For the readers of this blog, the following contribution presents a topic that may be of interest because it demonstrates the need to unify the regulation of the state as an heir in inheritance law and proposes improvements to Article 33 of the EU Succession Regulation at the level of its application. Currently, many issues arise from the regulation of heirless estates and Article 33 still does not provide a unified model. Instead, it leaves significant discretion to the Member States, which creates further legal uncertainty and practical problems.

Continue reading “The State as the Last-Degree Successor in Europe: What Lies Behind Article 33 of the EU Succession Regulation?”

EU-China trade relations are already managed through a dense set of political, economic and sectoral dialogues. Current disputes span electric vehicles, medical devices, export controls, industrial subsidies, access to public contracts and the security of critical supply chains. The EU-China Summit sets broad political direction; the High-Level Economic and Trade Dialogue (HLED) covers economy, finance, trade and investment; and sectoral dialogues address individual files. What remains less developed is a regular ministerial platform that coordinates several enforcement-related files, combines them with joint monitoring and links technical work back to political oversight.

Continue reading “Can Trade Talks Make Enforcement Work? Why the EU-China Trade and Investment Consultations Matter Beyond Diplomacy”

This blog post is based on the article “Enforcement Design in EU Digital Regulation: Lessons for the Digital Fairness Act”, published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation (2026).

The European Union already possesses an extensive body of rules governing digital markets. Consumer protection law, data protection law, platform regulation, competition-inspired digital regulation, and emerging AI governance frameworks all seek to address unfair practices in the digital economy. Yet the persistence of dark patterns, manipulative interfaces, opaque personalisation systems, and exploitative design techniques raises an important question: if the rules already exist, why do enforcement gaps remain?

 

Continue reading “Designing Enforcement for the Digital Fairness Act: Lessons from the EU’s Digital Rulebook”

The forthcoming publication by IVAP of the book From Europe to Basque Municipalities: Multilevel Governance and Citizen Participation in the Resettlement of Refugees, following its receipt of the runner-up award in the 2025 Leizaola Prize, provides an opportunity to reflect on an issue of growing legal and political importance: how to design effective, coordinated and legitimate responses to the resettlement of refugees.

Continue reading “[REPOST] From Europe to Basque Municipalities: Multilevel Governance and Citizen Participation in the Resettlement of Refugees”

We live in an age of grand challenges, from climate change and the digitalisation of markets to rising inequality. Yet legal systems struggle to respond effectively, constrained by entrenched disciplinary boundaries. Law and regulation, public and private law, and European Union (EU) law and national law often operate in separate silos, limiting meaningful dialogue. My book, Market Regulation and Private Law: The Quest for Reconciliation in European Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a holistic theoretical perspective on the relationship between market regulation and private law, with significant practical implications for a wide range of areas.

Continue reading “[REPOST] Piecing Together Market Regulation and Private Law: The Reconciliation Puzzle”

The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) is one of the most ambitious regulatory experiments in recent memory. Adopted in June 2024, it transforms large corporations operating in the EU into mandatory gatekeepers of their entire supply chains, requiring them to monitor, prevent, and mitigate environmental and human rights harms not just in their own operations, but across networks of global suppliers. The stakes are enormous: climate change and human rights abuses are among the most pressing challenges of our time. Yet good intentions alone do not make good law.

Continue reading “The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: Good Intentions, Flawed Design”

Caught in complexity: Why EU Fisheries Rules Fail in Practice

If you talk to operators, authorities, and other stakeholders in the fishing sector, you will hear the same complaints: the regulatory framework governing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is too complex, too unclear, and too inconsistently applied. Until the rules are simplified and better supported through cooperation, operators will continue to experience too much administrative burden. If the rules aren’t followed, the CFP will not be enforced.

That’s where the European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA) comes in. Since 2005, it has been responsible for coordinating inspections and supporting CFP enforcement across the EU. Operators and NGOs view EFCA’s work, particularly training, surveillance, and information sharing, as valuable. Nevertheless, there are a number of interrelated? issues that currently hold back the effective and efficient enforcement of the CFP:

