The growth of EU Regulation

EU Law provides rules, institutions, and governance arrangements with extraordinary reach in terms of both goals pursued and subjects regulated. Some of the EU’s regulatory ambition can be understood as supporting the European project within the logic of economic integration (e.g. competition law; the ECB). Other projects, such as recent regulations of the digital economy and green transition, are expression of the EU taking on, through the decades, more and more social and ecological concerns. Scholarly and political controversy has accompanied the growth of EU regulation, which many saw as over-extended or weakly democratic. In turn, EU regulation has been widely celebrated, not only for its reach and ambition, but also as possessing distinctive qualities which make it well-placed to deal with contemporary regulatory problems.

Increasing socio-economic and technical complexity, interdependencies, and systemic risks, make the regulation of contemporary globalized markets and societies intractable: pervasive uncertainty exists around the problems entailed by novel technologies and economic arrangements, for whom these problems manifest, and how to best remedy them. In this context, the EU’s preference for broad open-ended principles, and flexible rules, to be specified through decentralized enforcement, has been theorized as a model to deal with uncertainty. EU regulation, many have claimed, provides learning and deliberative spaces that produce better regulatory solutions and techniques – a model for other jurisdictions, national and transnational, to emulate.

Today, the EU and its style of regulation are under pressure as newer and more radical forms of uncertainty emerge and question its assumptions. For one thing, the threats of climate change, as, arguably, the central regulatory problem of our time, are existential and may not allow margins for error. More generally, the risks and dislocating effects of some recent technical developments, starting from AI, are potentially so intense that even well-oiled regulatory techniques may prove insufficient. Re-emerging geopolitical tensions and new interdependencies reveal the fragility of the EU regulatory project, especially in the face of economic and military force. Finally, backlash against EU regulation, and more broadly, liberal values and expertise, threatens the foundations of the EU.

Among the questions asked by the conference are:

• Is there continuity with previous phases of EU regulation? Or are we entering a new moment, and, if so, what are its features?
• Can models of governance pioneered in the EU still offer a model for the world’s future prosperity in an age of geoeconomic instability, climate crises, and backsliding democracy?