On November 30, 1998 LFMI and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation hosted a conference "Competition Law and the Right to Compete. Lithuania and the European Union." The event was designed to assess the benefits of EU requirements for Lithuania as well as the extent to which they constrain, or contribute to liberalising, the country's economy. The aim was also to analyse the regulatory framework for competition as an example of how EU law affects the legal and economic system in Lithuania. Finally, the conference was aimed at discussing the main concerns relating to competition and its regulations in Lithuania.

Addressing these issues became top priority for several reasons. First of all, a new law on competition was underway. The central concern in this respect was that the draft law obscured further the already ambiguous concept of competition and established patterns of competition unconducive to free market relationships. As Mr. Alaistar Sutton of the UK-based White&Case company and previously the European Commission noted at the conference, these issues are very topical but all too often neglected in Brussels. "Once bogged down in regulating competition, we often forget what all this competition is about", Mr. Sutton said.

Another reason for holding a conference on competition and the European Union was Euro-zeal and a lack of pragmatism in judging the EU on the part of Lithuania and its officialdom. Under such circumstances, we thought it healthy to look at what implications integration into the EU would have for the people of Lithuania (see also "How the integration into the EU may affect the building of free market societies in post-socialist countries" by Elena Leontjeva, The Free Market No 5, 1998). LFMI's conference was probably one of those few fora which did not aim to reflect on the EU as an indisputable goal, but rather as a thinkable means to attain desired ends. And the effectiveness of this means was one of the topics addressed at the conference.

The events following the conference showed that its open, forthright and constructive discussions got results: some provisions of the competition bill were revised and amended during parliamentary debates. What is more important, LFMI prompted both Lithuanian and European authorities and academia to start rethinking the bigoted and often unjustified approach to regulating competition. We also urged a reappraisal of the policy of sacrificing freedom of contracts, the cornerstone of competition, for a seemingly competitive market.