• Regulatory Complexity: Operators consistently highlight the complexity of the framework itself. Attempts to simplify fisheries control, particularly through the 2009 reform, have not gone far enough. The system remains difficult to navigate, with many provisions still requiring clarification. Take the landing obligation in Article 15 of the basic CFP. It sounds straightforward, fish subject to catch limits must be retained, recorded and landed. However, the provision spans over ten paragraphs which contain various exceptions and cross references to other Union documents, such as multi-annual plans adopted by the Commission. This seemingly straightforward obligation is therefore entangled in a complex legislative network.
• Lack of Clarity: In practice, rules are often vague, open to interpretation, and applied differently across Member States. At the same time, the standards are also difficult to implement because of their rigidity. Operators have identified the following standards as particularly problematic:
  • weighing practices,
  • tolerances,
  • transport,
  • prior notification, and
  • transmission deadlines
• Administrative Burdens: This vagueness and amount of obligations imposes much administrative burden on the operators, which in turn decreases compliance. While recent changes to the frameworks reduced 28% of administrative burdens to the operators, it must be noted that new obligations have also been imposed. For example, operators must now keep an electronic logbook of all fishing operations. As many vessels conduct several (and up to 20) operations a day, this requirement will increase error risk.

Ultimately, these concerns reflect one underlying issue: the rules are too complicated and insufficiently clear. This lack of understanding leads to continuous high infringement rates at around 10.5% and ineffective protection of fisheries. EFCA, being tasked with the implementation of the CFP, should take additional actions to:

• enhance cooperation,
• exchanging information, and
• clarify applicable standards

Casting a wide net: Hard or Soft Law?

How then to ensure the right bait is employed to improve the coherence and effectiveness of EFCA’s enforcement? Two approaches may be considered, overhaul EFCA’s formal powers through hard law, and or tackle the problem within the existing legal framework through soft law solution.         

Reeling in more direct enforcement powers for EFCA would require a revision to the EFCA regulation to increase their mandate and powers. Formal expansion of operational powers does not lie entirely in uncharted waters, a similar development can be observed in other EU agencies such as Frontex. Much like EFCA, Frontex started out with merely planning and coordination powers but was granted its own executive staff, resources and decision making powers following the 2015 refugee crisis. Importantly, they gained both supervisory and intervention powers giving the agency direct control over enforcement by national authorities.

Expanding powers through hard law seems attractive from an EU perspective since it can remove national disparities. This can in turn improve uniformity and compliance across Member States. However, this approach may catch EFCA swimming upstream. Revision of regulations requires political consensus, which might prove problematic when the division of powers between the EU and the Member States hangs in the balance. Additionally, the EU legislature seems to want to rely on national enforcement networks for the simple reason that powers are accompanied by resources which could put stress on the Union Budget. Of course, simplification of the CFP would also require such legislative reform which may again prove difficult in light of the attached procedures.

Alternatively, soft law instruments are not legally binding nor enforceable and are often written off as ineffective. However, the value of such instruments in the case of EFCA cannot be understated. After all, deterrence through sanctioning is not the only fish in the sea when it comes to compliance. In fact, pursuing enforcement based on positive support may better reflect the current reality regarding the CFP’s enforcement.

National authorities are struggling due to the technical nature of the enforceable norms. If the issue does not lie in opposition to the rules but rather inability to comply, direct enforcement would not incentivise national authorities to comply any more than a fish would be incentivised to bite a hook it cannot reach. Use of soft law must be navigated cautiously, overproduction of norms may cause more complexity than clarity. Nevertheless, as demonstrated below, when emphasis is put on clarification of norms to complement the CFP, EFCA may yet be able to provide operational guidance and improve accessibility through soft law instruments.

Fishing for answers: The ‘AI Act Service Desk’ and ‘Solvit’

AI Act Service Desk

One way to improve accessibility and operational guidance is to create an easy to use mechanism that increases the understanding people have of what their obligations are under the law. This can be done in a number of ways, but it is interesting to see how this issue is already tackled in other areas. For example, the AI Act is another law that is plagued by a large number of complicated rules that could negatively impact effective and consistent application. To increase effective implementation of the AI Act, mechanisms were created to provide information to those who encounter the AI Act in their work and lives. Even though the AI Act and the CFP are not completely similar, looking at how the issue is tackled in this area of EU law is a good source of inspiration.

The AI Act Service Desk was designed to aid stakeholders in navigating EU law requirements on AI. This provides the stakeholders with more legal certainty as to whether they are following the laws, which would ultimately benefit the AI market in the Union. Here, individuals and organizations can ask questions about the rules to experts in the field and get further assistance on their issues. Another part of this Service Desk is the Single Information Platform, which provides online interactive tools to understand the AI Act. For example, the AI Act Explorer allows people to intuitively search for information in the Act that is most important for them, and the Compliance Checker provides a way for people to check whether their AI system is in compliance with the rules in the Act.

