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After months of delays, internal frictions, leaks, and sensational claims that EU industrial policy is going “full China”, the long-anticipated proposal for an Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) is expected in early March. The IAA represents a continuation and deepening of the Commission’s new industrial policy, distancing itself from a deeply entrenched constitutional imaginary in which the economy was governed primarily through rules designed to enable and protect competitive coordination.

This shift is reflected, first and foremost, in its legal bases. Not unlike the recent Critical Raw Materials and the Net-Zero Industry Acts, the IAA is anchored primarily in Article 114 TFEU. Acknowledging the operative weakness of 173 TFEU, which precludes harmonization measures for industrial policy, the new industrial policy has unfolded through the progressive instrumentalisation of other constitutional bases – most importantly 114 TFEU, with industrial production recoded as a condition of market functioning and strategic capacity-building measures framed as internal-market harmonisation. At the same time, the IAA proposal expressly relies on Article 207 TFEU to recalibrate trade and economic security, enabling the Union to thicken the boundary conditions of the internal market. This produces a hybrid legal architecture that mobilises internal market governance and external commercial policy to steer and safeguard strategic value chains and strengthen productive capacity within the Union.

The constitutional implication is subtle but far-reaching. Industrial steering is no longer framed as a deviation from the competitive order or as a temporary crisis response, but as a structural condition for preserving the internal market’s resilience, security of supply, and productive capacity. Market integration thus no longer primarily disciplines industrial ambition; rather, industrial governance becomes the mechanism through which integration itself is to be sustained under conditions of geopolitical rivalry, subsidy competition, and decarbonisation pressure.

The Two Pillars of New Industrial Policy

The institutional architecture of the turn to new industrial policy is built around two conceptual pillars.

The first is an instrumental approach to markets, aimed at steering, shaping, and generating markets that produce outcomes prefigured by political authority. This approach has manifested in the CRMA and NZIA primarily through supply-side reforms that expand and incentivize industrial capacity and lower investment risk for clean technologies, the procurement and processing of critical raw materials, and the decarbonization of energy-intensive industries, while enhancing a broadly understood notion of economic security. The IAA further purports to create “lead markets” by redesigning the demand side through minimum Union-origin requirements for procurement and subsidies. This emerging regulatory regime of “market instrumentalism” contrasts with a long-standing paradigm of economic liberalism defined by the commitment to the competitive order, a broad understanding of market freedoms, rigid state aid control, and a liberal framework for international trade. On a deeper level, the market instrumentalism of industrial policy casts off the agnosticism about “value” that defined the liberal-competitive paradigm, according to which value could only be discovered and derived through market-mediated competition. Industrial policy instead posits a politically determined conception of value that precedes and reshapes the market and the competitive order.

The second pillar is a reconfiguration of the state–capital nexus intended to sustain this instrumentalism and the pursuit of strategic objectives, captured in the strategic role assigned to “derisking”. The IAA extends an EU industrial strategy that relies on public guarantees and financial backstopping to mobilise private investment in key sectors, actively securing private profitability without disciplining private actors to pursue the strategic objectives when these are at odds with profit calculations. As critics have pointed out, such institutional design does not subordinate investment decisions to collectively defined priorities but instead shifts part of the risk associated with strategic investments from the private sector to the public, opening new frontiers for capital accumulation through the expanded use of blended finance and risk-sharing instruments, the growing role of the European Investment Bank, the increasing use of Power Purchase Agreements, and related mechanisms. The strategy of derisking highlights how, beyond the aspirations of green growth, resilience, and economic security, the contemporary turn to industrial policy represents a strategic repositioning of public power. Derisking, in this sense, is best understood as an effort to stabilize accumulation under conditions of ‘secular stagnation’, characterized by declining profitability, weak investment, and slow growth.

Boundary-Setting and Territorial Embeddedness

Market instrumentalism requires “boundary-setting”: the attempt to stabilize the effects of public steering by conditioning access, limiting external contestation, and thickening territorial embeddedness within the Union’s economic space. Indeed, the leaked IAA proposal does not limit itself to seeking to create “lead markets” but it also develops techniques for ensuring that those lead markets cannot be immediately arbitraged away through global overcapacity, import substitution, or corporate mobility.

A first modality of boundary-setting lies in the re-politicisation of public demand through minimum Union-origin and low-carbon requirements. Public procurement is recast as a strategic lever of economic security and industrial policy and an integral component of an emerging industrial strategy oriented toward rebuilding production ecosystems and anchoring value creation within the Union.

A second modality is the conditionalisation of access to the Single Market in response to third-country restrictions on critical raw materials. Here, the draft sketches a retaliatory-resilience mechanism: where a third country imposes measures that generate shortages or threats of shortages, the Commission may require undertakings from that country to make an in-kind contribution as a condition for placing covered goods on the Union market (i.e., depositing specified quantities of critical raw materials at Union stockpiling centres).

