Europe’s prosperity is stagnating because the EU has strayed from its core mission: a functioning internal market that drives economic growth and innovation. This manifesto argues for a renaissance built on enforcing market rules, enabling creative destruction, and cutting regulatory dead weight.
Summarized by AI.
Source summarized: The Constitution of Innovation: A New European Renaissance.
Key Points
- Refocus the EU on core economic functions: customs union, internal market, eurozone monetary policy, and common trade policy.
- Enforce the internal market by reviving infringement actions and dismantling barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers.
- Enable creative destruction: eliminate zombie firms, streamline bankruptcy, and support market exit as a driver of innovation.
- Cut overregulation and “risk paranoia” to allow bold bets in AI, genetics, and venture capital.
- Adopt six legal reforms to restore prosperity: abandon directives, create Specialized Commercial Courts, implement federal field preemption, launch a true 28th corporate regime, leverage existing institutions, and mandate sunset clauses with real impact assessments.
- Promote genuine mutual recognition: goods approved in one country should be accepted EU-wide without legal battles.
- Shift from harmonization to competition of approaches (“variable geometry”) to let willing countries innovate faster.
- Acknowledge trade-offs honestly—policies like climate regulation and data privacy carry real economic costs.
- Encourage entrepreneurship with secure property rights, deep capital markets, and legal certainty for risk-takers.
Summary
The essay makes a provocative argument: Europe has lost its economic edge because it abandoned the foundational logic of the Rome Treaty. The EU’s internal market—once the engine of prosperity—is now “a fiction,” with infringement cases down 75% in a decade and regulatory creep suffocating innovation. By piling on new policies in housing, animal welfare, and climate regulation without enforcing baseline economic freedoms, the EU has undermined both its competitiveness and the social model it seeks to preserve.
At the heart of the proposal is a call to embrace creative destruction. Europe must stop propping up zombie firms, remove barriers favoring incumbents, and enable market exit through flexible labor rules and streamlined bankruptcy. Risk-taking, the essay insists, is not a threat to Europe’s future but its lifeline. From AI to genetic engineering, innovation requires bold bets—and Europe’s culture of over-precaution is “killing its future.” Ukraine’s wartime ingenuity with drones is held up as a vivid example of how empowering citizens and entrepreneurs leads to rapid, low-cost solutions.
To achieve a renaissance, the authors outline six concrete legal reforms. First, eliminate directives in favor of directly applicable regulations to end the 27-versions problem. Second, create Specialized Commercial Courts to rapidly adjudicate internal market violations and issue EU-wide injunctions. Third, adopt federal field preemption so that when the EU legislates in its core areas, conflicting national rules vanish. Fourth, craft a viable 28th corporate regime that firms can opt into to scale across Europe, learning from the failure of the Societas Europaea. Fifth, use existing institutions like the Unified Patent Court or the Strasbourg Court instead of duplicating them. Finally, fix legislative practice with mandatory sunset clauses, rigorous cost-benefit analysis at every stage, and transparency to prevent the entrenchment of unnecessary regulation.
The tone is both urgent and optimistic. Europe, with its 450 million educated citizens and vast wealth, has the ingredients for a new industrial renaissance. But it must abandon the illusion of cost-free policymaking, embrace regulatory humility, and trust its people to build the future. A “much better Europe” is possible—if the Union stops walling itself in with rules and starts focusing on prosperity above all else.
- 🤖 The Constitution of Innovation: A New European Renaissance – A manifesto arguing the EU must cut regulatory overreach, restore the internal market, and embrace risk-driven innovation to spark a new European renaissance.
#tech #culture #innovation #economics #policy
Summarized by ChatGPT on Nov 12, 2025 at 6:58 AM.