Bart 
De Wever

*** Deze toespraak is uitgesproken op 9 juni 2026. Enkel het gesproken woord telt.***

Ladies and gentlemen,
I don’t know the average age of the audience here today, but I imagine most of you will be familiar with Wile E. Coyote, one of the unforgettable characters from the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Wile E. Coyote, as you may recall, spends his entire existence chasing the Road Runner. 
And in quite a few episodes, the same thing happens: he runs off a cliff, keeps running for a moment – suspended in mid-air, legs still moving – and only falls when he looks down and realises there is nothing beneath him.
I think about that image when I look at Europe's economic position today.
We have been running. 
For decades, we ran well. 
We built the world's most sophisticated single market, the most comprehensive social model, the most elaborate regulatory architecture. 
But somewhere along the way, we ran past the edge of the cliff. 
Our legs are still moving. 
But if we are honest with ourselves – if we look down – we can already see the bottom of the ravine.
That may not be the end. 
Wile E. Coyote always survives. 
Of course he does.
He is a cartoon character.
We might not be that lucky if we don’t act now.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Jacques Delors understood that European cooperation rests on three pillars: economic strength, technological leadership, and military capability.
Let’s have a look at where we stand on each of them today.
First, defence: Europe has spent decades under an American security umbrella. 
The result is a continent almost entirely dependent on the United States for intelligence, air defence, logistics, and long-range strike capability. 
We chose comfort over capability. 
Now we are paying the price.
That will take years and costs hundreds of billions.
Second, technology: only four of the world's fifty largest technology companies by market capitalisation are European. 
Roughly thirty are American. 
We excel in developing rules.
Others in developing new technologies.
Much of our digital economy – cloud computing, cybersecurity, AI systems, payment platforms – runs on American infrastructure. 
Europe is a heritage steam train on a high-speed line it does not own.
And third, the economy: in 2008, the EU's economy was larger than that of the United States, producing 25 percent of global GDP. 
By 2024, it was one-third smaller, and our global share had fallen to 17 percent.
To summarize:
Two of Delors' three pillars are already heavily compromised. 
In technological and military terms, we mustn’t imagine that we’ll be able to step out from under the American umbrella tomorrow.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is ignoring reality.
That leaves the economy – and specifically the One Market – as the one pillar where we can still make decisive progress in the near term. 
It is not the only thing we need to do. 
But it is the most urgent thing we can actually deliver.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Before we talk about the One Market, we need to be honest about the world it operates in. 
Because the geopolitical context has changed more profoundly in the last few years than in the previous few decades.
This is an age of empires. 
The empires of the nineteenth century competed for territory. 
They drew lines on maps, planted flags, and measured power in square kilometres of land controlled and populations subjugated. 
Washington and Beijing are playing a different game – but it is no less imperial in its ambition.
They are not carving the world into rival blocs.
They are competing for control of the globalised economy itself: the financial networks that move capital across borders, the critical raw materials without which modern industry cannot function, the energy infrastructure that keeps economies alive, the data centres that are becoming the knowledge factories of the twenty-first century. 
The new imperial dominion is measured not in land, but in systemic dependency.
A power that wants to bring another country to heel no longer needs to invade it. 
It simply needs to sever the connections that keep it viable – and offer its own as a replacement.
Washington and Beijing are using clear-cut tools to achieve this: trade barriers, economic intimidation, excessive subsidisation and market protectionism. 
What follows, is conquest by dependency rather than by force.
Europe needs to understand this new imperial logic very clearly. 
We need to adapt.
We don’t need to copy their logic. 
The truth is that we can’t, even if we wanted to.
But we need to make ourselves indispensable in order to choose our own path.
And that requires one thing above all else: economic and industrial strength. 
Which is precisely what is at stake in this room today.
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In the best case – and I want to be ambitious here – Europe can become what I would call a pole star for the countries that want no part of the power politics of Washington and Beijing. 
A model that shows that democratic values, free trade, and the rule of law are not weaknesses to be exploited but strengths to be built on. 
A coalition by which middle powers around the world can orient themselves.
But a pole star that is economically declining gives no light. 
To play that role, Europe must first put its own house in order. 
And that means completing the One Market.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Any honest conversation about the One Market has to start with China – because China is where the pressure is most visible and most acute.
Look at the EU's top fifty companies by R&D leadership. 
According to the latest EU R&D Investment Scoreboard, eleven are European. 
That sounds respectable.
Until you take a further look.
Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Bosch, Stellantis, Sanofi, Bayer, Boehringer, Novo Nordisk. 
World-class companies, without a doubt.
But they’re all concentrated in the automotive industry, and the pharmaceutical and chemical sector.
Precisely the sectors where China is inflicting the most damage right now.
China has built manufacturing capacity on a scale that the world has never seen.
It is capable of producing 55 million cars per year.
That is around two thirds of total global demand.
European firms compete against Chinese rivals that are backed by state support on a scale that no market economy can match or replicate. 
According to the OECD, Chinese manufacturers receive subsidies that are three to nine times higher than those available to producers in advanced economies.
This is a structural distortion of global markets, and it is hollowing out the productive core of European industry.
The country that feels this most severely is Germany. 
Germany built its industrial identity on precisely the sectors where China is now most aggressively expanding.
The three Cs: cars, chemicals and clean technology. 
A recent report by the Centre for European Reform captured it with uncomfortable precision: "China has already eaten much of German industry's lunch, and is preparing to start on dinner."
