Time for a European single market ‘with teeth’ to take on China, India, leaders told

Former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta tells POLITICO that government subsidies should become a “European tool.”

It’s older than the euro and as integral to the EU as being able to cross borders without a passport ― but the single market is failing to deliver while ever-stronger world economies gain the upper hand.

Enrico Letta, a former Italian prime minister who will hand his report on the issue to EU leaders at their summit in Brussels on Thursday, told POLITICO the bloc needed to be “less naïve” if Europe was going to be robust enough in the years ahead.

“I strongly think that we need to create a single market with teeth," he said. “This is the key point: a single market with teeth.”

The network of the EU’s 27 countries, and a few neighboring nations beside, is supposed to allow the free movement of goods, services, people and capital, and came into being in 1993. While seen as one of the EU’s greatest achievements, politicians still lament the ways it doesn’t work. With the EU confronted by pressure to remain competitive in the face of emerging powers such as India and China, that needs to change.