Additionally, the Apply AI Alliance forum was created as a space for stakeholders and the Commission to share news, opinions, knowledge and recommendations. This so-called ‘Community Exchange Platform’ is open to everyone and provides a good opportunity for those working in the sector as well as lay-persons to learn about AI and the AI Act. This platform is more focused on innovations in the field of AI rather than on the AI Act itself. However, the idea of an exchange platform where experiences can be shared between those having experience with the legislation is a useful tool to educate people.

Overall, these AI mechanisms provide examples of ways in which people can interact with the EU rules to understand how they work in an easy and user-friendly way. One potential issue with such tools, however, is how to obtain the necessary funding and resources to create and maintain them. All of the examples provided above are managed by the Commission. It remains to be seen whether EFCA can manage to recreate its own tools within their funding or whether the Commission needs to lend a helping hand in this respect. Nonetheless, the tools do provide good examples on which EFCA can build its own framework to help people navigate the vast sea of legislation that is the CFP.

 

Solvit

Another way through which compliance can be reached is the European Administrative Networks (EAN). One of these EANs is Solvit, an informal non-binding mechanism which handles misapplication of EU law by public authorities in cross-border movement. Solvit is a network of centres staffed by civil servants in every EU Member State, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. Its general objective is to deliver fast, effective and informal solutions to cross-border problems for citizens and businesses free of charge. This makes it an early problem-solving tool offering an alternative to Courts by bringing about changes in national administrations through exerting peer pressure to ensure compliance. At the same time, it prevents the delegation of national responsibility to supranational organisations.

Its main strength is that it is user-centric, pragmatic, and has an informal approach. Solvit has two faces: the first being a formal problem-solving network and the second being an informal network of member states engaging in discussion on the application of EU law. This shows a ‘network spirit’ where civil servants discuss matters beyond the cases and therefore become better equipped to make for an important government tool promoting compliance with the internal market. Solvit is also a strong source of information when it comes to the workings of the Single Market. This is because it also detects and monitors systemic issues in the Single Market due to these being flagged through complaints.

The power of such an EAN lies in the fact that it is a tool to close the gap between EU legislation and national implementation. By providing a middle-ground for networking interactions with a focus on joint problem solving, citizens and businesses are better equipped to use their rights and national administrations are better equipped to comply.

The enforcement of CFP could be heavily improved by this network approach. Just like a school of fishes swimming together for protection, this networking approach of best practices may fend off the non-compliant sharks in the water. This balance of having an informal network of Member States makes enforcement a less individualised matter, but benefits the whole. Not only through enforcement by itself, but through being an information system too. 

In summary, a similar approach as Solvit, would allow citizens and businesses to gain more access to information and allow for increased agency in order to comply with the CFP. An EAN that translates the CFP could close the gap between the legislation and its implementation. Essentially making for smooth sailing in the often choppy waters of enforcement of the CFP and anchoring Member States to cooperative problem-solving and shared responsibility. 

Reeling in the solution: Solving  EFCA’s inaccessibility

The current deficiencies with EFCA’s enforcement of the CFP can be largely attributed to its inaccessibility, particularly the disconnection between the provisions and those fishermen and operators who must carry them out. This is not particularly surprising – one look at the agency’s webpage will reveal that it is almost as complex to navigate as the Regulation setting out EFCA’s tasks and competences. The online page contains little information on the agency beyond its general mission and current activities, causing those working in the field who seek clarity on the implementation of certain provisions to feel like fish out of the water.

With this in mind, the following soft-law solution can be brought forward to remedy the agency’s inaccessibility. In light of the widely successful EU initiatives of ‘Solvit’ and the ‘AI Service Desk’, the EFCA could adopt some of these ideas and introduce a direct line of contact with legal experts through its webpage. Much like ‘Solvit’, the EFCA website should include an ‘Ask the Experts’ tab where those knowledgeable on how the implementation of the CFP works in practice can answer those who are less experienced in real time.

One might reasonably wonder why this should be an EU matter. At first glance, it might seem that the EU has bigger fish to fry. Why should the EU offer a solution to what seems like a national implementation problem? The answer is simple – EFCA comprises almost 2000 Union inspectors and 3000 trained officials coming from all 27 Member States. As such, it contains a wider circle of experts than any national fisheries agency. An EU-wide ‘Ask the Experts’ line would therefore create a wide and diverse network of specialists in the field who can provide up-to-date information to any fisheries professional within the Union.

