The political economy of EU competition rule export: unravelling the dynamics of variegated convergence in Serbia and Turkey

Abstract

As part of the key conditionalities for EU membership, candidate states have to establish a competition authority as well as competition rules, using the EU’s neoliberal competition regime as a yardstick. Turkey and Serbia are two candidates that have closely modelled their competition regimes on EU standards but have also deviated in important respects. Scholarly work usually takes EU conditionalities for granted and focuses on institutional configurations or elite socialisation to explain varying degrees of convergence, while the substantive nature of remaining discrepancies is often not accounted for. Drawing on a historical materialist approach, this article locates the EU’s competition rule export in the structural problem of overaccumulation, and the variegated trajectories of rule adoption in the specific nexus between the state and organised capital fractions. In Turkey, close ties between small and medium-sized businesses and the state ensured protectionist features, whereas the Serbian state ultimately aligned with open-market-oriented transnational capital and eliminated most of the initial discrepancies.