ABSTRACT
An important fl anking device of the contemporary transformation of corporate governance regulation is constituted by the developments of EU-level competition or antitrust policy.1 Consisting of laws and regulations, competition policy generally pertains to the structure of market power and market integration. Situated at the heart of modern capitalist economies, it typically sets the conditions of market concentration and access, the scope of commercial freedom to conclude cooperative ventures with other companies, and more generally the distinction between the public and the private realm. Apart from the genuinely public market interventionist nature, competition policy can come in different shapes and serve a broad range of confl icting interests. Biased by the wider enforcement philosophies and competences of competition authorities, established practices and procedural rules, and most notably, interest group infl uence, it can both enable and constrain private market power, be more or less market-interventionist, more or less businessfriendly or free market-orientated. Consequently, competition policy needs to be understood as ‘a product of the prevailing economic and political thinking of the times’ that is both constituted by and constitutive to the structural power relations in a political economy (Gavil et al. 2002: 69).
