Brussels Effect 2.0: From Whistle to Workshop
For over a decade, the Brussels Effect has offered Europe a comforting narrative: that through the gravitational pull of its market, the EU shapes global practices in privacy, competition, and now artificial intelligence. Columbia professor Anu Bradford, who coined the term, argues that companies often “voluntarily extend EU rules to operations outside the EU” because complying separately would be too costly or inefficient.
As Anu Bradford herself has recently emphasised, the Brussels Effect was never conceived as a geopolitical strategy. When she first coined the term in 2012, and later elaborated it in her 2020 book, it described a largely unintentional side effect of the EU’s technocratic lawmaking process. Today, that effect is increasingly tested as EU regulation becomes entangled with geopolitics, industrial competition, transatlantic tensions, and debates about regulatory sovereignty and political identity.
It was a powerful story, but like many powerful stories, it risks becoming a crutch. The image of Europe as the world’s regulatory referee sounds reassuring, especially at a time when the continent increasingly depends on technologies developed elsewhere. Yet referees do not score goals, and they certainly do not win tournaments.
Europe has focused on how to govern the digital world, but not how to shape it. Now is the time, however, to step out of the paper tiger trap.
“Regulation-as-Strategy”: The Limits of Being the Referee
When the EU passes a sweeping new regulation—GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act—it demonstrates a very particular kind of strength: the ability to discipline the behaviour of global companies. It is a form of authority that the United States does not exercise, and China does not try to export.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this role. In several domains, Europe continues to act as an effective referee, and in some cases the Brussels Effect still operates—most notably in areas such as data protection adequacy or carbon pricing mechanisms like CBAM. But refereeing alone no longer guarantees influence in a world where technological capability sets the pace of rule adoption.
But regulatory influence is not the same as technological capability. The EU can define what “high-risk AI” is, but it does not produce the foundational models that dominate the global market. It can enforce strict privacy rules, but the world’s most widely used messaging platforms, operating systems, cloud infrastructures, and semiconductor designs do not originate in Europe. And Europe’s ability to set rules matters far less when Europe is no longer central to the technological frontier.
A New Trend in Brussels: Simplification and Enforcement Over New Layers of Law
Yet something interesting is happening in Brussels. After years of building regulatory layer upon regulatory layer, the political mood is beginning to shift.
Across institutions, there is a growing recognition that Europe’s problem is no longer the lack of rules—but the lack of time, capacity, and resources to transpose, implement, and enforce the ones it already has. And the difficulties created in terms of compliance by the many (possibly) overlapping rules.
The new political cycle is marked by:
- Calls for regulatory pauses or slowdowns, especially in digital policy
- Prioritising legal clarity and simplification over new legislative ambition
- A focus on enforcement and implementation as the true test of EU credibility
- A desire to reduce administrative burden, particularly for SMEs and innovators
- A push for better coordination among Member States, recognising that fragmentation—not the absence of regulation—is the real barrier
This shift echoes Bradford’s more recent observation that the weakening of the Brussels Effect is not only about the EU’s ability to export rules, but about its capacity to implement, enforce, and adapt them in fast‑moving technological domains.
This could herald a new wave of the Brussels Effect. Not the classic one (rules radiating outward), but a Brussels Effect 2.0: global influence built on effective implementation, predictable enforcement, and regulatory regimes that are stable, readable, and exportable because they actually work in practice.
If the 2010s were the decade of rule-making, the second half of the 2020s could become the decade of tool-making and system-building, where the EU leverages clarity and enforcement as competitive assets—not bureaucratic artefacts.
Why Leadership Requires European Capability, Not Just Compliance
The EU’s instinct has long been to treat innovation primarily through the lens of risk. Europe regulates earlier, more comprehensively, and with more institutional confidence than any other region. But the more Europe doubles down on its regulatory strength, the more stark its industrial weakness becomes.
We cannot legislate away these deficits:
Leadership requires capability, and capability comes from investment, scale, and a willingness to move with speed, qualities Europe often struggles to operationalise.
Brussels Effect 2.0: From Referee to Player
If Europe wants to lead, it cannot rely solely on the gravitational pull of its market. Leadership emerges from demonstrating what is possible, not just what is permissible.
This means:
- Building infrastructures and institutions that let European actors develop and deploy advanced technologies at the same pace as their global counterparts.
- Treating public procurement not as a risk to be audited but as a driver of demand—much as the U.S. government did with early cloud adoption or DARPA-funded innovation.
- Recognising that open-source ecosystems, which Europe champions rhetorically, require sustained investment if Europe wants to avoid dependency on foreign corporate stewardship. A 2023 report by the OpenForum Europe highlights how Europe benefits from open-source software but invests comparatively little in its sustainability, and not much has changed since then.
- Capitalising on Europe’s unique advantages: multilingual datasets, cultural heritage, privacy-enhancing technologies, public-sector digitalisation, and user-centric design. These should not be approached as European values alone; they can and should be European competitive strengths.
The Future of the Brussels Effect Depends on Whether Brussels Plays
There is nothing wrong with being the referee: every functioning system needs one. But when refereeing becomes a substitute for participation, and you forget how to play, you don’t just lose influence—you become background noise.
Europe should not entirely abandon its regulatory model; it has made some great contributions to global governance. But rules alone do not build industries, and industries shape the world far more than rules do. The next phase of Europe’s digital identity will depend on whether Brussels can expand its role from steward of the rulebook to architect of the game itself.
The shift from the Brussels Effect to Brussels Leadership cannot just be a battle of buzzwords. It must be a strategic one. Leadership will come not from the standards Europe demands of others, but from the technologies Europe builds for itself. And ultimately, from the confidence to step onto the field, it has spent so long officiating.
Here’s to 2026—a year for building, not just regulating.
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Written byCaroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
