Europe has spent three years quietly building a preference for its own companies into the way it spends public money — and almost nobody planned it that way. Since 2022, contract by contract and fund by fund, the EU has attached strings that tie access to public procurement and EU money to European origin, control or production. No single law created this 'Made in Europe' regime. It accumulated, instrument by instrument, until its shape became hard to see. A new analysis from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) has now laid the pieces side by side — and the picture is messier than Brussels might like to admit.
The CEPS In-Depth Analysis, 'Made in Europe, inadvertently: origin preference in EU procurement and funding,' makes a simple but uncomfortable point: the EU has assembled a body of origin-preference law without ever deciding to build one. Each measure was drafted to solve its own problem — securing a supply chain here, answering a foreign subsidy there — and none was written to fit the others. The result is a patchwork whose logic only appears when the instruments are stacked together.
To make sense of it, the analysis maps the measures along two axes. The first is the technique each one uses: diversifying suppliers, demanding reciprocity from trading partners, requiring a minimum share of EU-origin content, or setting conditions on where a company is established, controlled or actually produces. The second is the legal vehicle: full-blown legislation, the eligibility rules buried in EU funding programmes, or the administrative frameworks that contracting authorities and EU bodies apply on their own. Same goal, wildly different routes — and that inconsistency is the problem.
Rather than take a side in the long fight between open markets and strategic autonomy, CEPS proposes five principles that any origin-preference instrument should satisfy, whatever form it takes. Each measure should be justified under the EU's own primary law. Its compatibility with the bloc's external commitments — above all World Trade Organization rules — should be demonstrated, not simply assumed. Review procedures should match the weight of the obligation imposed. Regulators should prefer operational fixes to the outright exclusion of foreign firms. And coherence across instruments should be a design goal, not a happy accident.
The framing is pointed. These, CEPS notes, are essentially the same conditions the EU has spent years demanding of other countries when they favour their own industries. Applying them at home is partly a matter of credibility.
The timing is not academic. Brussels is actively weighing a wider overhaul of public procurement rules designed to give European providers a firmer edge over foreign competitors, part of a broader industrial-policy turn that has gathered pace as the bloc worries about Chinese competition and unreliable partners. As that debate moves from principle to legislation, the question CEPS raises — whether the EU can favour its own firms without breaking its own rules — stops being theoretical.
Every major economy is quietly rediscovering industrial policy, and the EU is no exception. But the bloc's whole pitch to the world rests on rules: predictable, WTO-compatible, applied evenly. A 'Made in Europe' regime that grew by accident, with no shared logic and no consistent test for when preference is justified, risks handing trading partners an easy charge of hypocrisy — and Europe's own courts plenty to litigate. The value of the CEPS intervention is less any single recommendation than the demand for a decision: if Europe is going to buy European, it should say so openly, design the rules to hang together, and be able to defend them. The alternative is a protectionism that is real in effect but deniable in law, which is the worst of both worlds.
