This paper examines whether the European Union’s single market continues to serve as an instrument for advancing the Union’s foundational values or whether it is increasingly being deployed as a pragmatic tool in a valueless geopolitical order. It argues that, while recent crises such as Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reaffirmed the single market’s capacity to promote solidarity, the rule of law and collective resilience through coordinated EU action, later developments suggest a worrying drift toward transactional politics. The 2025 ‘Turnberry accord’ with the US and the EU’s muted reaction to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza reveal a shift away from a values-based international posture towards a survivalist, interestdriven pragmatism. The paper concludes that using the single market as leverage in a value-free global environment may erode the EU’s own normative foundations and weaken its internal legal and institutional framework, threatening the long-term integrity and credibility of European integration.
Daniel Sarmiento (Sun,) studied this question.