The bottom line is that, as proven by past EU-driven initiatives, the best way to ensure compliance with the agency’s complex rules is to bring these laws closer to the very people who are expected to implement them. By bringing industrial operators and fishermen into direct contact with legal experts who can easily answer their questions, EFCA will streamline the current national and individual compliance of the CFP. In doing so, the agency will strengthen the professional development of these individuals, ensuring the long-term sustainability of our waters and echoing the familiar proverb that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him how to fish, you feed him (and our fisheries) for a lifetime.”

By Oliwia, Kaloyan and Carolin

The problem and regulatory framework

Pharmacovigilance produces near-constant scrutiny of medicines on the EU market. Yet in the years since the EU gave itself the power to fine companies for pharmacovigilance failures, that power has been formally triggered once, and no fine has followed.

The EU monitors the safety of authorised medicines continuously. Companies must track and report adverse events, national authorities inspect their systems, and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) assesses the safety of centrally authorised products on an ongoing basis. Set against that volume of routine oversight, one figure stands out: since Regulation (EC) No 658/2007, the Penalties Regulation, empowered the EU to impose financial penalties for such failures, it has produced a single infringement procedure, and that procedure closed without a fine.

Why so much monitoring but so little penalising? Part of the answer is that enforcement power is divided. A national authority may detect a problem, the EMA investigates it, but the decision on penalties is taken elsewhere, by the European Commission. When responsibility for an outcome is split this way, it can become unclear who is answerable for the result.

This post uses two distinct ideas to explain that. The first is responsibility in Dennis Thompson’s sense: ownership of an outcome, that is, whose conduct produced it. The second is accountability in Mark Bovens’s sense: the obligation of an actor to explain and justify its conduct to a forum that can question it and pass judgement. The argument is that when many hands produce an enforcement outcome, responsibility for the overall result becomes diffuse, and no forum is positioned to hold that overall result to account.

The framework itself is extensive. Directive 2001/83/EC sets out the general rules for medicinal products. For authorised medicines distributed within the EU, Regulation (EC) No 726/2004 establishes the EMA’s role and powers. The Clinical Trials Regulation and the EU’s pharmacovigilance rules add further safety and monitoring obligations. What determines whether these rules matter in practice is how they are applied.

Pharmacovigilance rules  –  the legal requirements and guidelines ensuring that medicines are monitored for safety, so that their benefits continue to outweigh their risks.

 

In practice, enforcement is divided between actors, each with a defined role:

• National authorities detect problems at Member State level
• The EMA investigates and assesses possible infringements
• The European Commission decides whether to impose penalties

The EMA is central to supervision and investigation, but it cannot impose fines. Although penalties can reach 5% of a company’s EU turnover for certain infringements, the power to impose them rests with the Commission. This leaves a gap between investigating a breach and deciding what follows from it. When enforcement is shared across institutions, establishing accountability becomes harder.

Comparative perspective

Other EU agencies are built differently. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) can investigate breaches and impose penalties directly. ESMA can supervise specific market actors and adopt binding decisions, including financial penalties, without depending on another institution; the ECB supervises banks and sanctions breaches of EU banking rules. In those models, the body that builds the case also owns the outcome. The EMA model separates the two.

How Enforcement Works in Practice

One procedure, nineteen medicines, no fine

The first and, to date, the only infringement procedure opened under the Penalties Regulation tells us less about wrongdoing than about how the system divides authority.

 

80 000+ REPORTS LEFT UNASSESSED

~5 years FROM OPENING TO CLOSURE

€0 PENALTY IMPOSED

How it began

In 2012, a routine pharmacovigilance inspection by the UK’s MHRA, part of a coordinated European inspection programme, identified serious shortcomings in Roche’s pharmacovigilance system. Around 80,000 reports collected through a Roche-sponsored patient support programme in the United States had not been evaluated to determine whether they should have been reported to EU authorities as suspected adverse reactions. These included 15,161 reports of patient death. Whether the deaths had any causal link to the medicines was not known; under EU law the reports nonetheless had to be assessed, and they had not been.

The findings were referred to the European Commission, which asked the EMA to open a formal infringement procedure under the Penalties Regulation.

