Before Munich, there was Paris. The first stage of JD Vance’s European tour was an Artificial Intelligence (AI) summit in the French capital. The vice president’s speech was not well received. He disagreed with the EU’s approach to regulating AI and he had a few things to say too about the EU’s lawfare against the U.S. companies. To understand what has been going on involves looking more closely at the EU’s past, its attitudes to regulation, and to the U.S., so here goes . . .
EU rulemaking is the assertion of Brussels’s control over territory once reserved for the bloc’s national legislatures. The crucial role it plays in advancing “ever closer union” operates as a powerful incentive for legal and regulatory activism, not that it needs it. Dirigisme has, with occasional exceptions, been its default mode since the time of its Christian or Social Democratic founders.
Some of those founding fathers envisaged the future EU as a device to win back the place at the global top table ...
