One Europe, One Market enters the hard part

Two years after the Letta and Draghi reports diagnosed the structural weaknesses of the European economy and put forward a comprehensive reform agenda, the Union has finally moved from diagnosis to action. Presented in April 2026, the One Europe, One Market roadmap provides a crucial framework for implementing the reforms needed to strengthen European competitiveness, setting out a political timetable, legislative priorities and a shared commitment to deliver.

Yet implementation is invariably the most difficult phase of European integration. As the roadmap moves from political ambition to legislative negotiation, it brings to the surface a series of fault lines that have shaped European integration for decades and now cut across the entire legislative agenda.

Three fault lines shaping the Single Market

The first concerns the perennial balance between European integration and national sovereignty. 

The debate is no longer about whether the Single Market should deepen, but about who should exercise the powers required to make it function effectively. The Market Integration and Supervision Package illustrates this dilemma well. Proposals to strengthen ESMA’s role in supervising the largest cross-border financial actors inevitably encounter resistance from national authorities reluctant to relinquish responsibilities closely tied to domestic financial ecosystems. 

The issue is not simply one of Brussels versus national capitals; it also reflects divergent interests among large and small Member States and countries with different economic models. 

The same tension runs through EU Inc., where an optional European corporate regime must coexist with national company laws, or the Digital Networks Act, whose harmonising ambitions raise similar questions about the role of national authorities in telecommunications regulation. Across these files, deeper integration ultimately requires agreement not only on common rules, but also on the level at which they should be administered and enforced.

A second fault line concerns the relationship between competitiveness and the Union’s other strategic priorities. For much of the last decade, sustainability has been at the core of European policymaking. Today, however, geopolitical competition and the race for industrial leadership require Europe to reconcile environmental ambition with speed, resilience and investment. 

The challenge is not whether to pursue the green transition, which remains a clear strategic imperative, but how to manage its inevitable economic and social costs, distribute them fairly and select instruments capable of delivering the transition without weakening Europe’s productive capacity. 

The parallel drive for regulatory simplification adds another layer of complexity. Reducing administrative burdens is essential to unlock investment and accelerate implementation, but simplification must not create regulatory uncertainty or dilute environmental objectives. These tensions will be particularly visible in the reform of the ETS, the Grids Package, and the Circular Economy Act among others. Success will depend on balancing credible transition incentives with manageable costs for households and industry.

The third fault line is external and is probably the most relevant. For three decades, European integration largely assumed that openness and interdependence would naturally generate prosperity. That assumption has fundamentally changed. Economic interdependence has become an instrument of geopolitical competition. Supply chains, digital infrastructure and critical technologies are now viewed as strategic assets rather than merely economic resources. 

This transformation is visible throughout the roadmap. Measures such as the Industrial Accelerator Act, the Public Procurement Act, the revised Cybersecurity Act and the Cloud and AI Development Act all reflect a more interventionist European approach aimed at strengthening resilience and reducing strategic dependencies. Such policies would have been difficult to imagine only a decade ago. 

Yet they also generate new divisions, as Member States and stakeholders differ substantially in their exposure to global markets, their industrial structures and their willingness to embrace more assertive industrial policies.The challenge is therefore to reconcile Europe’s longstanding commitment to openness with the strategic need to protect its economic interests, with the aim of building consensus around innovative and effective instruments.

Keeping competitiveness socially sustainable

Underlying all these debates, however, lies another key tension that has so far received comparatively little attention but may ultimately prove the most consequential: the social dimension of the competitiveness agenda.

When the Single Market was completed in the early 1990s, economic integration was accompanied by a strong commitment to social and territorial cohesion. In the current debate, that balance appears less visible. 

Competitiveness, innovation, simplification and strategic autonomy rightly dominate the agenda, but Europe also needs to ensure that the benefits of integration remain broadly shared across territories, sectors and generations. The Commission’s forthcoming Right to Stay strategy is an encouraging signal that this challenge has not been overlooked. Yet its ambition will need to match that of the broader competitiveness agenda. A transformation of this scale cannot succeed if it is perceived as benefiting only the most competitive regions or the largest firms. Europe’s economic project will remain politically sustainable only if it also strengthens social cohesion and equal opportunity across the Union.

From political ambition to implementation

This list of tensions is by no means exhaustive, and none of them can be addressed in isolation. What the implementation phase requires is not only political leadership, but also a method capable of managing inevitable trade-offs. In this respect, the roadmap’s package approach offers one of its most valuable characteristic. 

By linking legislative files instead of treating them as isolated negotiations, it creates space for broader political compromises, allowing concessions in one area to unlock progress in another. This may prove indispensable for overcoming the fragmented decision-making that has too often slowed European reform.

The political landscape remains highly complex, with Member States approaching the reform agenda from different starting points and often defending divergent economic and institutional interests. Yet there are signs of movement, including through initiatives bringing together groups of Member States. The E6, for example, has contributed to important progress on key elements of the Savings and Investments Union, demonstrating that convergence can be achieved even on particularly sensitive questions. 

The challenge now is to sustain and broaden this momentum, translating the same level of ambition into progress across the full range of files included in the roadmap.

Ireland’s Council Presidency now inherits precisely this responsibility. Its longstanding reputation for pragmatic consensus-building may become one of Europe’s greatest assets in the six months ahead. 

Whether One Europe, One Market becomes another well-diagnosed ambition or the next major step in European integration will depend less on any individual legislative proposal than on Europe’s collective ability to navigate these fault lines without losing sight of the common objective.