While lawyers have been identified as key actors in State-building processes (Karpik & Halliday 1998), and despite the fact that the Common Market is famously a legal construct (Stone Sweet 2004), there is no such thing as an institutionalized European bar. How is it then that in such context the legal professions have remained so different and no strong EU-centered profession has emerged?
This paper, looking at the first moment of the E.E.C. and the negotiations of the 1977 directive regarding the freedom to provide services for lawyers, tries to understand this contradiction. Despite the exclusion of lawyers from the Treaty of Rome (article 55), the European Commission and more specifically the DG Internal Market, tried from 1959 to include them in this project. But the opposition of the bars, who see any european intervention as a threat for the principle of autoregulation, and their links with Ministries of Justice (Abbott 1988) lead to a sectorial legislation, below european entrepreneurs’ expectations. Negotiations of the 1977 directive are thus indicative of a double failure in the establishment of a European profession: the result of the negotiations has little impact on the profession due to the compromises that have been made with national bars and the Council of European bar created in order to present a united positions of the bars at the European level is wracked by internal conflicts.
The second part of this paper highlights the profiles of the first european competition lawyers. A new ideal type of european lawyers is emerging through those first competition specialists. They share a common background and common values: a link with the United States (the American legal style), they are embedded in academic and political networks and remain until the 1980’s secondary actors in their national environment (anti establishment’s position).
