The Securitization of Market Competition? EU Economic Statecraft in the Age of Geopolitics

The European Union’s approach to market competition, historically based on promoting a level playing field, without state aid or market concentration, is undergoing significant changes. As originally enshrined in the treaties that built the Single European Market, the EU’s model emphasized neoliberal competition policies. However, competition is now being “securitized” in the EU, reshaped by geopolitical concerns rather than purely economic ones. This shift is reflected in new industrial policies and foreign economic strategies that merge market activism with security concerns. The change is surprising, as the EU was initially established as a peace project, not a traditional state with national interests. How will the intertwining of market and security logics shape the EU going forward?

Preparatory reading
McNamara, Kathleen R.2023. “Transforming Europe? The EU’s Industrial Policy and Geopolitical Turn.” Journal of European Public Policy 31 (9): 2371–96.

Kathleen R. McNamara is Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on globalization and the European Union, with a special interest in how politics, culture, and identity shape markets. At Georgetown, she co-directs the Global Political Economy Project, which seeks to reinvent the way we study global markets. In Spring 2023, she was the inaugural Simone Veil Fellow at the European University Institute, researching the EU’s new industrial policy and geopolitical shift. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, and taught at Princeton University and Sciences Po (Paris). She received the International Studies Association’s 2018 Distinguished Scholar in International Political Economy award and the ISA’s 2020 SWIPE Award for Mentoring Women in International Political Economy. Her books include The Politics of Everyday Europe: Constructing Authority in the European Union and The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union.