Since 2022, and against an increasingly difficult geopolitical landscape, the EU has built a body of law that conditions access to public contracts, and to the EU funding linked to them, on EU origin, control or production. It did not design this body of law. It accumulated it, instrument by instrument, none drafted to fit the others. The result is a regime of origin preference whose shape becomes visible only when the instruments are laid side by side.
This CEPS In-Depth Analysis report lays them side by side. It maps the ‘Made in Europe’ measures along two dimensions. The first is the substantive technique they employ: diversification, reciprocity, EU origin content, and requirements on the establishment, control and production location of operators. The second is the legal vehicle through which the obligation is imposed: legislative acts, the eligibility rules of EU funding programmes, and the administrative frameworks adopted by contracting authorities and EU institutional bodies.
From this, the analysis derives five principles for the design and review of any origin-preference instrument, whatever its legal vehicle: justification under primary law; external compatibility demonstrated rather than presumed; review procedures correlated with substantive obligations; a preference for operational mitigation over structural exclusion; and coherence across instruments as a design objective rather than an accident. The principles do not settle the choice between openness and strategic autonomy. They set the conditions that any such choice must satisfy to be lawful, compatible with the EU’s commitments, economically defensible and administratively coherent. They are, in the end, the conditions the EU has long asked of others.
