The European Union has already entered the decision phase on the reforms needed to reduce fragmentation in key strategic sectors, and the next steps will come quickly, former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta said in Bucharest at the Economist Romania Government Roundtable, an event organized in partnership with RCI Holding România. According to Letta, the European Council endorsed the launch of this agenda 10 days ago, while a new decision on how to implement the plan is expected in about three weeks. Among the concrete measures he highlighted is the proposed “28th regime” in corporate law, the much-discussed EU Inc., designed to help companies operate more easily across borders and reduce legal fragmentation inside the bloc.
In his remarks, Letta argued that Europe’s competitiveness problem is rooted above all in one structural weakness: fragmentation. While the EU is integrated in many aspects of daily life, it remains divided in the areas that matter most for scale, investment and long-term strategic autonomy. “In the European Union, we are integrated in important aspects of our daily lives. But we are fragmented in these three fields, and the fragmentation of financial markets, energy and connectivity is something that is today the main cause of our weakness,” he said.
The former Italian prime minister placed financial markets, energy and connectivity at the center of his diagnosis, arguing that Europe continues to behave as 27 separate systems in sectors where continental scale is essential. In his view, this fragmentation prevents the bloc from mobilizing the level of capital needed for large investments, especially in areas such as artificial intelligence, advanced technologies and infrastructure.
Letta linked Europe’s lag in strategic technologies not to a lack of talent, but to a lack of integrated capital markets and a business environment able to support growth at scale. Europe, he said, has strong engineers and scientific talent, but has failed to translate that into leadership because investment capacity remains too limited and too dispersed.
Letta also framed the issue in broader geopolitical terms. In a world reshaped by the rise of China and India, even Europe’s largest national economies have become too small to compete alone. What used to count as “big” in Europe is no longer big enough internationally, he said, which is why the bloc must allow companies and sectors to move from a national to a truly European logic. “Being fragmented for us means sending jobs to the US and to other parts of the world. Being fragmented for us means not being able to attract [talents] because we are too small,” he warned.
That logic, he argued, applies well beyond finance. In energy, telecoms, digital industries and other strategic sectors, Europe’s companies face competitors from the US and China that are larger, better capitalized and able to produce more efficiently. Consumers ultimately follow price and efficiency, he said, and Europe cannot expect to protect its industrial base if it remains structurally divided.
The broader conclusion of his Bucharest intervention was that Europe already knows what it needs to do. The real test now is whether it can move from awareness to execution. Sharing sovereignty in selected strategic areas, he argued, would not weaken national identities, but make them more sustainable in a more competitive and dangerous world. His Bucharest message was therefore less a theoretical appeal for “more Europe” than a warning that Europe has entered a period in which fragmentation carries a direct economic cost. For energy, as for capital markets and connectivity, the choice is no longer between national comfort and European ambition. It is between deeper integration and continuing decline in competitiveness.
Bigger is better – Romanian President Nicușor Dan
For a Romanian audience, Letta’s intervention also had a strong regional and national resonance. Countries seeking growth, industrial development and stronger energy security have a direct stake in whether Europe can move from a collection of national systems toward a genuinely integrated strategic market. In that sense, his message echoed the remarks made earlier by Romanian President Nicușor Dan at the opening of the event, when he argued that Romania supports the completion of the European single market because “in the economy, the bigger you are, the more competitive you are.” The president also stressed the need for a genuine European single energy market, warning that Europe’s overall competitiveness is being affected by price differences across the bloc. In the same context, he welcomed the fact that Europe is beginning to reconsider nuclear energy and expressed hope that nuclear will have a clearer place in the continent’s future energy mix. By linking competitiveness, energy integration and the upcoming debate on the EU’s 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, Nicușor Dan placed Romania firmly inside the same strategic conversation that Letta advanced in Bucharest: that Europe’s future strength will depend on its ability to think and act at scale.
Skepticism and the limits of integration
However, Enrico Letta’s plea for more unified Europe is received with skepticism by some analysts and commentators. Matthias Bauer, writing for ECIPE, is skeptical of Enrico Letta’s push for a “28th regime” because he sees it as a potentially elegant institutional workaround that could still leave the real causes of fragmentation intact. Bauer argues that the proposal is too vague on core legal questions, would likely focus mainly on company law while leaving politically sensitive fields such as taxation, labour law, insolvency, and social policy largely untouched, and therefore risks producing only limited practical gains for firms trying to scale across borders. His deeper criticism is that optional EU frameworks succeed only when they offer clear, tangible advantages over national systems; otherwise, the EU may simply add another layer of complexity instead of removing it. In that sense, Bauer’s warning is not against integration as such, but against a form of integration that multiplies legal forms without changing the incentives and structures that keep the Single Market fragmented.
Thomas Moller-Nielsen, in Euractiv, is more bluntly dismissive: he presents the latest single-market drive as another in a long series of Commission “strategies,” “roadmaps,” and “agendas” that promise integration but deliver almost nothing. His criticism is that Brussels keeps producing documents rather than results, while most of the barriers identified decades ago remain in place and only marginal parts of Letta’s proposals have actually been implemented. Moller-Nielsen acknowledges that member states resist change in sensitive areas such as taxation, bankruptcy, and employment law, but he places the heaviest blame on the Commission itself for weak enforcement, poor monitoring of barriers, and an unclear overall strategy. The result, in his telling, is that Letta-style appeals for a more unified Europe risk becoming part of a familiar ritual of rhetorical ambition paired with institutional ineffectiveness.
