Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–2004 (review)

Freyer published an earlier book on antitrust in Great Britain and America, Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America, 1880– 1990 (New York, 1992), but the present volume has a far broader geographical reach and a different time span. This refreshing book, written by a learned scholar, represents interdisciplinary history at its best. Based on archival sources, plus interviews with key policymakers, it covers economic, business, legal, and intellectual history and features new materials that neatly mesh the ramifications of an international trade storyline with antitrust-policy creation. Freyer identifies three phases of antitrust history: (1) 1930 to 1945, (2) 1945 to the early 1970s, and (3) the mid-1970s to 2004.

Phase 1 of Freyer's narrative really begins in 1937/38, when the United States resumed a vigorous antitrust stance while governments in Europe, Australia, and Japan held vastly different attitudes toward competition. Freyer focuses initially on the U.S. experience, showing how World War II differed from World War I in its impact on American policymaking.¹ Freyer reveals the complexities and changes in U.S. policies in comparison and contrast with those of other nations.

For phases 2 and 3, Freyer starts by elaborating on the U.S. case and then extends his discussion to other countries. He maps U.S. policies inherited from the cultural and institutional framework of the New Deal. Antitrust was designed to open opportunities and preserve accountability not only at home but also abroad. Freyer deftly reviews the internationalization of antitrust and the heated controversies surrounding it. He outlines the varieties of approaches within the U.S. government in the immediate aftermath of the war, as well as during the 1950s and 1960s. For the subsequent decades, he covers the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, the views of Robert Bork, and the implementation of antitrust under succeeding U.S. administrations. Quoting a story in the Tuscaloosa News (a rare case of a fragile source), he writes that the proportion of U.S. Justice Department cases involving multinational enterprises was 5 percent in 1993 and 29 percent in 1997. Freyer believes that by the 1990s, the anticompetitive practices of international businesses were an unintended consequence of the open world economy.

Freyer's scrutiny of Japan, in phases 2 and 3, begins with a reinterpretation of the Antimonopoly Act of 1947, arguing convincingly for a more important Japanese role in its drafting (it was not simply a U.S. imposition). The Antimonopoly Act was amended in 1949, 1953, and 1958, in each case relaxing its strictures. Not until the start of the U.S.-Japanese Structural Impediments Initiative (sii) after 1989 and the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in the 1990s did the Antimonopoly Act and antitrust policy gain fresh support within Japan.

In the postwar years, countries in Europe adopted an antitrust program more rapidly than Japan did. As they had in Japan, U.S. advisors during the Occupation offered ideas about curtailing cartels and monopolies. Freyer documents the debates amongWest Germans, emphasizing the role of anti-Nazis, especially Ludwig Erhard and the Ordo liberals (prewar lawyers and economists who favored antitrust ideas despite Nazi persecution). In time, Erhard's advocacy of a social-market economy served to transform "the weak German cartel-abuse regulatory tradition into the strong antitrust regime established in the Cartel Law of 1957" (397). Freyer documents the evolving antitrust policies from the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Union. He includes the experiences of transition economies with anti-monopoly and restrictive business practices; accession to the European Union by the former communist states required the adoption of effective antitrust policies.

Freyer then traces the unfolding post-WorldWar II Australian policies and practices, interlacing his discussion with comparisons to his preceding materials. He reveals the beginning of broad international cooperation in antitrust matters. A web of bilateral agreements emerged from the late 1990s to the early twenty-first century. Antitrust—whether in the United States, Japan, Europe, or Australia—always has to...