEU will read in its relevant part: `The Union shall estab-

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