EMU Lab Lecture with Enrico Letta
Two years after the publication of his landmark report Much More Than a Market, Enrico Letta returns to the question of how Europe can turn ambition into action. In this lecture, he will examine the state of implementation of the Single Market roadmap, assessing what has been achieved and where progress has stalled.
At the heart of his analysis lies the question of scale. In an era of intensifying geoeconomic competition, scale has become a strategic imperative for the European market—not as an end in itself, but as a source of power to be built in strategic sectors, from finance and energy to telecommunications and frontier technologies. While the United States and China leverage the size of their home markets to project economic power, Europe's fragmentation remains a self-imposed constraint on its ability to compete.
Letta will address the political challenges of deepening integration in a fragmented landscape, where national interests and electoral cycles often work against long-term European reform. Central to his argument is the need to frame negotiations as a positive-sum exercise: rather than a zero-sum contest between Member States, the completion of the Single Market should be understood as a collective gain in prosperity, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy.
Enrico Letta is President of the Jacques Delors Institute and former Prime Minister of Italy. He has been Dean of the IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs in Madrid since October 2024.
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The Economic and Monetary Union Laboratory (EMU Lab) is a collaborative initiative driven by the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair and the Pierre Werner Chair, aiming to reassess the Economic and Monetary Union's structure in light of current European and global economic conditions.
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