Strategic autonomy for whom? Assessing the EU’s industrial policy turn

Once a champion of open markets and competition, the EU is now shifting toward a more interventionist industrial strategy. Strategic autonomy has become a central response to structural challenges facing the continent, including intensifying geopolitical rivalries and the breakdown of multilateralism. This is visible in programs such as NextGenerationEU, Horizon Europe and InvestEU, which explicitly link industrial support with the goal of strategic autonomy. But what is the nature of the EU’s new industrial policy turn, and who benefits from the resulting policies? By analyzing the evolution of industrial policy and its distributional effects, this paper explores whether the EU’s current industrial policy spending programs privilege certain growth models over others, and what this implies for the EU’s political economy and integration trajectory. To answer this question, this paper draws on comparative political economy literature to assess how industrial policy spending aligns with assumptions about drivers of growth. Empirically, it analyses legal documents implementing industrial policy spending, including Council and Commission regulations, directions and decisions from 1987 to 2024. In total, I analyze 127 documents across 25 industrial policy spending programs over this period. Using qualitative content analysis, I trace changes in the growth logic underpinning spending programs, including as the sectoral, technological and recipient “targetedness” of current programs, which are then compared against the previous horizontally oriented programs of the neoliberal era. From the perspective of a growth models approach, my hypothesis is that the EU’s new industrial policy turn disproportionately supports a supply-side oriented, export-led growth model, favoring member states with economies already aligned to such strategies. By bridging comparative political economy and EU integration literature, this project contributes to current debates on the interaction between national growth models and supranational policy design at the EU level.