Across Europe and beyond, ‘deregulation’ and ‘simplification’ are back at the top of the political agenda. The promise is familiar: if only legislators took a chainsaw to the regulatory forest, growth would return and bureaucracy would recede. Similar calls have echoed since the 1980s, but they are now reinforced by global political figures and by parts of the EU’s own institutional and lobbying landscape.

This contribution argues that sweeping deregulation and radical simplification are structurally at odds with core EU objectives: a well-functioning internal market, a high level of consumer, environmental and safety protection, and legal certainty for economic operators. It also outlines a different path: reducing regulatory burden by refining how we regulate, rather than by dismantling the rules that hold the Single Market together.

Complexity, the Single Market and the limits of ‘short and simple’ regulation

The longing for ultra-lean rulebooks evokes an age when a handful of basic norms could plausibly govern most social and economic interactions. That world no longer exists. Cross-border supply chains, digital platforms, AI-driven business models and pervasive data flows have multiplied the number of interactions and the types of risks regulators must address. Direct online commerce between Asian manufacturers and EU consumers, or cross-border online grooming of minors, would have been practically unthinkable a few decades ago; today they are routine challenges for regulators and enforcement authorities.

The EU context makes this complexity particularly visible. The Treaties guarantee free movement of goods, persons, services and capital, and Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) explicitly ties internal-market legislation to a high level of consumer, health, environmental and safety protection. This creates an inherent need for dense and relatively detailed rules: if Union legislation is too general, interpretative gaps are filled by 27 different legal traditions, spawning divergent national practices, mutual mistrust and, ultimately, new non-tariff barriers. Otherwise said, each additional specifying provision reduces the margin of interpretation of authorities and other actors in the Member States—and thus should be welcome.

The trajectory of EU product-safety law illustrates this. The European Court of Justice’s Cassis de Dijon¹ principle of mutual recognition was meant to enable free circulation on the basis of trust in other member states’ standards, but, in practice, governments routinely invoked more or less plausible environmental, safety and consumer-protection concerns to maintain barriers. The subsequent ‘New Approach’² moved to light, principle-based legislation, coupled with standards. Yet here too, the lack of legislative detail generated interpretative disputes, prompting the proliferation of—not necessarily respected—guidelines or standards and ever more detailed binding implementing rules. Today, many ‘New Approach’ instruments are hardly distinguishable in density, granularity and oversight mechanisms from classic EU regulation—because experience has shown that, without precision and supervision, rogue operators prosper, citizens remain unprotected, legal uncertainty spreads and protectionism reigns. See in particular Regulation (EU) 2017/745 on medical devices and Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 on construction products as examples for these relatively granular and dense regulations³. 

Why today’s deregulation push is self-defeating

Against this background, current political pressure for broad deregulation and ‘radical’ simplification is likely to trigger de-harmonisation of administrative practices and market behaviour. This effect is not unique to the EU; wherever comparable issues are decided by multiple authorities, practices will diverge unless norms are sufficiently clear and detailed. But in the Union, where different legal cultures and interests interact, the centrifugal pull is especially strong.

History suggests that the cycle will repeat: once vague, slimmed-down rules lead to diverging implementation and new internal barriers, the same actors who demanded deregulation will soon complain about ‘fragmentation’ and call for ‘completing the Single Market’. The contradiction between the two agendas is rarely acknowledged explicitly. Yet, whoever argues for large-scale deregulation in the EU context must candidly accept three consequences: greater legal uncertainty, erosion of free movement, and a lowering of safety, environmental and consumer-protection levels, in tension with Article 114 TFEU.

This tension is visible well beyond the EU. In the United Kingdom, for example, post-Brexit narratives of regulatory liberation coexist with demands for rapid legal responses to online harms and other emerging risks. The same dynamic is visible in OECD analyses: governments seek both less ‘red tape’ and more robust responses to complex, cross-border risks. Without confronting this dualism, the deregulatory discourse risks becoming an exercise in cognitive dissonance rather than evidence-based policymaking.

