Europe Cannot Deregulate with a System Designed to Regulate
Speaking at the US–EU Transatlantic Business Summit in Brussels, Antonios Nestoras, Founder and President of the European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC), delivered a structural critique of Europe’s competitiveness debate.
Europe’s challenge is not primarily diagnostic. It is institutional.
The European Commission was originally built as a regulatory engine. Its historic mission was to construct a single market out of fragmented national jurisdictions. That task required harmonisation, rule-making, and regulatory expansion across policy domains. The system was designed to integrate markets by producing common rules.
It succeeded.
Today, however, Europe demands something fundamentally different. The political call is no longer for regulatory construction, but for regulatory simplification. Cut red tape. Streamline procedures. Reduce burdens. Compete with the United States. Compete with China.
These are not the same institutional tasks.
Designing rules to integrate markets and dismantling accumulated regulation operate on different logics. The current governance architecture — built around 27 member states, multiple political systems, layered competences, and complex co-decision procedures — was optimised for expansion and harmonisation, not subtraction and simplification.
Across Brussels, there is broad agreement that Europe’s problem is one of execution rather than diagnosis. The reforms are known. The objectives are clear. Yet when implementation repeatedly stalls, a deeper question emerges: is the issue execution — or is it structural?
If competitiveness reforms continue to underperform, institutional reform may need to accompany regulatory reform. Not cosmetic adjustments, but structural reflection on whether the current decision-making model is fit for purpose in an era defined by geopolitical competition, industrial scale, and speed.
Europe has reinvented itself before — from the Coal and Steel Community to the Single Market to Economic and Monetary Union. Its history is one of adaptation under pressure.
If adaptation proves politically impossible in the current moment, the problem will not be regulatory complexity alone. It will signal a deeper condition.
The risk is not simply overregulation.
The risk is political decay.