The most far-reaching boundary setting, however, sits in the chapter on foreign investment. This is where the draft moves from shaping demand to shaping ownership and control, and from encouraging territorial embeddedness to structurally constraining exit options and capital mobility. For foreign direct investments in emerging key strategic sectors above a EUR 100 million threshold, implementation is prohibited unless explicitly approved by a national Investment Authority or the Commission. What follows is not classic screening but an attempt at a harmonised investment constitution for strategic sectors: a 49% cap on foreign ownership or control, a joint venture requirement with EU-domestic entities, and operational conditionalities tied to technology, R&D, labour, and input composition.

Three features matter conceptually. First, the joint-venture logic is structural, ensuring “sufficient participation of Union partners” and measurable “value added to the Single Market.” Corporate form becomes an instrument of industrial policy, embedding cooperation and partial EU control into the legal architecture of permissible investment. Second, the technology-transfer dimension is unusually explicit: approval is conditioned on licensing intellectual property and sharing know-how with detailed provisions on ownership of IP developed domestically or jointly. Third, investment legitimacy is tied to ongoing territorial embeddedness through performance thresholds: commitments to R&D spending within the Union, workforce composition requirements, and minimum Union-manufactured input shares in products placed on the market.

Taken together, these provisions recast foreign investment as a potentially distortive market intervention that must be reshaped to serve strategic value creation. The Investment Authority becomes a market-gating institution, policing the terms under which capital may enter, operate, and extract value. This is why the political controversy around “Made in Europe” reflects a deeper constitutional wager. The wager is that the Union can stabilise its emerging industrial strategy by combining demand-side European preference with investment-side conditionality, thereby anchoring production, rebuilding manufacturing capacity, and narrowing the pathways through which global capital can treat the internal market as a space of frictionless arbitrage.

The Contestation of New Industrial Policy

The provisions of the IAA remain susceptible to the critique that the EU prioritizes its own economic security and accumulation processes while simultaneously constraining the policy space of other countries wanting to do the same. Not only has the EU consistently criticized similar industrial policy designs adopted by China, but it has also used newly concluded Free Trade Agreements as an opportunity to block policy instruments typically associated with state-led industrialisation – such as import and export monopolies, dual-pricing schemes, and performance requirements – while adapting its own trade defence practice to impose anti-dumping and countervailing duties on downstream imports from countries that promote domestic processing of upstream raw materials.

At the same time, despite the forthcoming aspirations of a more politically-controlled and steered investment environment, the IAA does not break with but in many ways fortifies the market instrumentalism-derisking dualism. In the absence of direct public investment or public control over financial flows, the IAA relies on incentivised and publicly guaranteed private investment –through procurement and support schemes, alongside financial guarantees. In this sense, the IAA functions as a mechanism for the absorption of risk and uncertainty, ensuring private profitability.

Yet, the IAA also reinforces a broader trend toward the politicisation of economic priorities, departing from a long-standing paradigm of economic regulation characterised by deference to market coordination and global capital mobility. In particular, the IAA pursues strategic value creation through far-reaching conditionalities, monitoring obligations, and potential penalties for foreign investment that promote deeper territorial embeddedness, making corporate exit – and its associated leverage – more difficult. This is why, according to commentators, the FDI provisions are projected to “face a lot of opposition from free traders and multinationals”.

The postponement of the IAA’s adoption by the Commission highlights the political sensitivity of the proposal. The apparent controversy over the “Made-in-Europe” provisions and resistance from industry stakeholders shows that the boundary-setting logic underpinning the Act is already contested. Concerns about market closure, price effects, administrative burden, and compatibility with openness point to a deeper distributive conflict over how far EU industrial policy may reshape market access and investment conditions. The delay thus reflects the concrete political confrontation generated by the emerging industrial strategy: whether strategic objectives can be embedded in law without reshaping the internal market settlement on which the Union’s market order has long depended.

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On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel assassinated the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei. The joint operation marked the first time either state has directly killed a sitting head of state. As with the US’s January 2026 operation against Nicolás Maduro, what stands out is not only the gravity of the act but the manner in which it was justified. Public statements emphasised Khamenei’s record and the sophistication of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation, but they did not articulate a credible legal basis for the strike.

