The challenge of simplification crucial for the new Europe

As the French writer George Sand recalled, 'simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world; it is the extreme limit of experience and the last effort of genius'. Much easier is to complicate. The European Union knows something about this, which in recent years has seen regulation literally explode, particularly in the digital sphere, trying - but not always succeeding - to maintain the right balance between innovation and consumer protection.

The data repeatedly recalled in recent weeks by the president of Confindustria, Emanuele Orsini, are revealing of a trend towards the superfetation of laws and regulations that can no longer be indulged in, especially after the blow to international trade dealt by Donald Trump's duties announced on 2 April. In five years the EU has produced 13,000 new regulations, the US 3,500, as well as around 2,000 resolutions at federal level. Two years ago a study on seven European countries, including Italy, calculated the price of regulation at 154 billion dollars per year: a hidden tax that penalises companies and reduces the gross domestic product.

It is true that Europe has won on the field the sceptre of the most influential supranational organisation in exporting its high regulatory standards. But the 'Brussels effect', according to the fortunate definition coined in 2012 at Columbia University, has long since seen its positive contours soften and its negative ones worsen. According to the European Investment Bank Group's 2023 report, referred to by Mario Draghi in the Report to relaunch European competitiveness, regulation is considered by more than 60% of EU companies to be an obstacle to investment, and 55% of SMEs cite regulatory obstacles and administrative burdens as the biggest challenge they face. In the technology sector, the burden turns into a ballast: there are about a hundred existing laws, there are more than 270 active digital network regulators in all member states. A fragmentation of procedures and interlocutors that weakens the Old Continent compared to the giants of the world economy, from the USA to China, because it forces companies to juggle updates, duplications and inconsistencies. Suffering the consequences are above all medium and small enterprises, the heart of Italy's productive fabric.

"Too little attention is paid to the tangle of laces and entanglements that hamper the activities of enterprises," wrote Carli as president of Confindustria in 1976, advocating the cause of an enterprise statute which, as Cesare Zappulli put it, should have taken the form of "a flurry of anti-laws to free industrial initiative from the barriers that imprison it on all sides". A year later Carli reiterated the point, arguing that state powers that lose their grip on citizens always take refuge 'in the labyrinth of authorisations, permits, concessions. The form and the stamp, in short, are the insignia of a weak state'.

Paraphrasing that comment, we could say that European overregulation is precisely the emblem of a weak Union. This is why the omnibus package announced by the Commission to simplify rules on sustainability and investment, with the aim of reducing administrative burdens by at least 25% and those for SMEs by at least 35% by the end of the mandate, is a step to free the 'vital spirits' that animate the EU, the only ones that can give it the vigour it needs to regain cohesion. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said this on 18 March in Parliament: 'We will do everything so that Europe is not suffocated by its own rules. If it continues to pretend to over-regulate instead of releasing energy it will not survive'. Simplifying is the only way to defend the values underlying the European dream of Carli and other great Italian statesmen before him, such as Luigi Einaudi, who wrote in March 1954: 'The propitious time for union is only that during which the same ideals of freedom will endure in Western Europe. Are we sure that adverse factors will not unexpectedly gain sufficient strength to prevent union; causing the one to fall into the North American orbit and the other into the Russian one?" Seventy-one years later, this is the question that comes back.