Weaponizing the Single Market: The Cases of the EU’s Trade Policy and Digital Agenda

In recent years, there has been a remarkable shift in EU economic policymaking. The single market and trade policy have always been depicted as devices for fairness and efficiency that transcend cultural, geographical and political boundaries. However, this liberal logic is increasingly challenged. Some argue that the EU should use its structural power and normative clout to push for higher standards in areas such as data privacy, consumer health, or online hate speech, positing the EU’s social model as an alternative to the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, proponents of ‘strategic sovereignty’ seek to protect Europe against foreign threats and to bolster European companies for global competition. These developments strongly reorient discourse and policymaking from economic to political concerns, and from inward-looking to outward-looking ambitions. We claim that this amounts to an incipient geopoliticisation or even weaponization of the single market, and we seek to explain why this reversal in discourse and policy is happening now, and why, among all available routes, it takes the one we observe. We argue that a changed geopolitical and geoeconomic environment, and a changed perception of this environment among the EU policy elites has paved the way for this reversal. We plan to substantiate this argument using text-as-data methods to map discursive changes, discourse network analysis to link these changes to coalitional changes, and expert interviews to explore the motives and mindsets of actors. We focus on two cases in which the reversal is particularly apparent: trade policy and the EU’s digital agenda.