The procedure, step-by-step

2012	MHRA inspection identifies shortcomings. Some 80,000 unassessed reports found in Roche’s pharmacovigilance system. At the Commission’s request, the EMA opens an infringement procedure on 23 October 2012 under the Penalties Regulation.
2013	EMA finalises its benefit-risk safety review. No new safety concerns identified across the medicines concerned; this review is separate from, and without prejudice to, the infringement procedure. (EMA, 19 Nov 2013)
2014-2016	EMA builds the infringement case. Its initial report is finalised in April 2014 and passed to the Commission; the file returns to the EMA in 2015 for further inquiry; the EMA sends its final report to the Commission on 1 July 2016. The procedure concerns 19 centrally authorised products.
Dec 2017	Commission closes the procedure. Satisfied with Roche’s remedial actions, the Commission decides not to issue a statement of objections and closes the case. No fine is imposed. (Commission statement, 15 Dec 2017)

 

Who did what?

 

MHRA identified the problem

→

Commission asked EMA to act

→

EMA investigated

→

Commission decided the outcome

How to read the outcome

Enforcement did happen. Roche implemented remedial measures, the EMA produced a detailed record of the failures, and the safety review found no impact on the benefit-risk balance of the medicines. Closing a case once a company has remediated is a recognised regulatory approach. In EU competition law, the Commission can resolve non-cartel cases through a commitments procedure without imposing a penalty. On this reading, enforcement here corrected behaviour rather than punishing it.

But the division of roles has a cost for visibility. The institution that built the case had no formal say in how it ended. The Commission, which decided, published only a brief statement of its reasons, namely that it was satisfied with Roche’s remedial actions, rather than a detailed, reasoned account of why remediation was preferred to a penalty.

KEY OBSERVATION

The EMA carries the investigative burden; the Commission carries the decisional authority. The framework does not clearly require either institution to explain publicly how investigative findings translate into the final decision.

 

This design is deliberate. Under Regulation 658/2007, the EMA initiates and conducts the inquiry while the Commission takes the final decision. What the Roche case shows is not merely how one procedure unfolded, but how decisional power is distributed, and how that distribution affects whether responsibility for the outcome is visible.

What are the sanctions for?

Whether the absence of a fine is a problem depends on what a penalty is supposed to do. If its role were purely restorative (to repair an undesirable situation), then the outcome looks adequate: Roche overhauled its reporting systems, the outstanding reports were assessed, and the safety review found no effect on the benefit-risk balance of the medicines. The system was, in that narrow sense, repaired.

The harder questions concern the other functions. A penalty also has a deterrent and preventive role, signalling to every marketing authorisation holder that failing to assess tens of thousands of safety reports carries a real cost, and an expressive one, marking publicly that an obligation central to patient safety was breached. Remediation after the fact does little for either. This is why the accountability concern here does not depend on the claim that Roche deserved a fine. The concern is that a discretionary choice with system-wide signalling effects was made without a reasoned public justification. The problem is the unexplained exercise of discretion, not the absence of a penalty as such.

Who is responsible?

The Roche case exposes a recurring difficulty: when several institutions each follow their own rules correctly, yet the overall outcome is still open to question, it becomes unclear who bears responsibility for that outcome. This is the “problem of many hands.”

Dennis Thompson named the difficulty that arises wherever a task is divided among many actors:

“Because many different officials contribute in many ways to decisions and policies of government, it is difficult even in principle to identify who is morally responsible for political outcomes.” 

Dennis Thompson (1980), p.905

Many hands, or many eyes?

A reader might object that this is really a case of the “problem of many eyes” rather than many hands. Bovens draws both, and the distinction is worth stating precisely. Many hands describes the actor side: a forum faces several potential actors and cannot easily determine who contributed what, or who can be called to account. Many eyes describes the forum side: a single actor answers to many forums at once, each applying its own criteria. Many eyes is a problem of forum surplus (Bovens, “Public Accountability,” 2007, 182–208).

On the many-eyes reading, the accountable actor is Roche, facing a divided set of overseers: the MHRA, national authorities, the EMA and the Commission. That reading is coherent, but it answers a different question from the one this post asks. The concern here is not how Roche answers to its overseers; it is who owns the enforcement outcome, that is, the decision to close the case without a penalty or a reasoned justification. On that question the case fits the many-hands pattern: the MHRA, the EMA and the Commission each acted within their powers, yet responsibility for the combined result is not clearly attributable to any of them.

And it comes with a twist. Many eyes is a problem of too many forums; the difficulty here is the opposite. There is no forum at which the overall enforcement outcome must be justified. The case sits between the two: many hands on the actor side, and a forum gap, rather than a forum surplus, on the accountability side.

