Transforming Europe? The EU's industrial policy and geopolitical turn

Markets require rules, made and enforced by governments, and modern market-making has therefore unfolded as an intrinsic part of state-building. While the European Union is not a state, it has not been immune to these processes. Over the last three decades it has expanded its Single European Market and created a currency while constructing European political authority and deepening its institutional capacities. The EU has done this through supranational market-making largely centred on neoliberal precepts of competition and openness. Today, however, the EU is breaking with that tradition by pursuing a visibly interventionist European industrial policy and geopolitical market strategy. I suggest a theoretical framework to illuminate how this policy turn may reconfigure the EU’s political authority and build it as a polity. After briefly identifying the contours of the new European industrial and geoeconomic policy, I outline a research agenda to probe how the new market activism may reformulate societal interests and coalitions, increase the politicisation of the EU’s governing institutions, raise the stakes for democratic legitimation, and project the EU as a geopolitical actor. The conclusion notes how this new market-making translates into significant policy challenges for both the EU and the international economic order.