The EU Won’t Outcompete Anyone With Regulations Nobody Can Implement
Europe is now in a war economy. The era of scarcity is here, and it is forcing Brussels to ask a once-taboo question: which rules can Europe still afford? In the last few weeks, EU lawmakers have pushed through a deal to scale back flagship sustainability obligations, explicitly sold as a competitiveness move, meant to cut reporting burdens. The point is compliance with a benchmark the Commission set earlier last year: a 25% cut in administrative burdens. Brussels is also applying the same logic to rearmament, selling “defence simplification” as red-tape removal to speed investment.
Yet while Brussels is rediscovering the language of deregulation, little is done to ensure this newfound commitment trickles down to the regulatory apparatus. The economy is still shrouded in red tape. Red tape, that is thoroughly unreadable, overbearing, unevidenced, and unimplemented.
According to EPICENTER’s latest look at the EU rulebook, the picture is grim. Despite years of “simplification” talk, the von der Leyen Commission presided over a 14% increase in the paperweight of EU legislation. In Denmark, more than six in ten regulations in force trace back to Brussels. And measured by the word-count of EU acts still in force, EU legislation has grown by over 700% since the Maastricht Treaty.
What the EU Regulatory Quality Index makes clear is that this is not only a quantity problem; it is a writing problem. In 2024, directives packed an average of 39.62 words into a single sentence, so paragraphs frequently contained just that one sentence and nothing else. That is almost double the EU’s own clear-writing advice, which tells authors to aim for around 20 words per sentence if they want people to actually understand what they are reading.
This means that Brussels is creating a new privilege: understanding the rules. With many EU directives running past 30,000 words and sentences so complex, a non-expert can easily spend four to six hours just reading one directive carefully. In practice, the body of law is inaccessible to ordinary citizens, by design or by habit.
Let’s be clear: this complexity is not neutral. EU rules are tilting markets toward big players. When compliance is hard, it is incumbents who win. EPICENTER’s index makes the mechanism visible in one more aspect: in the sample it analysed, roughly four in ten impact assessments failed to cover essentials: SME effects, competitiveness, the financial & administrative burden, and even environmental impacts. Impact assessments often become theatre: they exist on paper, but key dimensions are missing, so they rarely discipline policy ambition.
This all leads to a scenario where implementation is left messy: key details arrive late, enforcement varies by country, and businesses end up paying for uncertainty. The result is simple: a rulebook ordinary people can’t read, firms can not plan around, and governments apply unevenly. Predictably the follow-through is weak. Fewer than half of directives (44.3%) make it into national law by the deadline, and typically only about 12 member states have bothered to pass at least one implementing measure by then.
In today’s world, there’s less and less excuse for bad writing. With AI, you can generate countless variations of any paragraph in seconds and pick the most precise, concise, and readable. And as the push to cut red tape intensifies, the regulatory apparatus should be under less strain. If the legislative machine is slowing down, then the laws produced in Brussels should get more attention, not less: drafted with proper care and backed by accurate, complete impact assessments.
Europe is at a precarious moment. The EU is under pressure from both outside and within. Foreign adversaries are routinely probing our defences, targeting critical infrastructure, and threatening the continent’s future. Domestically populists are drilling their troops, turning every frustration, real or imaginary, into ammunition aimed at the European project.Europe doesn’t have the luxury of waste right now, and heavy-handed regulation is a particularly expensive habit. A tougher, more disciplined approach to rulemaking could be the most effective antidote to the two threats ahead. We don’t win a global race by patting ourselves on the back for better cable management. We win by making Europe the place where rules are lean and legible, institutional infrastructure is world-class, and bold ideas move from lab to market at full speed.
