Politics
Europe’s Industrial Accelerator Act marks the rupture in the EU
On 25 February 2026, the European Commission is expected to formally present the Industrial Accelerator Act, a comprehensive proposal designed to accelerate the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries, secure strategic supply chains, and rebuild manufacturing competitiveness amid mounting external challenges.
Behind the familiar language of climate transition and industrial resilience, however, lies something far more unsettling.
The Industrial Accelerator Act is not simply another technocratic adjustment within the routine choreography of Brussels policymaking, nor merely a regulatory attempt to smooth the frictions of a volatile global market.
Rather, it embodies the emerging ideological and geopolitical rupture within the European project itself, signalling that the continent has, albeit belatedly, that the post-Cold War settlement, which subordinated production to finance, economic planning to the whims of the free market, and sovereignty to supranational institutions dictated by the whims of Washington, is no longer sustainable under conditions of intensifying fissures.
The Industrial Accelerator Act: the end of financialisation?
For three decades, the European Union has determined its economic constellation on a fragile architecture of external guarantees provided by the rules-based order, with the US at its helm. Cheap energy flowed from Russia’s abundant gas reserves, manufacturing networks extended into China, and the wider Eurasian periphery and security concerns were largely outsourced to the US.
This model, often celebrated as the triumph of liberal internationalism and popularised by figures such as Francis Fukuyama as the “End of History,” was framed as the final stabilisation of the global order following the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe.
The European Union presented itself as the laboratory of a post-political future: a space in which conflicts would be neutralised through procedure, and the market would quietly perform the task once reserved for political struggle. The violence of history, we were told, had been domesticated.
This apparent stability concealed profound contradictions. Europe’s eventual transition toward a post-industrial economy was less a transcendence of its industrial preponderance than its externalisation. Manufacturing did not disappear; it was offshored.
The era of financialisation masked a structural fragility, substituting speculative expansion and asset inflation for productive renewal. Economic integration concealed asymmetries of power, while global value chains obscured the geopolitical dependencies within them. Europe increasingly occupied the position of the consumer within a system whose productive core and strategic leverage were located elsewhere.
Permacrises
The crises of the 21st century have progressively exposed this settlement as contingent and unstable.
The financial crash of 2008 revealed the systemic risks of an economy oriented solely toward financial accumulation rather than industrial resilience.
The pandemic exposed the brittleness of global supply chains, as shortages of essential goods demonstrated the strategic costs of outsourcing critical production.
The war in Ukraine shattered longstanding assumptions about energy security and forced Europe into a rapid and costly restructuring of its economic model at the behest of US imperatives.
Simultaneously, the US returned to large-scale industrial policy, crystallised in the Inflation Reduction Act, made clear that even proponents of neoliberalism had abandoned their own orthodoxy. China’s ascent in renewable energy, battery production, advanced manufacturing, and critical mineral processing further underscores that control and guidance over production remain the decisive axis of power in the current world-system.
In this context, the Industrial Accelerator Act can be understood as the first attempt to reconstruct the material basis of European autonomy in global affairs.
Reconstructing autonomy via the Industrial Accelerator Act
Pushed forward by French Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné and supported by a broad coalition of industry leaders, the proposal deploys a suite of mechanisms: European preference in public procurement, low-carbon labelling for steel and cement, fast-track permitting for decarbonisation projects, and caps on foreign direct investment in emerging strategic sectors (notably a 49% limit on non-EU ownership in key greenfield investments) to foster a durable industrial ecosystem capable of sustaining a necessary ecological transition and geopolitical power.
While recent drafts have introduced flexibility, allowing “trusted partners” (such as the UK or Japan) to qualify under delegated acts and softening rigid origin thresholds to avoid immediate supply-chain ruptures, the core intent remains unmistakable: to create lead markets for cleaner, more resilient EU-made products and to prevent the hollowing-out of strategic industries by external actors.
If implemented with sufficient ambition, the Industrial Accelerator Act could underpin a genuine reindustrialisation: millions of skilled jobs in retrofitted steel mills, battery gigafactories, and hydrogen infrastructure; reduced exposure to geopolitical coercion; and a decarbonisation pathway that strengthens rather than undermines social models.
Yet the path is fraught. Internal divisions persist, between free-trade-oriented member states wary of Single Market fragmentation, industries concerned about cost increases, and those demanding bolder action. Compatibility with WTO rules remains contested, and the success of delegated acts that define thresholds and “trusted partners” will determine whether the policy is inclusive or exclusionary.
What is Europe to become?
Above all, the Industrial Accelerator Act signals a deeper ideological shift.
Europe is moving, however unevenly, from a post-historical illusion of triumphant liberalism, marked by an era of uncontested American hegemony, to an increasingly multipolar arrangement, though not in the way we expected. it.
The Industrial Accelerator Act reflects Europe’s attempt to navigate this contradiction. It seeks to preserve openness while constructing resilience, to maintain integration while rebuilding production. But this effort is haunted by internal tensions. The European Union is not a unified state but a heterogeneous formation. Some member states fear protectionism; others demand more radical intervention. The result is a policy that oscillates between ambition and hesitation.
This hesitation is itself revealing. Europe does not yet know what it wants to become. It oscillates between the desire to remain within the Atlanticist world-system and the necessity of sovereignty. It fears both dependency and conflict. The Act therefore embodies a form of strategic ambiguity, an attempt to act without fully acknowledging the implications of one’s actions.
The presentation on 25 February will mark not the conclusion of a legislative process, but the opening of a larger contest: whether Europe can summon the political will to reclaim the material basis of its independence, or whether it will once again defer to external forces the question of who controls its destiny. The Industrial Accelerator Act is the first gesture in that uncertain process.
Featured image via the Canary