The growth of EU Regulation

The EU is widely recognized as a global regulatory powerhouse. In pursuit of food security or financial stability, competition or sustainability; drugs, digital companies, pesticides, emissions, consumer contracts - few things escape the reach of EU regulation. EU Law provides rules, institutions, and governance arrangements with extraordinary reach in terms of both goals pursued and subjects regulated. Scholarly and political controversy has accompanied the growth of EU regulation, which many saw as over-extended or weakly democratic. In turn, EU regulation has been widely celebrated, not only for its reach and ambition, but also as possessing distinctive qualities which make it well-placed to deal with contemporary regulatory problems characterized by uncertainty.

Increasing socio-economic and technical complexity, interdependencies, and systemic risks, make contemporary regulatory problems intractable: uncertainty exists around the problems entailed by novel technologies and economic arrangements, where and when said problems materialize, and how to best remedy them. In this context, the EU’s preference for broad open-ended principles, and flexible rules to be specified through decentralized enforcement, has been theorized as a model to deal with uncertainty. EU regulation, many have claimed, provides learning and deliberative spaces that produce better regulatory solutions and techniques – a model for other jurisdictions, national and transnational, to emulate.

Today, the EU’s own style of and approach to regulation face internal and external pressures which make its future uncertain. Re-emerging geopolitical tensions and new interdependencies reveal the fragility of the EU regulatory project, especially in the face of economic and military force. The EU’s own renewed emphasis on global competitiveness and technological sovereignty (the Draghi Report) leads to calls for simplification and deregulation. The populist backlash against supranational governance, liberal values and expertise, make EU regulatory projects, starting from the European Green Deal, key targets. In turn, the threats of climate change, as, arguably, the central regulatory problem of our time, are existential and may not allow margins for error. The risks and dislocating effects of recent technical developments, starting from AI, are potentially so intense that even well-oiled regulatory techniques may prove insufficient.

The conference seeks to make sense of the present moment for EU regulation. It takes uncertainty as the guiding lens to reflect upon regulatory developments, new challenges for regulation in the EU, and new theoretical and empirical insights. Aimed at scholars, students, and practitioners, the conference is a moment for interdisciplinary reflection on major contemporary developments in EU law and governance.

Among the questions asked by the conference are: Is there continuity in the ways the EU has approached regulation in previous decades? Or are we entering a new moment, and, if so, what are its features? Can models of governance pioneered in the EU still offer a model for the world’s future prosperity in an age of geo-economic instability, climate crises, and backsliding democracy?