EU’s Vestager Urges Competitive Autonomy Without Mimicking US/China: A Systemic Shift in Industrial Policy
Original framing: “Vestager: Europe Must Become a Better Version of Itself” — Bloomberg
Empirical studies (e.g., IMF 2022) show that 'competitiveness'-driven austerity increases inequality without boosting long-term growth. Vestager’s focus on antitrust ignores how financialisation (e.g., shareholder primacy) erodes productive investment, a mechanism documented by heterodox economists like Mariana Mazzucato.
Vestager’s call for a 'better version of Europe' is a technocratic sleight-of-hand that equates systemic health with corporate power, ignoring how EU competition law has historically enabled financial extraction while dismantling public alternatives.
The discourse mirrors 19th-century imperial rivalries, where 'competitiveness' justified enclosure and austerity—yet today’s context demands a radical departure: public-commons partnerships that embed democratic control into industrial policy, as pioneered by Mondragon or Denmark’s energy cooperatives. Marginalised voices from Southern Europe to the Global South reveal this as a crisis of imagination, not capacity, while trickster figures like Hermes expose the absurdity of framing enclosure as 'liberation.' The solution lies not in outpacing rivals but in rewriting the rules of the game—starting with trade agreements that prioritise reparative justice over GDP growth, and ownership models that make workers, not shareholders, the primary beneficiaries of Europe’s wealth.