Post by Ann Mettler

🛡️ Europe’s Single Market Is Not Just an Economic Project. It’s a Security Imperative.   Back in 2018, while at the European Commission, I argued that the Single Market was Europe’s greatest guarantor of sovereignty. Europe didn’t - and still doesn’t - have hard power comparable to the US or China. What put us on the map was an economy almost on par with the US, tech leadership, a vast market others wanted access to. That was our leverage.   Fast forward to today. After years of neglect, the Single Market is finally back. That’s why I was delighted to speak at the CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies) Ideas Lab on the Single Market -  and to focus on what I believe is the real missing piece in the conversation: companies.   ➡️ Big Tech Companies Augment Sovereign Power Over the past decades, a new generation of systemic global firms has emerged. They scaled rapidly in large, integrated home markets — and reshaped the balance of power between states and markets.   Think about the United States without: Alphabet. Amazon. Meta. Microsoft. Nvidia. Tesla. OpenAI. Anthropic.   Or China without: Alibaba. Tencent. ByteDance. CATL. BYD. Huawei. Xiaomi. Shein. Temu. Goldwin. Envision Energy. DeepSeek.   With the exception of Microsoft, all are under 50 years old.   Now consider Europe. At the turn of the century, 41 of the world’s leading corporations were European (including the UK and Switzerland). Today, only 18 remain. In more than 50 years, Europe has not produced a single deep-tech startup worth €100bn listed in Europe.   This isn’t just an innovation gap. It’s a scale gap. A MARKET gap. And increasingly, a sovereignty and security gap.   ➡️ The Uncomfortable Reality US and Chinese super-companies follow a similar playbook:   • Scale in large, integrated home markets • Access deep capital markets • Benefit from substantial state backing (China invests ~4% of GDP in subsidies) • Expand into Europe’s open market — often without reciprocity   Their size allows them to navigate EU fragmentation more easily than European firms - which start small and too often stay small. And this is often by design. EU competition policy remains deeply distrustful of size. Subsidies are made contingent on “market failure” - but how do you prove failure in emerging technologies when the market doesn’t yet exist? And open trade means European firms -  facing the world’s highest taxes, wages, energy costs, and compliance burdens -  must compete from day 1 with companies from outside of Europe that don’t have to shoulder equal costs. That’s a tall order.   - conclusion and thanks to fellow panelists in comments -