At the founding of the European project in 1958, its overriding purpose was to tear down barriers to competition and trade among members and to create an internal market with the same freedom of movement, scale and efficiency as the U.S. Its executive body, the Brussels-based European Commission, may be the last bastion of neoliberalism—the doctrine that free trade and free markets best promote prosperity. But sometime in the last 15 years, the bloc’s priorities shifted, from prosperity toward protection—of privacy, of data, of the climate. A tsunami of regulation on everything from website disclosures to carbon emissions followed. Those priorities look badly out of step with today’s reality. Having pushed so hard to rein in big tech companies, Europeans now lament that they have none of their own.
