Is EU competition policy still "special"?

The Modernisation Project decentralised the enforcement of EU competition policy and increased the symbiotic relationship between the national and supranational enforcement regimes through the formation of a network between the national competition authorities and the European Commission. Regulation 1/2003, the legal background of Modernisation, has now completed its fifth year in operation and the Commission released a report regarding the initial functioning of the system. In a recent TILEC discussion paper, TILEC member Firat Cengiz takes a retrospective look at the institutional elements of Modernisation in response to this report. In general, the paper comes to positive conclusions regarding the initial experiences, particularly due to the increased communication between competition officials with concrete policy outcomes. Nevertheless, there are significant accountability problems in the functioning of the new regime. Overall, the paper argues that as an unanticipated consequence of Modernisation, competition policy has lost its special status in Europe and become prone to the general systemic problems of multi-level governance. The author urges the Commission to give due consideration to these problems and the epistemic community to place competition policy within the broader debate on multi-level governance.