Khamenei’s assassination represents a new stage in the erosion of the international norm against assassination. This norm has long been understood as part of a broader framework protecting sovereignty and prohibiting the use of force outside armed conflict. Under international law, the killing of a state official outside an armed conflict will almost invariably violate the prohibition on the use of force, state sovereignty, and/or international human rights law. In an influential piece written two decades ago, Ward Thomas observed that “the directly targeted killing of foreign adversaries, once rejected as beyond the pale, has become a prominent issue in debates over U.S. security policy”. For Thomas, the shortsighted policies driving the US’s so-called “global war on terror” were undermining the norm and risked spilling over to justify the killing of state officials. Yet, in 2005, he wrote with some relief that “the word ‘assassination’ itself still carries a considerable stigma”. In the wake of Khamenei’s assassination, this statement no longer seems to hold true.

Since the early 2000s, the gradual normalisation of state-sponsored assassination has lessened the stigma attached to the practice to the point that assassinating a sitting head of state without any legal justification has now become a reality. While the international norm against assassination may not yet be fully dead, its recent trajectory offers little hope for its restoration.

A gradual normalisation of assassination

The norm’s erosion was already visible in the January 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani. The Trump administration initially invoked self-defence and imminence, before shifting to claims that Soleimani had “American blood on his hands”. International reactions were limited: a joint statement by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom focused on regional stability without directly condemning (or indeed mentioning) the killing. Subsequent cases reinforced this pattern. The Biden administration justified the 2022 killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri with the assertion that “justice has been delivered”, without any articulation of its compatibility with international law.

This apparent normalisation of assassination as a tool of statecraft rests on two interrelated mechanisms: routinisation and legitimation. Prior to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States was a vocal critic of Israel’s practice of assassinating Palestinian activists. After 9/11, however, it quickly adopted the practice and slowly began to legitimate it. With the US adoption of the practice, now strategically renamed “targeted killings”, assassination became increasingly routinised as a tool of statecraft.

Today, both democratic and authoritarian states employ it, and targets have expanded beyond suspected terrorists to include scientists, political opponents, bloggers, journalists, state officials, and sitting heads of state during armed conflict. Alongside covert poisoning and car bombs, methods have evolved to include drone strikes and AI-assisted targeting. The practice now spans objectives of counterterrorism, deterrence, regime security, and strategic signalling. What was once treated as an exceptional and contested measure has been bureaucratised and normalised as a tool of policy within self-proclaimed liberal democracies such as the United States and Israel. The definitional move from “assassination” to “targeted killing” facilitated this process by situating such operations within the vocabulary of armed conflict after 9/11.

In parallel, legitimation has become possible through a reinterpretation of the applicable legal framework. Since the early 2000s, the United States and Israel have been more vocal in advancing expansive readings of self-defence, imminence, and the existence of non-international armed conflicts beyond traditional battlefields to justify targeting individuals that could not be regarded as lawful targets under stricter legal interpretations. The lack of strong condemnation by other states allowed the legal justifications, however implausible, to provide a precedent for further action.

As this effort at legal justification provided a veneer of legitimacy for the routinised assassination of suspected terrorists, it became increasingly easy to rely on the newfound legitimacy of the practice to assassinate other “enemies of the state”, such as nuclear scientists or state officials like Soleimani, as well as to abandon legal justification altogether, as for al-Zawahiri.

The assassination of Khamenei as a rupture

The assassination of Ali Khamenei differs from the killings of the past two decades insofar as sitting heads of state have historically occupied a distinct normative category. As explained by Thomas, as early as the seventeenth century, “a complex combination of material and ideational factors contributed to the rise of the norm against assassinating foreign leaders” in wartime and, a fortiori, in peacetime. Even when states plotted against foreign leaders during the Cold War (for instance, the US repeatedly attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro), they always did so covertly and rarely acknowledged responsibility when exposed. In later decades, when the US targeted foreign leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, it was careful to claim that their deaths would have been an inadvertent consequence of a strike undertaken in self-defence. Such was the stigma against targeting heads of state that, as late as 2022, some authors argued that the norm erosion triggered by targeted killings would remain “compartmentalised” to the targeting of non-state actors.

It must therefore be emphasised that the US-Israeli strike of 28 February 2026 deliberately targeted and killed the sitting head of state of a sovereign state. In addition, Khamenei’s killing was publicly embraced, and its justification was framed in moral rather than legal terms.

Despite repeated violations of the international norm against assassination, its resilience depended on states either concealing their involvement or defending their conduct through appeals to legal exemptions such as self-defence or combatant status. Both practices signalled that assassination remained normatively problematic in the international order.

When assassination is openly acknowledged and only minimally justified in legal terms, as was recently the case with Soleimani, al-Zawahiri, Haniyeh, or Nasrallah, that signal weakens. The threshold then shifts from whether the act can be legally justified to whether the target is sufficiently “bad” to warrant elimination. Whether the targets of recent assassinations “deserved” their fate is, however, less important than the implication of this shift from legality to morality for the international order. While legal arguments can be rebutted, moral claims about worthiness are less susceptible to meaningful contestation.

