The European Commission’s upcoming clean industrial strategy, the ‘Competitiveness Compass,’ is set to be officially released early next month, but we already know that it will focus on shifting more power from national capitals into the hands of Brussels.
According to Euractiv, which was given an advance sneak peek into the document a few days ago, the Commission arrives at the same conclusion it always does when assessing systemic problems affecting the whole of the European Union: fragmented national policies and the lack of what it considers proper, EU-level centralized oversight.
Member state sovereignty and a willingness to pursue independent interests are the greatest obstacles to Europe’s economic revival, the Compass says, unsurprisingly. According to the document, the main problem is that
each member state deploys its own industrial and support policies to boost national competitiveness, with little consideration of what happens in other member states.
Therefore, in order to boost the bloc’s competitiveness while also being able to deliver on its climate targets, the EU executive once again argues for giving itself tighter control over national industrial strategies and making sure member states don’t deviate much from the common route by introducing further instruments that could be used to blackmail them into submission.
The main proposal in the Compass is the establishment of a “Competitiveness Coordination Tool,” through which Brussels would identify joint economic and industrial priorities, create specialized action plans for each member state, and oversee their implementation.
According to the document, the upcoming competitiveness strategy will follow the model established after the 2008 financial crisis, under which Brussels was given more authority over national fiscal decisions to ensure a harmonized response. Just like then, industrial targets will be set for individual countries rather than the EU as a whole, so that everyone has their own checklist to implement.
Furthermore, the document says the Commission could “encourage” and “incentivize” compliance by tying previously ‘free’ EU and European Investment Bank (EIB) funds to meeting certain targets and benchmarks.
Even the leftist Euractiv recognizes that this move “may be seen as a power grab” and warns that there could be heavy opposition from the capitals against the Compass.
Still, things have been steadily moving in this direction for months now, as the Commission wants to completely restructure how EU member states access cohesion funds, which until now were given to the economic development of poorer regions with no strings attached.
But by introducing a wide-ranging cash-for-reforms model to all types of EU funding, such as cohesion funds or agricultural and industrial subsidies—similar to how the conditionality mechanism works with regard to the rule of law—the EU would massively increase its influence over member states overnight without actually needing to ‘mandate’ decisions from above.
In other words, blackmail and extortion will gradually become the standard operating procedure in all areas of EU policy, and that of course will include industrial and climate strategies—making it harder to quit or reverse the Green Deal.
