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Prosperity After Liberalisation: The EU’s Energy Dilemma

par Perl, Mathias
Référence IDEAS 2026: New paths towards prosperity in the European Union - Rethinking Governance, Integration and Collective Well-Being. (Bruxelles - IEE)
Publication Non publié, 2026-05-28

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

In the early 1980s, the European Community faced a fundamental choice: it could build a Common Energy Policy - anchored in planning, solidarity and strategic investment, as envisioned by the Commission in 1981 - or it could construct an Internal Energy Market (McGowan, 1989). The Union chose the latter (Slot, 1994). In doing so, it moved from conceiving energy as a domain of national sovereignty to treating it as an object of competition (Edwards and Hoskins, 1995).This shift produced a legal framework that enabled European integration “on the cheap”: it created a unified economic space without mobilising fiscal solidarity, industrial coordination or a federal budget. In this architecture, energy became a market long before it could become a policy.Yet this model, shaped by the economic priorities of the 1990s, sits increasingly at odds with the qualitative forms of prosperity invoked by IDEAS26. It struggles to sustain the long-term investment cycles required for the Green Transition and constrains the renewed ambitions of industrial policy.The paper argues that the path to sustainable prosperity requires a paradigm shift: moving beyond the inherited logic of “absolute competition” and re-embedding markets within a regime of public goods. Signs of such a shift are already visible: in recent years, the Union has begun to articulate a genuine energy policy - no longer at the margins of market integration but increasingly oriented toward strategic planning, security of supply and decarbonisation.By examining the instruments that already steer the Union toward this emerging form of European energy sovereignty, the paper identifies both the possibilities they open and the constraints imposed by the enduring norms of the EU’s economic constitution. It concludes by returning to a tension first raised nearly forty years ago: the difficult balance between a market logic and a policy logic in the governance of energy - and whether, ultimately, Europe can avoid choosing between the two.