Applying this to EU pharmaceutical enforcement

In the Roche case, the EMA, the Commission and the MHRA each performed their role within their legal powers, and enforcement did take place: the failures were identified, investigated and remedied. But because the steps are carried out by different actors, no single institution oversees the process end to end. When the procedure closed without a fine and without a detailed public justification, it became difficult to identify who was responsible for that outcome. This is not the failure of any one institution but a feature of the system: responsibility is diffused across the stages of enforcement rather than attributable to a single actor.

Where responsibility sits, and where it does not

Political oversight does not generally focus on individual enforcement decisions, and where no formal sanction is imposed, judicial review may be unavailable, raising a concern under Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees the right to an effective remedy.

Accountability and design

On Bovens’s account, accountability is a relationship between an actor and a forum: the actor must explain and justify its conduct, the forum can question it and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences. In the Roche procedure, there is no point at which the overall enforcement outcome must be justified in this way. Individual steps can be reviewed, but the combined result is not clearly subject to any single accountability forum. Accountability is missing precisely where responsibility is hardest to locate, which is how diffused responsibility (many hands) becomes an accountability gap.

Unlike the EMA, ESMA and the ECB can investigate and sanction directly, so the institution that builds the case also owns the outcome.

The issue, then, is not that enforcement is absent but that responsibility for it is not clearly visible. Addressing this need not mean redesigning the system. Granting the EMA limited sanctioning powers, on the ESMA model, would close the gap between investigation and outcome. Requiring the Commission to publish reasoned decisions when it closes such cases would make the exercise of its discretion visible to Parliament, courts and the public. As enforcement increasingly runs through shared structures, making responsibility visible is a precondition for accountability to function at all.

Europe is spending more on defence than ever, but rising budgets have not been matched by greater coordination. This blog post explores the economic rationale behind the EDA, its historical development, and how its role may need to evolve in today’s shifting geopolitical landscape.

By Martin, Alexandra, Gillis and Julia

While defence is and has always been a national responsibility of each European Union (EU) Member State, defence coordination and efficiency is now more important than ever. The European Defence Agency (EDA) was founded in 2004 to promote defence collaboration in the EU and to support integration within the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) between Member States. Although defence spending has gone up in Member States, the collaborative procurement benchmark has consistently gone unmet, not because the EDA has failed as such, but because Member States have not made sufficient use of it for their joint procurement. The Agency can facilitate cooperation; it cannot compel it. This is why it has often been criticised for lacking teeth.

This blog post will therefore explore the economic reasoning of collaborative procurement behind the EDA and its historical development, after which the current geopolitical context will be analysed and how the EDA could and should react to this. This blog post argues that the EDA could be redesigned, by implementing several reforms and aligning its tasks with the current geopolitical context.

Spending More, Wasting Less

Europe is arming up. The EU’s 27 Member States spent €343 billion on defence in 2024 alone. But more money does not automatically buy more security. Part of the challenge is efficiency: turning each euro into more real military capability. Yet efficiency is only one side of the picture. European security depends at least as much on whether Member States are politically willing to use the capabilities they hold, as the response to Russia’s war in Ukraine has made clear. Even the best-equipped forces add little to collective security without the shared political will to deploy them. The EDA can help make spending more efficient, but it cannot manufacture that political will, which remains firmly with the Member States.

Efficiency can be achieved through quicker procurement, fewer duplicated national projects, and forces that can work together when it matters. That is the core economic argument for European defence cooperation. If Member States keep spending, buying, and developing in parallel, a great deal of that money risks being lost to fragmentation and inefficiency instead of being turned into usable collective strength.

At its core, the idea is straightforward, cooperation can help Member States to get more value from every Euro they spend. Defence equipment is extremely costly to research, produce, maintain, and upgrade. When each State follows its own path, defence orders stay small, due to limited national demand and technical standards that differ. Furthermore, national forces may end up utilizing systems that do not work well together within cross-border integrated forces. Economists describe this as a problem of fragmentation and the loss of economies of scale. In simple terms, the Member States individually, without coordinating their efforts, can end up paying more for less.

Defence can also be described as a special market. Governments do not buy ammunition, tanks or missile systems the way consumers buy groceries, phones or cars. National security concerns, political sensitivities, and domestic industrial interests often keep procurement focused and protected within national borders. This makes coordination harder, but also more necessary. The more procurement remains nationally fragmented, the greater the risk of duplication, incompatibility, and inefficient spending. The European Commission has repeatedly argued that a more integrated European defence market would support larger-scale production, stronger innovation, and more efficient procurement outcomes across borders.

Seen from this perspective, the economic rationale behind the EDA is not simply about “more Europe”. It is about reducing costs, overcoming coordination problems, and helping Member States turn rising defence budgets into stronger, more compatible, and more efficient capabilities.

