Event Overview
For decades, the European Union was built to constrain national industrial policy and safeguard the single market's level playing field, not to conduct it. Its ordoliberal economic constitution privileged market-making over market interventionism, disciplining fiscal policy, state aid and monetary policy discretion. Yet industrial policy has returned to national capitals, and Brussels itself has become a proactive industrial policy actor, propelled by successive crises, geopolitical rivalry, and Franco-German realignment.
This lecture asks whether Europe has moved beyond the regulatory state, and, if so, what is becoming of Europe as it shifts toward a "transformational state". Donato Di Carlo argues that the Commission now orchestrates industrial policy through networks rather than markets or hierarchy, operating as a Developmental Network State across four functions: targeted resourcing, brokering, facilitation and economic statecraft. He contends, however, that despite good intentions, the EU remains a weak industrial policy actor that can hardly become a fully-fledged developmental state. Trapped between interdependent national capitalisms and entrenched veto points, it can neither return to the nation state nor move forward toward a federal Europe. Caught in purgatory, Europe is becoming a patchwork state: workable, incoherent and politically fragile.
About the Speaker
Donato Di Carlo is Assistant Professor in Political Economy at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Founder of the Luiss Hub for New Industrial Policy (LUHNIP), an interdisciplinary policy hub that bridges academic research, policy debate, and stakeholder engagement on industrial policy and economic governance in Europe and Italy. A comparative political economy (CPE) scholar, his work revolves around three interrelated research streams: EU and Italian industrial policy; continuity and change in European models of capitalism and growth regimes; and the political economy of labour market and wage-setting institutions.
Before joining LSE, he was Lecturer in Political Economy at Luiss Guido Carli, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He has experience at the interface of research and policymaking, including as external economic advisor to the Cabinet of the Mayor of Rome and through the development of policy-oriented research initiatives and partnerships via LUHNIP.