European Ends, National Means: State Aid and the Unfinished Constitution of EU Industrial Policy

ABSTRACT Reimagining State Aid argues that Article 107 TFEU no longer describes what State aid control does and proposes amendments to recalibrate and narrow the notion of aid, modernise the compatibility grounds and expressly ground Commission frameworks in Article 108. This comment shares the diagnosis but disputes its cause, and thus the cure. The Union has assumed industrial objectives without a consolidated competence or commensurate fiscal resources, and compatibility control has become the path of least political resistance as it attaches common conditions to national expenditure without resolving broader political or budgetary conflicts. That account changes the reform question. Articles 107(3), 108 and 109 TFEU already permit considerable adaptation and steering, whereas narrowing Article 107(1) would weaken the jurisdiction through which national spending is coordinated. Reform should instead strengthen framework‐level evidence and evaluation, make European additionality testable, connect common objectives to Union co‐financing and derisking and choose more deliberately among nonfiscal industrial policy instruments.