FD Europe Essay: Laissez-Passer: Why EU-Inc. is worth choosing

Laissez-passer: why EU Inc. is worth choosing

My family has spent three generations choosing where to belong. My grandparents left Spain for Venezuela. My mother, born and raised there, moved to the US to study, where she met my Greek father, and then moved to Greece with him. I myself was bound, like most of my classmates in Greece, for a university in the United Kingdom. Brexit redrew the map, and nearly all of us turned to the Netherlands instead, which effectively became the new go-to country for all the Greek students. Every single one of these journeys was made by choice. None of us left because we were forced to. We left because we believed in the place we were travelling towards.

A Greek kid’s choice to go and study in the Netherlands is only possible because of the EU. I could move to the Netherlands as easily as I once expected to move to Britain because the EU guarantees that a citizen can cross a border without becoming a stranger on paper. Few European achievements are as tangible as this one.

Governments speak of EU membership in terms of obligation, compliance, and cost. The current discussions on the EU budget are the perfect example of that. Brexit showed everyone the cost of leaving. Is it overly cynical to argue that those who remain do so less from conviction than from fear of leaving? This is the very reason why so few people can say which direction Europe is heading. A union, whether it’s a marriage or the EU, held together mainly by the price of exit has no destination.

The EU should be more than the sum of its member states’ contributions, and that ambition may well crystallize in the DNA of its (new) companies. In March 2026 the European Commission proposed EU Inc., the so-called 28th regime, as a Regulation creating a single company form that would exist alongside the national legal entities. An EU Inc. would be incorporated digitally, and its rule set on governance, capital structure and employee incentive plans would apply throughout the EU. That is fundamental change in its plainest sense: one body of law where there are now twenty-seven. The proposal is not just another policy; it is evidence that the EU can still build something people choose rather than something merely imposed upon them.

A European entrepreneur who wishes to scale must contend with twenty-seven national legal systems. Each expansion requires new advisers, new registrations, and often a new corporate structure, so that growth is delayed by weeks or months and planned around legal geography rather than commercial opportunity. Investors meet the same obstacle from the other side, since they must assess companies whose rights and governance differ from one jurisdiction to the next. That uncertainty limits the flow of investment capital and accounts for a huge part of the funding gap between EU deep-tech start-ups and their US peers. And no, the EIC alone is not going to fill that gap.

A single form would remove much of that burden. A founder would incorporate once, at low cost, and then expand, hire, and relocate within the EU without re-establishing the company in each jurisdiction. An investor would assess one legible legal structure instead of twenty-seven unfamiliar ones, which should lower the cost of cross-border capital. I know what such right of passage feels like because I have been granted it as a person. When I left Greece for the Netherlands, one status travelled with me, and nothing was lost at the border. That quiet, uncelebrated freedom is precisely what a company should be able to enjoy as well.

This is why the voluntary character of EU Inc. is its strength rather than its weakness. No founder would be obliged to incorporate as an EU Inc., and no member state would be required to abolish or alter its national legal entities. Founders will choose it because it will function better, not because it is their only option.

The EU has too often mistaken imposed compliance for genuine unity, demanding obedience where it should have earned trust. EU Inc. offers a chance to correct that in the DNA of Europe’s new companies, and with it a test of whether Europe can persuade rather than command. If successful, it can serve as a precedent for later initiatives. And with every new legislative initiative, EU leaders should ask themselves one question: Would people choose this if they were free not to? If the answer is yes, the EU will have found its direction.

No one instructed my classmates to come to the Netherlands. My generation went there because it was worth going to, just as my family, for three generations, went wherever they believed a life could be built. That is the Europe I hope to arrive in. A Europe that does not limit options but functions better than the existing frameworks on which it builds. It may begin with a single founder, on a Monday afternoon, registering a company recognized in Athens, Amsterdam, and Madrid alike, and end with the first EU Inc. becoming a unicorn. A legal form is a modest building block, but unity is eventually built from stacking such blocks in order to build a strong house.