In this chapter, I explore the imaginaries of prosperity underlying the European Union’s (EU) approach to industrial law and policy. Long considered a taboo in European politics, the EU began to rediscover industrial policy after the 2008 great financial crisis, gradually increasing its ambitions when it came to shaping the relations between the state and the market. Having reviewed an array of EU measures, starting with the 2010 industrial policy and including the more recent burst of legislative proposals (Chips Act, Batteries Act, Critical Minerals Act, and Net Zero Industry Act), this chapter aims to do two things. First, it identifies shifts in the background understanding of political economy, including the role and appropriate objectives of markets, politics, law, and government, that lie behind successive policy interventions. Second, this chapter sketches the contours of the new synthesis of prosperity that emerges from these recent proposals and measures, while at the same time, and in no ambiguous terms, drawing attention to its considerable limitations.

Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

This chapter explores the changing imaginaries of technological governance in the European Union (EU), on the basis of one increasingly significant element of the EU policy: ecodesign. The grounds for treating ecodesign as especially significant are at least twofold. First, ecodesign presents a success story in governmental steering of technological development in the EU. Remaining for the most part on the sidelines of public discussion, ecodesign has fundamentally impacted the daily life of all Europeans, making a very broad swathe of everyday products (vacuum cleaners, lamps, or washing machines) more energy efficient and longer lasting. Second, the expansion and deepening of ecodesign framework creates important background conditions for shaping technological futures. It sets the grounds for the conversation on how technology relates to a sustainable economy; what kind of technological advances are necessary; the desirable relation between production, distribution, and consumption; and finally, the distributive consequences of both technological and legal interventions. These questions will become ever more salient as the EU pursues sustainable futures, from the digital economy to the energy transition, from a more balanced transportation mix to sustainable food provision.

Chapter 3 explores how European institutions have (re)imagined consumption, and consumers, as part of the changing imaginaries of prosperity. It does so by exploring systematically the discursive shifts behind the European Union’s consumer policies over the past fifty years, identifying how the changing imaginaries of economy, government, law, politics and nature have produced different imaginaries of consumers and consumption. After the long arc of the dominance of neoliberal imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, we have witnessed more recently a gradual shift in the background understanding of political economy. The emergent imaginary of prosperity shares some elements with the previous ‘welfare state’ imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, such as the return of the language of ‘protection’. But it also incorporates entirely new preoccupations such as repair, longevity, maintenance, circularity, and sharing, all the while embracing a more expanded, ‘holistic’ understanding of consumer interests.

Social integration in European countries seems increasingly dependent on the “we” that draws on tribal markers of identity. This type of belonging, in good times flatteringly called demos, tends to resurface in its far uglier exclusionary versions when times get more difficult and resources more scarce – and at the same time, the horrors of previous wars are either forgotten or strategically rehashed. The European Union (EU), however, still has a window to change these dynamics and reorient Europe towards prosperity. For Europe, this is both a task and a necessity: the EU cannot socially integrate but via the imaginaries of prosperity, all the while it emerged with a task to prevent the excesses of tribalism.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how our ideas about the economy and the market shape the way in which we think about the law, as well as how ideas about the law condition our understanding of what the market “is” and what it “needs”. I argue that legal and economic discourses share a set of fundamental pre-understandings as the relation between the subject of the legal-political order and the social whole. These shared pre-understandings ensure that the law and legal discourse tend to support, rather than subvert, the tenets (if not the particulars) of socio-economic organisation. However, by uncovering this entanglement, we unearth a potentially subversive role for the law. If law and legal discourse succeed in unsettling the shared pre-understandings, and offer alternative imaginaries as to the role of the law in society, they may become a trigger for a broader social transformation.

In the first part of the chapter, I develop a theoretical account, arguing that different economic, political and legal discourses converge around shared, and historically determined, pre-understandings (social imaginaries) as to what constitutes the socio-economic whole, who can act on it, and how. I further elaborate this argument by exploring the transformations of private law as a response to different imaginaries of the economy, politics and society in the last two centuries. In the second part, I turn to European private law to show how a new socio-economic imaginary enters and settles in European consumer law and policy – exposing both the conduits and the contingency of this transformation. I conclude by discussing some of the important impacts of the new socio-economic imaginary on European private law.