Not Rotten, Not Bad: Rethinking Apple and EU Tax Governance through Law and Political Economy

Abstract This Article reinterprets the Apple State aid case through a Transformative Law and Political Economy (TLPE) lens. It argues that the Court of Justice’s 2024 judgment showed that, under specific national-law conditions, State aid control can reach aggressive tax planning by prioritizing economic substance over formal profit allocation. Apple thus marked the high-water point of the Commission’s post-2013 effort to use Article 107 TFEU as a meso–level governance tool linking firm-specific tax rulings to broader distortions in the internal market. At the same time, the case exposed the limits of this strategy. Parallel enforcement actions failed, and subsequent legislative initiatives encountered comparable resistance rooted in sovereignty claims, unanimity requirements, evidentiary asymmetries, and geopolitical constraints. Read through a TLPE lens, the Apple saga reveals both the contingent possibilities and the structural limits of EU legal strategies to constrain corporate tax avoidance. While law can expose the contingency of entrenched arrangements, durable institutional redesign ultimately depends on political-economic conditions that legal intervention alone cannot generate.