Frankfurt: A founder who wants to build a company that operates seamlessly from Lisbon to Helsinki today confronts a maze of twenty-seven national rulebooks on incorporation, insolvency, and labour. The European Commission’s answer to that maze, an optional bloc-wide corporate regime nicknamed EU Inc, is moving from think-tank slideware toward the centre of the Union’s competitiveness agenda, and the coming months will reveal how much political weight is behind it.
The idea is deceptively simple. Rather than forcing twenty-seven legal systems into harmony, the so-called twenty-eighth regime would create a single, optional framework that any company could choose to adopt, operating across the bloc under one unified set of rules instead of its national regime. Proponents argue that a startup incorporated under such a regime could raise capital, hire, and expand across borders without re-papering itself in every market it enters. For a continent that watches too many of its promising firms decamp to the United States in search of scale and deeper capital, the appeal is obvious.
The push sits inside a broader strategy the Commission president unveiled in February under the banner of moving from an incomplete single market to one market for one Europe within two years. That ambition, in turn, traces back to the influential report Mario Draghi delivered in 2024, which diagnosed the bloc’s fragmented internal market as a central drag on productivity and warned that the gap with the United States and China would widen without decisive action. The diagnosis has been widely accepted. The treatment has proved harder to administer.
Progress so far is modest. By the start of this year, only around fifteen percent of the Draghi report’s recommendations had been fully implemented, with roughly another quarter partially in place, figures that critics seize upon as evidence that the rhetoric of competitiveness has outrun the legislative reality. A nearer milestone offers a fairer test: the Commission has committed to delivering the first phase of its Savings and Investment Union by this month, a package meant to channel Europeans’ considerable savings into productive investment rather than letting them sit idle or flow abroad.
The obstacles are political as much as technical. A twenty-eighth regime touches company law, taxation, and insolvency, areas where member states guard their prerogatives jealously and where unanimity can be required. Some capitals fear that an optional federal-style framework would, over time, hollow out national systems as firms migrate to whichever rules suit them best, a quiet competition that smaller states worry they would lose. Others counter that an opt-in regime forces no one’s hand and simply offers ambitious companies a ladder that does not currently exist.
Business groups have largely welcomed the direction while pressing for speed, warning that each year of delay cedes ground to competitors who are not waiting. The Commission, conscious that this mandate has cast itself as the one that finally completes the single market, knows the credibility of the entire competitiveness pivot rests on converting strategy documents into laws firms can actually use.
Whether EU Inc becomes a functioning option or another well-received proposal that stalls in the Council will signal a great deal about how serious the Union is about closing the productivity gap it has spent two years diagnosing.