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The question is not whether Europe should respond. 
It must. 
The question is how – and this is where I want to be careful, because the wrong response would be as damaging as no response at all.
We must not copy the mistakes of others. 
Europe does not have the fiscal space for subsidy wars. 
And even if we did, that path leads to a race to the bottom that ultimately serves no one. 
A level playing field and reciprocity remain key, not in the least to guarantee fair competition.
Blanket protectionism would raise costs for European consumers and businesses, fragment the internal market further, and invite retaliation against our exports.
Our response must be targeted, coherent, and grounded in the rules-based order we have always championed. 
That means accelerating existing trade defence instruments far more assertively. 
It means advancing de-risking through diversification, reducing critical dependencies, and operationalising the safeguard instruments we have already designed but too rarely deployed. 
And it means insisting on reciprocity – in market access, in intellectual property, in technical standards.
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But here is the strategic point that often gets lost in these debates. 
Defending what we have is not the same as building what we need. 
And this is where the One Market becomes not just a trade policy instrument, but a geopolitical one.
The countries that will matter in the world of competing empires are not necessarily the largest. 
They are the ones that are indispensable. 
The ones that control chokepoints, anchor supply chains, provide capabilities that others cannot easily replicate. 
Europe's ambition should be precisely that: to become indispensable in the value chains that will define the next decades. 
In clean energy technology, in advanced manufacturing, in life sciences, in the digital infrastructure that a sovereign Europe needs to build. 
We cannot wall ourselves off.
Quite the contrary.
Our One Market must be an Open Market.
We have to be so deeply embedded in global systems that our leverage is structural, not incidental.
That is the strategic case for completing the One Market. 
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Ladies and gentlemen,
The One Market is the most powerful economic tool Europe possesses. 
Four hundred and fifty million consumers. 
The world's largest trading bloc. 
A regulatory framework that, when it works, gives European companies a platform to scale that no member state can match.
And yet we have never fully built it.
In financial services, capital remains stubbornly national. 
European savings – and we are a continent of loyal savers – flow into domestic banking systems and government bonds rather than into the cross-border investment that could fund the next generation of European companies. 
The result is that innovative firms either stay small, or leave. 
They go to the United States, where deep capital markets, large venture funds, and a single legal framework allow them to scale at speed.
Completing the Savings and Investment Union is a strategic priority. 
Deeper capital pools, better risk-sharing, stronger support for scale-ups, and real retail participation in equity markets: these are the conditions for European companies to compete at global scale.
But capital markets alone will not be enough.
If we truly want European companies to scale across the continent, we also need to make progress on the 28th regime.
For too many businesses, expanding across Europe still means navigating 27 legal systems, 27 tax codes, and 27 administrative cultures.
The compliance costs alone are a barrier to growth. 
A common optional legal framework for businesses that want to operate EU-wide from day one would complement national systems, giving firms that aspire to European scale a single set of rules to follow.
I want to be clear about scope here. The 28th regime must focus on what is genuinely European to organise: company law. 
Taxation and labour law will remain national competences for the foreseeable future, and we should not pretend otherwise. 
But within those constraints, there is real room to simplify and to make Europe more attractive for the companies we want to keep – and also for the ones we want to attract.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
European economic integration has rarely begun with all twenty-seven member states moving simultaneously. 
It has almost always begun with a smaller group willing to go further and faster, creating the gravitational pull that eventually draws others in. 
The internal market itself. 
Schengen. 
The euro. 
Each started as a coalition of the willing.
The Benelux countries have historically played that role. 
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg have served as a laboratory for European integration more than once.
Not because we are the largest, but because we share borders, economies, and a deep institutional understanding of what integration actually requires. 
If a group of member states is willing to pilot a genuinely European company framework, a Benelux initiative could be the starting point.
It could deliver a blueprint to be rolled out more broadly. 
Enhanced cooperation is already possible under the Treaties. 
We do not need unanimity to begin. 
We need the courage to go first.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Enrico Letta's initiative – this Coalition of Action, this commitment to delivering a completed One Market by 2028 – is important precisely because it starts from the bottom up. 
It goes to businesses and trade unions, to academics and civil society, to the companies and workers who actually experience the fragmentation of our market every day.
That matters, because the One Market is not a technocratic project. 
It never was. 
It is a promise.
A promise to the entrepreneur in Seville who wants to sell across the continent, to the pension saver in Warsaw who deserves access to deeper capital markets, to the engineer in Munich whose startup is being undercut by subsidised competitors, to the nurse in Marseille, the student in Bologna, the small business owner in Sofia. 
And a promise to every European consumer, who will benefit from an increased choice and better prices.
If completing the One Market stays the project of politicians, officials and economists, it will remain incomplete. 
It needs to be owned by the people it is meant to serve.
Europe in the age of empires has one decisive advantage: it is the only large economic actor in the world that is also a genuine community of values, a union of democracies that has chosen integration over domination. 
That is worth being proud of.
That is worth defending. 
That is worth building.
But a pole star has to shine. 
And right now, we need to generate more light.
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Europe has everything it needs to do so.
The question is whether we are all willing to remove the obstacles that dim its light.
And whether we can broadly motivate our societies to shoulder this crucial effort.
The One Market remains our most powerful instrument.
Completing it is not just an economic necessity.
It is a strategic imperative.
Thank you.