The EU Is Moving on From Neoliberalism. “nobody falls in love with a common market.”
The global backlash against neoliberalism has finally reached Brussels.
The European Union, which was born in 1993 and sired by the Maastricht Treaty, was a child of neoliberalism: the doctrine of market supremacy and government restraint that swept the world from the 1980s onward.
Provided the Chinese did the manufacturing, the US paid for defense and the Russians provided the energy, the EU could afford both a generous welfare state and a green transition.
The global backlash against neoliberalism has finally reached Brussels.
I spent last weekend engaged in a very EU activity — discussing the future of the organization with Euro-wonks in a delightful Tuscan village — and everybody seemed to agree about this epochal change.
Now Europhiles are more likely to quote Jacques Delors’ 1988 warning that “nobody falls in love with a common market.”
The first is the reality that America is no longer a reliable ally.. Europeans realize that Trump is not an aberration but a symbol of a wider disengagement.
It’s not just that the MAGA wing of the Republican Party regards EU officials as foreign versions of the home-grown Brahmin elite that runs the universities, government organizations and NGOs — in other words, the enemy.
It’s that the traditional Democratic elite is more interested in a rising Asia than a falling European continent.
The other problem is the second China shock, with potentially devastating consequences for its biggest industry and biggest economy, Germany.
In a forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of American Europe, Glyn Morgan of Syracuse University argues that the European Community started life as a US project
Europeans seem finally to have grasped that new times demand new thinking. The last few years have seen little but drift and dither — dull bureaucrats pronouncing ancient formulae and panicked politicians producing ad hoc responses to crises.
Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg April 24, 2026
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-04-24/is-the-eu-about-to-get-interesting-again
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