The European Defence Agency

The EDA was established in 2004, at a time when European governments were becoming increasingly aware of a growing contradiction in their defence policies. On the one hand, security challenges were becoming more complex and often required collective responses. On the other hand, defence remained highly fragmented, with each Member State planning, spending, and procuring largely on its own.

This fragmentation was not a new problem, but it became more visible in the early 2000s. The EU’s experience in the Balkans during the 1990s exposed limitations in Europe’s ability to act cohesively in crisis situations. At the same time, global developments such as the September 11 attacks reinforced the need for more coordinated approaches to security and defence. European countries were also facing increasing pressure to do more with limited resources, while still maintaining a wide range of national military capabilities.

In light of these developments, the EDA was established to help address a key question: how can European countries cooperate more effectively in defence without giving up control over their own armed forces?

The Agency’s original legal basis was set out in a 2004 Joint Action under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Its role was later formalised in the Treaty of Lisbon, where Article 45 of the Treaty on European Union defines its main tasks. These include identifying capability gaps, encouraging cooperation between Member States, supporting defence research and industry, and evaluating whether agreed commitments are being followed. Its current structure and functioning are further detailed in Council Decision (CFSP) 2015/1835.

Notably, the EDA was not designed as a powerful central authority. Instead, it was conceived as a facilitator, an institution that could bring Member States together, provide expertise, and promote cooperation, without overriding national sovereignty. In other words, it reflects a broader EU approach to defence: improving coordination rather than centralising control.

Academic observations highlight this balancing act. Some scholars argue that the EDA represents a pragmatic solution, allowing states to work more closely together while keeping ultimate authority at the national level. Others point out that this same design also limits its impact, as cooperation ultimately depends on whether Member States choose to follow through on shared priorities.

In this context, the creation of the EDA was less about transforming European defence overnight, and more about managing an existing tension: the need for collective action in a policy area that remains deeply tied to national sovereignty. This tension continues to shape both the Agency’s role and its limitations today.

A New Geopolitical Era

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to ammunition shortages in the Ukraine and the EU, supply-chain pressure and wider uncertainty about European security, Member States have faced pressure to procure their military goods as quickly and efficiently as possible. The last years have however shown that this increase in urgency has not led to increased cooperation and that Member States still often value their sovereignty more than collectively procuring military goods. This may lead to duplication and over-reliance on non-EU suppliers.

This is also shown by the EDA’s collaborative procurement benchmark, set since 2007. As mentioned previously in this blog post, this benchmark has never been met. While the EU has estimated that the total EU defence expenditure has reached €381 billion in 2025, this increased spending has not been accompanied by a proportional increase in joint procurement among Member States.

An example of this is the French and German Future Combat Air System (FCAS), EU’s next generation fighter jet program, which aimed to improve the EU’s strategic autonomy and increase cooperation. While this could have been a great way to enlarge collaborative procurement among Member States, the FCAS has been described as potentially collapsed after Germany chose to purchase United States’ F-35 combat aircrafts instead of developing and procuring these via the FCAS-program.

The European Defence Agency 2.0

As described above, the geopolitical context in which the EDA operates has changed significantly since its establishment in 2004. Defence procurement has grown and become more urgent, but not necessarily more coordinated. While the industry grows, the economic inefficiencies, as described in section I, remain. This is where the redesigned role of the EDA comes in. By increasing coordination along the procurement chain, the EDA can address inefficiencies. Putting this into practice, requires structural rethinking the role of the EDA.

Any case for a stronger EDA has to be made against the institutional reality that the most supranational role in European defence is currently played not by the EDA but by the Commission. It is a question this section returns to below.

According to André Denk, EDA’s chief executive, the desire from Member States to do more on defence at EU level in line with the EU’s Defence Readiness 2030 programme, has increased. Denk introduced the redesigned role of the EDA in response to this call from Member States and the current turbulent geopolitical times. While the EDA’s traditional role remains, in essence, to coordinate rather than to centralise control, the amount of Member States in favour of expansion of the EDA’s mandate is rising. Denk called on Member States to: “use us to take forward the projects that one member state cannot.”

This call for a redesign of the EDA was also supported by former Estonian Prime Minister and current High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas. Kallas made a statement on the inefficiencies in EU defence procurement. She spoke about the lack of complementary procurement, the focus on national interest, and persisting fragmentation. Kallas concluded that the EDA needs to lead, not just facilitate, thereby expressing her vision for a stronger EDA.

