Economic Law, Inequality, and Hidden Hierarchies on the EU Internal Market

This Article has several aims. First, the aim is to show the continuing importance and relevance of antitrust and international trade lawyers in countering the concentration of power in the hands of the few or in some geographic areas of the world, if some of the assumptions of antitrust and trade are adjusted. Second, the goal is to articulate a particular analysis from the perspective of the (European) periphery. As the recent Euro crises and the near exit of Greece from the Union show, the European prospect of development for all has not arrived. This Article will articulate the privilege of the corporations in a structurally privileged position of the European center to harm the industry of the periphery and offer one analysis and explanation for the reproduction of hierarchies and concentration of wealth in the center of the European Union. The doctrine developed on this basis is called “dumping practices of the center.” Third, the aim is to challenge the sensibility that economic thinking is the main culprit in the concentration of power and economic impoverishment of some parts or sections of the world. Rather, what needs to be challenged is the existing social understanding of injury, in economic thinking just as much as in thinking about equity or fairness. In arguing for a reversal of social understanding of harm, economic analysis can be used as an important tool for social transformation.