From Capital Markets Union to Savings and Investments Union: The Shifting Policy Narratives on European Financial Market Integration

Abstract Financial market integration has been a major European Union (EU) policy goal since the earliest days of European integration in the 1950s and the subject of hundreds of pieces of EU legislation. Yet, competing economic interests and disagreements about suitable regulatory templates have stalled progress in this area, promoting new proposals, repeated relaunches and relabelling: inter alia, the Capital Markets Union project launched in early 2015, relaunched in 2020 and then relabelled as Savings and Investments Union in February 2025. Combining an actor‐centred strategic constructivism and policy narratives approach and using a quantitative and qualitative text analysis methodology, this article examines the shift in the policy narratives deployed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the three European Supervisory Authorities with a view to mobilising political support for financial market integration in all its guises and overcoming entrenched opposition to it. This article explains why and how EU supranational actors have wielded five different policy narratives portraying financial market integration as an instrument to achieve other sought‐after economic policy goals, with a view to eliciting wider political and public support.