“Competitiveness” is high on the agenda of European policymakers and academics alike. In early September 2024, Mario Draghi presented a much-anticipated report in which he warned about the economic shortcomings of the European Union in managing the green and digital transformations, especially when compared to other global trading blocs like the United States and China. Moreover, EU institutions and national governments are discussing a revival of industrial policy and more activist forms of state intervention.
This paper examines European Council and European Commission communication on competitiveness from a long-term perspective (1960 to 2024). It applies supervised transformer models for content classification in a newly collected and merged dataset including all European Council and Summit conclusions, all Commission speeches and related legislative acts. The classified textual data are qualitatively analyzed to compare the communication and strategic priorities of competitiveness challenges since the 1960s.
The analysis shows that questions about economic competitiveness have regularly been the subject of European Council deliberations and Commission speeches. In addition, the paper documents interesting variation, both in terms of content and strategy: while competition for a long time concerned relations with supposedly like-minded actors like the US or Japan, more recently the focus shifted towards geopolitics and the role of China. The European Council increasingly considers greater economic autonomy and investments in European public goods as adequate tools in the global competitiveness race.