Jeremy Lever Lecture 2025

What should the EU do and become in a Trump 2.0 world? As a rules-based order built on collaboration, the EU is facing an increasingly hostile global reality regressing to zero-sum logic and naked hard power. This at a time where shared global challenges require more collaboration, not less. On this hostile global field, moreover, the EU is rapidly losing ground to the US and China, also economically. As the Draghi report makes very clear, this expanding gap in competitiveness may even challenge the European social model and the fabrics of our societies in the longer run.

To face these challenges, the EU is trying to boost its economic power and competitiveness, as well as to translate its economic might into hard power. In addition to increased spending, one key instrument for this purpose are unilateral EU measures that impose EU norms on external actors. From FDI screening to the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and from the AI act to    the recently adopted Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence directive (CSDDD), the EU is trying to leverage the size of its market to influence the behaviour of others, i.e. to have power.

Though understandable, and in part necessary, such use of unilateral instruments carries great risks. One risk is that such instruments clash with the law-based and free-trade nature of the EU. Part of the EU’s economic power comes from free trade and free competition as embedded in its legal DNA. Undermining free trade hence can undermine the very source of economic might being leveraged.  

Another key risk is alienating other countries and regions in the world that Europe needs to collaborate with to achieve EU and shared global aims, including the climate transition. One of the necessary moves to address this risk is decolonizing EU law and the EU perspective of the world this law is based on. As I will argue, the EU is currently estranging our necessary partners in Africa, Latin America and East Asia. It is doing so by the substance of the unilateral norms adopted, the form these measures take, as well as the processes via which these norms are produced. Our potential partners are understandably cynical of norms that do address shared challenges but always also happen to protect EU interests, and that do not contain a genuine attempt at a collaborative win-win. In short, they are sceptical of norms that come across as (neo-)colonial and are based on a world view where they are not fully equal partners, or even partners that have already outpaced the old continent in several ways.

My plea for decolonizing EU law therefore entails honestly looking at the place of the EU, and the systemic ways in which our laws, procedures and world view do not truly take into account the real interest of our partners. I will argue, moreover, that such decolonization is not just a normative imperative, a nice to have for woke ivory tower academics. Rather, it is now a must-have, already from the narrow perspective of the EU’s immediate self-interest. Perhaps for the first time, realigning our world views and legal norms with the new global reality overlaps with the normative imperative of decolonization, not just as an academic or epistemological exercise, but as a necessary exercise for EU economic law and external economic policy.

From such a perspective, decolonizing EU law leads to both very practical and concrete challenges as well as to more fundamental conceptual rethinking. How, for example, can we modernize competition law, including state aid norms, to protect the EU from foreign abuse but not abuse the EU’s power versus third countries or undermine the very foundations of free trade and competition? How can we significantly boost investment in key sectors but do so with our partners and in a way that allows true benefit sharing? Or, procedurally, how can we draft and adopt unilateral measures in ways that include and respect the needs of the EU’s global partners much better and at an earlier stage, amidst the already complex decision-making within the EU, and where should we stop dreaming of the Brussels effect altogether? 

Conceptually, EU law can contribute on a more fundamental level to decolonization. The world desperately needs to be liberated from some colonial concepts that are capturing and limiting our national and global capacity to effectively act and collaborate. As an example, I will focus on the simplistic and rather absolute conception of sovereignty increasingly used, which also contributed to Brexit. This simplistic conception of sovereignty is not just trapping the EU and the UK, but also trapping our potential partners in Africa, Asia and Latin-America into our historic conceptual prison. An evolved, decolonized conception of sovereignty can liberate both ourselves and our partners, leading to a legal framework able to support both the protection of the national and the regional and global collaboration we need to meet challenges such as boosting competitiveness and fighting climate change.

Armin Cuvyers is the head of the European Law department at Leiden Law School, and a full Professor of European Law. He holds the chair in EU Constitutional Law and Comparative Regional Integration, and is also Director of CompaRe, the Leiden Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Comparative Regional Integration. He previously was a visiting researcher at a.o. Berkeley, Stanford, Sydney University, Hastings Law School and Bilgi, as well as a visiting fellow at the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) the in-house think tank of the European Commission President. His research focusses on European constitutional law, sovereignty, Brexit, (con)federalism and monetary integration, often in a comparative perspective and in collaboration with social psychologists to integrate their empirical insights into EU law. In addition, Armin regularly provides legal advice to public and private actors, including in legal disputes on complex matters of EU substantive law.

Armin graduated cum laude from Leiden University in Civil Law (burgerlijk recht) and Legal Philosophy, where he also received his certificates, cum laude, in Public International Law and European Law. He was a visiting student at Harvard College and Harvard Law School and in 2005 received his Magister Juris degree from Oxford, Exeter College, with distinction. In 2013, Cuvyers received his PhD, jointly in European law and in Legal Philosophy with his thesis: ‘The EU as a Confederal Union of Sovereign Member Peoples’.

In his research on EU constitutional law and theory, Cuyvers combines traditional legal-constitutional methods with two innovative approaches. Firstly, he compares the EU with other regional organisations in the world such as ASEAN, MERCOSUR, CARICOM and the EAC. Contrary to the standard approach, he thereby also looks at what the EU can learn from other organisations, instead of assuming the EU is the gold standard. Secondly, he collaborates with social psychologists to integrate empirical insights into EU constitutional law. For the EU as well, feelings are facts. European integration must therefore adapt to human nature, as the opposite will not happen.