Antonios Nestoras, Founder and CEO of the European Policy Innovation Council, contributed to EUROPEN’s Single Market Day with remarks on the strategic importance of the Single Market for Europe’s competitiveness, innovation capacity, and political cohesion.
His intervention focused on a simple but often overlooked point: the Single Market is not merely a technical framework for removing barriers. It is Europe’s most important scale-making mechanism. In a continent defined by national fragmentation, different regulatory traditions, and dispersed economic capacity, the Single Market creates the conditions under which European firms, ideas, capital, and talent can interact at continental scale.
This is central to Europe’s competitiveness challenge. The Draghi agenda has made clear that Europe must increase productivity, deepen integration, and remove obstacles that prevent innovation from scaling. But this cannot be achieved through industrial policy alone. It requires a Single Market that works as a genuine field of competition and cooperation, allowing firms to grow beyond national boundaries and giving European innovation the space to become globally relevant.
EPIC’s contribution placed the Single Market in a broader historical and strategic context. Europe’s fragmentation has often been a source of weakness. But when organised properly, it can also become a source of dynamism: competition, experimentation, interaction, and institutional learning. The Single Market is the modern instrument through which Europe transforms fragmentation into productive scale.
The discussion also connects directly to EPIC’s wider work on competitiveness, regulatory simplification, and the implementation of the Draghi recommendations through the Draghi Observatory and draghiwatch.eu.
For EPIC, the future of European competitiveness depends not only on new funding or new strategies, but on completing the internal market that Europe already built — and making it fit for the next generation of technological and industrial competition.