Coming back to the EDA’s core tasks, these were designed as open norms. The redesign therefore does not change the Agency’s architecture so much as the use Member States are prepared to make of it. As defence ministers increasingly speak with a sense of urgency, the space for the EDA to coordinate widens accordingly. In other words, a revised role for the EDA does not require a new agency; it requires Member States to make fuller use of the one they already have.

Two caveats follow from this. First, this is a willingness to procure together, which is not the same as a willingness to act together: even a Europe that buys efficiently and fields interoperable forces contributes little to its own security if Member States are unwilling to deploy what they own, as the halting response to Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown. A stronger EDA can close a capability gap; it cannot close a resolve gap. Second, the EDA is not the only candidate for that coordinating role.

The EDA proposed five revised lines of action:

1. Scaling up research;
2. Consolidating EDA’s central capability role;
3. Support joint procurement;
4. Secure resources;
5. Leveraging existing partnerships.

Apart from increasing budgets for already existing competences, the EDA’s goal is to take a more prominent role in the supply chain. In practice, this results in the EDA to target shared requirements for joint acquisition before contracts are put to market. This strategy can improve efficiency in concrete ways. When demand is aggregated earlier and common requirements are established at the EU level, Member States can benefit from larger production runs, reduced unit costs, and greater leverage with suppliers. Furthermore, existing partnerships with, for example, Ukraine, Turkey and Canada are to be strengthened under the EDA procurement framework. This redesigned EDA is stepping beyond pure facilitation and increasingly towards centralisation, answering the Member States’ calls.

Important to note is that the EDA operates within fixed structural limits. It does not control national defence budgets, cannot compel Member States to procure jointly, and works alongside existing frameworks such as NATO. Any case for a stronger EDA must also be placed in its wider institutional setting. In recent years, the most visibly supranational role in European defence has been played not by the EDA but by the European Commission. The Commission has increasingly shaped defence policy through funding and joint procurement instruments, from the European Defence Fund to more recent readiness and common procurement initiatives, despite the Treaties providing no defence specific legal basis for the Commission to do so. As Meershoek has shown, this expansion has been built largely on internal market and industrial policy competences rather than on any defence mandate proper, which makes the Commission’s authority in this field real but legally awkward. A more powerful EDA would therefore not be filling an empty space; it would have to be positioned alongside the Commission, raising a genuine question of institutional balance. Either way, the shift towards a modern, strategic EDA 2.0 depends not on institutional reform alone but on genuine political willingness among Member States to use the EDA for the projects that no single country can advance on its own and on clarifying how its mandate fits with the role the Commission has already assumed.

Coordination Is No Longer Enough

The EDA exists to help EU Member States coordinate and work together more effectively in defence: the idea is simply that cooperation can help countries avoid duplication and waste, save money, and build capabilities that work better together. But the EDA was never given strong powers of its own: it was designed to support and coordinate, not to force Member States to act. As this blog post has argued, the collaborative procurement benchmark has gone unmet not because the Agency has failed, but because Member States have not chosen to use it, and that has become harder to defend as spending rises fast while joint procurement remains limited. A stronger, more strategic EDA could help close this gap. Efficiency is not the same as security: even a well-funded, well-coordinated Europe adds little to its own defence if Member States lack the political will to use their capabilities when it counts. The EDA is not the only supranational actor in this space, the European Commission has increasingly driven European defence policy, so the real question is one of institutional balance rather than a simple case for a bigger EDA. A stronger EDA is therefore worth pursuing, but only if it is matched by genuine political will among Member States and by clarity about how its role fits alongside the Commission’s.

Enforcement of Single Market rules and ensuring a level playing field without unjustified barriers is key in order to make the Single Market work for businesses and citizens. In January 2026 the European Commission presented its first annual Single Market enforcement agenda as part of its annual Single Market and Competitiveness Report of 2026. Although, is it a fully-fledged agenda? The actual size and content of the agenda raise some questions. What does the Commission intend and how will it live up to its initial promises? Would a more comprehensive agenda be desirable and possible and how the Commission could and should give more transparency about enforcement? After a brief description of the initial announcement of the agenda and content of the first Single Market enforcement agenda, I will discuss the last two questions. More transparency is desirable: from a democratic perspective, but also in order to focus enforcement on those areas which matter most for a well-functioning Single Market based on a dialogue between the Commission, Council of Ministers of the European Union and European Parliament.

Continue reading “The Single Market Enforcement Agenda, an example of more transparency?”