Europe was initially built around the market and competition. This is why the European Commission has devoted substantial efforts since 1957 to dismantling national industrial policies by targeting state aids that could distort this competition in the common and then single market. However, due to a very limited budget and political difficulties in reaching agreements on this matter, no European industrial policy has emerged. The only exceptions, Airbus in aeronautics and Arianespace in space, were born outside the strictly community framework, through cooperation between states. And in the current state of European law, it is uncertain that such operations could be repeated without encountering a veto from the European Commission.
Dependency. Due to this lack of industrial policy, unlike Japan, the United States, or China, and also due to its very open internal market, Europe missed the latest waves of technological innovation: microelectronics, computers, mobile telephony, the Internet. Following Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the operations of the NSA, the United States’ cyber intelligence agency, and the entry of Chinese multinationals into the European market, massively supported by their state and an opaque financial system, Europeans eventually realized the state of weakness and dependency to which this lack of industrial policy was leading them.
With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in 2018, various actions in the field of competition and intellectual property, and others in the fiscal domain, the European Union is finally beginning to try to assert itself against the GAFA, the American digital giants. At the same time, the Union adopted last February its first common framework for controlling foreign investments. The Commission has also slightly relaxed its doctrine on mergers to more easily allow the creation of European giants, although it recently opposed the Siemens and Alstom merger in railways. But in terms of a properly articulated industrial policy, it remains in its infancy, even if the Commission wants to redirect the next European budget (2021-2027) towards support for research and innovation, notably by cutting back on the common agricultural policy and cohesion funds.
G. D., Alternatives รฉconomiques
