This blog post is submitted by Dr. Arletta Gorecka
Exploring the New Frontiers of EU Law is the latest publication of the Commission’s Legal Service. Its subject matter reflects the period: the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the digital and green transitions, and the more recent emphasis on economic security.
The book is not neutral in the conventional academic sense. The contributors are largely describing legal developments in which the Commission itself has played a central role. The book is consequently most useful when read both as a substantive account of recent developments and as an example of how the EU’s legal establishment justifies those developments.
The Expansion of EU Legal Competence
The first part examines developments within the internal market, including the use
of Article 114 TFEU in areas of industrial policy, the Digital Services Act, cybersecurity and crypto-asset regulation, alongside the changing organisation of the EU administration itself. The second part turns towards issues with a stronger external and security dimension, including foreign direct investment screening, sanctions, the European defence industry, drones, EU criminal law and the rule-of- law mechanism. The range of subjects illustrates how far EU law now extends beyond the traditional concerns of economic integration.
Articles 114 and 122 TFEU are particularly important examples. Vaccine procurement, the Digital COVID Certificate and other emergency measures required legal bases and institutional arrangements that were not straightforwardly provided for in the Treaties. NextGenerationEU went further, involving common EU borrowing on a scale that represented a significant development in the Union’s economic governance.
Treaty flexibility allows the Union to respond to circumstances that could not reasonably have been foreseen when the Treaties were agreed. At the same time, the more existing provisions are used to support new areas of Union action, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish interpretation from an effective expansion of competence. The practical difficulty of treaty reform makes the Commission’s approach understandable, but it does not remove the constitutional question. The book is strongest in demonstrating how this process has occurred; it is less convincing as a critical examination of its limits.
Competition Law and Its New Frontiers
Its central argument is that the increasing consideration of objectives such as sustainability, industrial policy and labour protection does not mean that EU competition law has abandoned its traditional foundations. Articles 101 and 102 TFEU remain the starting point, and the chapter places recent developments within the longer constitutional history of EU competition law rather than presenting them as a complete departure from established doctrine.
Three areas are especially significant. The first is labour markets. Competition law has traditionally been associated with product and service markets, but the treatment of collective bargaining and the position of self-employed and platform workers has increasingly brought labour markets within the field of competition policy. The development of the case law following Albany and Kunsten, together with the Commission’s 2022 guidelines on collective bargaining by solo self- employed and gig workers, reflects an attempt to distinguish legitimate collective bargaining from anticompetitive coordination. More recent enforcement against labour-market restrictions, including no-poach arrangements, suggests that this is becoming a genuine area of competition enforcement rather than a peripheral issue.
The second is sustainability. Environmental considerations can now form part of competition-law analysis, particularly in the context of the European Green Deal. The important point, however, is that sustainability does not necessarily require competition law to abandon its existing framework.
The third concerns privacy and data. In digital markets, personal data can be an important source of competitive advantage, meaning that data protection considerations increasingly intersect with questions of dominance and merger control.
Continuity Rather Than Revolution
None of these developments amounts to a complete reconstruction of EU competition law. The contribution instead demonstrates how established Treaty principles can be applied to economic relationships that were largely absent from the traditional conception of competition policy. The significance lies in the accumulation of these developments: labour markets, sustainability and data protection each bring competition law into closer contact with other areas of EU regulation and policy.
This is also where the chapter’s emphasis on continuity is important. The recent expansion of competition law into new areas does not necessarily undermine its constitutional foundations. The principles of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU remain intact, alongside the foundational case law of the Court of Justice.
Conclusion
The book is therefore a valuable reference point. Its principal value is not that it provides the final word on these developments, but that it records, unusually clearly, how the institution itself understands the legal changes it has helped to create.
That limitation does not make the book unimportant. On the contrary, its institutional perspective is one of its most useful features. It provides a detailed account of how the Commission understands the development of EU law during a period in which the Union has assumed responsibilities extending well beyond its traditional internal-market role. The competition law discussion is particularly effective in showing how a mature area of EU law is adapting to labour markets, sustainability and digitalisation without abandoning its Treaty foundations.