The real bottleneck: obligations, not the number of articles

If sweeping deregulation is both unrealistic and counter-productive, how can the regulatory burden on businesses and administrations be reduced? Three approaches hold promise and are compatible with Treaty objectives and the EU’s ‘better regulation’ agenda.

1. Re-design verification chains: who checks what, and when?
   A core question in modern regulatory design is: who must verify which conditions, at what point in the value chain, to ensure compliance? The Handbook ‘How to Regulate?’ argues that officials with a broad inventory of regulatory techniques can configure more efficient verification architectures, for example by shifting from ex ante licensing to registration plus targeted, data-driven ex post controls in suitable sectors. Advances in data analytics and AI create opportunities to replace some burdensome prior approvals with smarter market surveillance—provided that verification gaps are identified and addressed. Periodic, structured reviews of verification chains should become a standard component of evaluations.
2. Invest in clarity, structure and transparency of legislation.
   Regulatory burden is not only a function of how much law exists, but also of how it is designed. The Commission’s better regulation guidelines and toolbox already emphasise clarity, coherence and accessibility, yet many sectoral regimes remain difficult to navigate for SMEs and national administrations. Techniques such as clear typologies of obligations and modular regulatory architectures—as suggested in the Handbook ‘How to Regulate?’ and in recent OECD work—can significantly reduce interpretive work and increase understanding without lowering protection standards. Further tools have been listed in the last part of a recent article of the author⁴.
3. Shift from “provision slashing” to obligation scrutiny and re-design.
   The politically attractive metric of ‘cutting X% of EU law’ or ‘one in—one out’ focuses on the wrong object. What matters for businesses and citizens is not the number of provisions—by default just providing clarity—but the net burden of obligations, relative to the risks addressed and the legal certainty provided. Scrutinising obligations—who must do what, how often, with which transaction costs, and whether the same regulatory objective could be reached with leaner, more targeted or digitalised duties—offers a more surgical and economically meaningful approach than arbitrary reduction of pages or provisions.

In practice, this means working with the scalpel, not the axe, and even less the chain-saw: refining reporting, licencing and supervision mechanisms, partly replacing them by AI tools, consolidating overlapping obligations, better aligning supervisory requirements across sectoral regimes, and systematically using the existing toolboxes like this ‘EU Legislators’ Toolbox’ and its dedicated Simplification Selection.  

Towards an honest simplification debate in Europe

The current debate on ‘deregulation’ and ‘simplification’ in Europe will remain stuck in a rhetorical loop as long as it ignores the structural trade-offs between lean rulebooks, a genuinely free and fair internal market, and high levels of protection. The challenge for EU and national policymakers is not to promise the impossible—a 21st-century Single Market governed by ‘short and simple’ law⁵—but to use the full range of modern regulatory techniques to reduce unnecessary burdens while preserving, and in some areas strengthening, the protective core of EU law.

A more honest agenda would therefore replace calls for blanket deregulation with a commitment to systematic verification-chain reviews, investment in legislative quality and transparency, and rigorous scrutiny and re-design of obligations. This would not make for easy slogans—but it would offer a realistic path to both a competitive European economy and a resilient, high-trust Single Market.

1 Judgment of the European Court of Justice of 20 February 1979, C-120/78.

2 Later called ‘New Legislative Framework’.

3 However, even such relatively granular and dense regulations would merit further refinement, as the Regulatory Institute will soon demonstrate for the revision of the New Legislative Framework.

4 Kohler, M.: ‘Better Complete and Detailed than Short and Simple Legislation’, in: ‘The Loophole’, the Review of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel, Edition 12/2025.

5 See again Kohler, M.: ‘Better Complete and Detailed than Short and Simple Legislation’, in: ‘The Loophole’, the Review of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel, Edition 12/2025, where he illustrates this impossibility inter alia by analysing the ‘short and simple’ key sentence of EU product safety law, Article 5 of the Regulation (EU) 2023/988 on General Product Safety: “Economic operators shall place or make available on the market only safe products.”