Session 2a: Can the EU's better regulation agenda deliver competitiveness?

* Event: Bruegel Annual Meetings scheduled for 2-3 September 2026.
* Session 1 addresses climate policy survival in the face of war, political polarization, and geopolitical tension.
* Session 2a focuses on mapping Europe’s clean energy and industrial transformation, referencing the European Clean Tech Atlas book launch.
* Session 2b examines the role of tax systems in bolstering European competitiveness amidst current policy debates.
* Session 2c addresses the gap between EU GDPR privacy rules and economic reality regarding consumer consent for data sharing.
* Session 3a covers the macroeconomic implications of the Middle East conflict on oil production, trade, energy prices, and central bank responses.
* Session 3b explores how Europe is perceived by leading multinational companies from outside the EU.
* Session 3c addresses the anticipated care transformation, longevity risk, and health uncertainty through data-driven modeling.
* Session 4a discusses maximizing the impact of European rearmament spending.
* Session 4b examines balancing harm mitigation and innovation incentives in AI regulation, specifically concerning the EU AI Act.
* Session 4c reviews insights on EU enlargement policy and barriers to Single Market access for candidate countries.
* Session 5a explores managing the European banking system and its infrastructure for economic growth.
* Session 5b discusses Ukraine’s path to EU membership as an exchange in areas like agriculture and military performance.
* Session 6a addresses European trade policy beyond FTAs, seeking feasible paths without major global cooperation.
* Session 6b discusses policies needed to foster greater economic dynamism and innovation by encouraging exit from inefficient firms.
* Roundtable 1a focuses on Europe's digital sovereignty using lessons from China's AI quest, featuring Bertin Martens and Alicia García-Herrero.
* Session 1b discusses the evolving global monetary landscape, including the roles of the US dollar, euro, renminbi, gold, and crypto-assets.

The structure of the meetings reveals a deliberate effort to confront Europe's current multifaceted challenges by forcing consideration of interconnected policy domains—from environmental and industrial transitions to geopolitical stability and internal regulatory frameworks. The thematic organization suggests that complexity is not merely additive but systemic; for instance, the discussion moves fluidly between macroeconomics (Middle East conflict), structural change (clean tech), governance friction (GDPR vs. economy), and external relations (trade, defense). This sequence implies that short-term existential threats necessitate a re-evaluation of long-term structural priorities, particularly regarding economic dynamism and technological leadership.
A recurring tension is evident between the imperative for growth/innovation and the need for regulatory coherence or risk mitigation. In the clean energy and taxation sessions, the pursuit of competitive advantage through market mechanisms clashes with the need for coordinated public investment and fairness. Similarly, the AI regulation session highlights the inherent difficulty in setting rules that simultaneously guard against catastrophic risk (harm mitigation) while allowing for necessary experimentation (innovation incentives). The focus on enlargement policy and trade suggests a pivot from internal domestic struggles to external geopolitical positioning, demanding that EU policy be viewed through a lens of global systemic competition rather than purely national interest.
The pattern observed is a move away from siloed problem-solving toward integrated systemic thinking. The integration of research (e.g., the Clean Tech Atlas) with immediate political concerns (e.g., defense spending or monetary response) suggests that the utility of these platforms lies in forcing decision-makers to recognize the non-linearity between economic performance and geopolitical stability. The underlying assumption being tested is whether current policy mechanisms are capable of handling multiple, competing high-stakes priorities simultaneously without suffering from analytical fragmentation. The implication for agency is that effective navigation requires recognizing that solving one problem often necessitates redefining the parameters of another.