[0xCaponte]

European values, like consumer protection, privacy, and environmental standards, are, in my view, among the best in the world. However, bureaucracy and politics push them in the wrong direction or tie everything up. I had never thought much about this before, but I now plan to look more into supporting European industries. However, only for products of comparable quality. If a product doesn’t measure up, I don’t see many people choosing it just for the sake of buying European.

[kennethwolters]

not an attempt at rebutting or so, just adding my thoughts:

It doesn't matter if the product is great because of those values if there is a lack product (bc politics and bureaucracy make it infeasible to produce). Makes you think if those values might contribute to the bad politics and bureaucracy. And if so, how.

[piva00]

Why is it always attributed to politics and bureaucracy when there's a much more obvious point on why European products take a long while to gain market share even inside the continent: the EU is made of 27 independent countries with their own culture, and language.

A consumer product created in the Netherlands needs to be adapted to be marketed across 27 different countries, sales teams need to know how to approach each of them, manuals, UI, etc. need to be translated into the customers' languages, so on and so forth.

Is there bureaucracy? Of course, some of it is to uphold values, some might be unnecessary but it's not the main obstacle faced by European companies to grow themselves into the whole of the EU.

Imagine for a moment that each US State had its own centuries-old way of living, its own language, and history separated from the US as a nation, there would be much more friction for products to spread around the whole country, there would be much more localised versions of the same market niche, exactly what happens in Europe.

A federalisation of Europe is a slow process, it will take generations to integrate all these different cultures, streamline production pipelines to allow products to be released across many different member-states at once, etc. Ironically the US becoming more insular and adversarial might be a catalyst for European companies to do so, there will be quite a few market gaps opening up in the wake of US's influence retraction.