Politics & Power Quote by Mario Monti

A technocrat’s ideal of purity is doing a lot of work here: keep the analysis about territory, ignore corporate passports, and you insulate competition policy from the grubby pressures of geopolitics. Monti is selling “neutrality” as both method and moral stance. In EU antitrust, where markets are defined by where commerce happens rather than where headquarters sit, that sounds like common sense. It also sounds like a protective spell against the oldest temptation in economic governance: using regulation as a proxy for industrial strategy or trade retaliation.

The phrasing is revealingly defensive. “Of course” performs inevitability, as if only a naïf would think nationality should matter. “Best guarantee” signals that he’s arguing in an environment where guarantees are being demanded - lobbying, diplomatic pressure, or public unease about foreign champions swallowing domestic firms. Monti’s subtext is: if you let nationality in through the front door, you will never get it out again. Every merger becomes a flag dispute; every enforcement action becomes a bilateral incident.

Context matters: this is the voice of a European competition commissioner-era worldview, forged in a union trying to build a single market while being accused (from multiple sides) of favoring European firms or, conversely, being too tough on them. Monti’s line aims to keep antitrust credible by keeping it boring: a rules-based discipline, not a stage for trade wars. The irony is that insisting on “total disregard” is itself a political move - an attempt to depoliticize an arena everyone knows is already political.