Alongside Jeremy Waldron, one may therefore begin to ask:“Do we want [assassination] to become a permanent capability available in principle to any of the 192 [now 195] sovereign states in the world that think of themselves as having particular persons as enemies?”

Is the international norm against assassination dead?

The systemic effects of recent assassinations, from drone strikes in Yemen to the assassinations of Soleimani and Nasrallah, are cumulative. Each muted reaction by states that style themselves as the guardians of the “international rule-based order” lowers the political cost of the next strike; each public acknowledgement unaccompanied by legal argument lowers the justificatory threshold for other states and future assassinations. Combined with the widespread availability of drone and long-range strike technologies, assassination becomes both politically easier to defend and materially easier to replicate. As a result, the practice of state-sponsored assassination, which once required covert modalities and plausible deniability, is increasingly conducted openly.

This does not mean that the norm is formally extinguished. Even under the most expansive readings of international law, as advocated by the US and Israel in recent decades, the “targeted killing” of a state official outside an armed conflict still violates the prohibition on the use of force, state sovereignty, and international human rights law. Many states continue to denounce assassination when they consider themselves as victims, and legal scholarship remains largely sceptical of expansive doctrines of imminence or “globalised armed conflict” that would render such killings lawful.

The more difficult question is whether the norm still meaningfully constrains powerful states. Norms do not disappear simply because they are violated. They erode when violations become routine, when justificatory standards decline, and when adverse reactions diminish. The 28 February 2026 assassination of Ali Khamenei features as the culmination of these three dynamics. It suggests that, at least for some states, assassination has moved from a covert and contested practice to an overt, politically defensible, and even desirable instrument of policy.

Should other states emulate this model, and should international responses remain muted, the norm will continue to hollow out. Conversely, sustained contestation, coordinated sanctions, and renewed insistence on legal justification could restore its constraining force. As such, whether the norm against assassination will effectively disappear depends less on the existence of prohibitive rules than on future practice.

Reactions by other states to Khamenei’s assassination will be decisive for the norm’s future trajectory. At present, however, that trajectory points much less toward a restoration of the stigma than toward a full normalisation of assassination as a tool of statecraft.

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In January 2026, Serbia adopted a package of amendments to core judicial statutes, informally labelled the “Mrdić laws”, that together recalibrate key elements of the country’s prosecutorial and judicial framework. While the legislative drafting of the package is formally technical and several political actors, including the law’s namesake MP Mrdić, have framed it as primarily efficiency-oriented, the surrounding political discourse and the institutional context in which the reforms emerged suggest a more contested underlying rationale. In substance, the amendments introduce structural changes whose cumulative effect is likely to weaken the operational autonomy of Serbia’s specialised anti-corruption prosecution and to further entrench hierarchical control within both the judiciary and the prosecution service. The reforms have already triggered visible resistance within the Serbian legal community, including public statements, professional appeals, and protest actions by prosecutors, judges, and civil society actors. The timing of the reforms is particularly salient, as they unfolded alongside a deeply contested election process for the High Prosecutorial Council, marked by repeated voting and open factional divisions within the prosecution service.

At the centre of the reform lies the restructuring of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime (TOK), including mechanisms enabling the large-scale reassignment of prosecutors currently handling politically sensitive cases. Yet the significance of the legislative package cannot be understood by examining the TOK provisions in isolation.

The “Mrdić laws” illustrate a contemporary mode of rule-of-law erosion in which formal guarantees of independence remain textually intact and outwardly suggest only cosmetic adjustments, even as the functional capacity of key institutions is deliberately weakened. The Serbian case illustrates how targeted restructuring, rather than overt dismissal, can operate as an effective technique of prosecutorial and judicial neutralisation, exemplifying one of the many legal cheating strategies that have come to define Europe’s rule-of-law backsliding over the past decade.

The legislative package: scope and architecture

The reform package amended statutes central to the organisation of the Serbian judiciary and prosecution service. The amendments target interlocking domains: the prosecutorial governance framework, the judicial organisational structure, and the civil service regime applicable to justice-sector personnel.

Uglješa Mrdić, Chair of the National Assembly’s Committee on the Judiciary, Public Administration, and Local Self-Government, stated that the adoption of the package of judicial laws would only be the first step in returning what he described as a “hijacked judiciary” to the state and the people of Serbia. He said that the reforms would no longer be governed by, in his words, “alienated centres of power under foreign control.”

The legislative process itself drew criticism. The reforms were adopted through an expedited procedure, omitting the type of inclusive expert deliberation typically expected for structural judicial reforms.

Several of the adopted solutions conflict with applicable international standards and, more specifically, risk undermining the trajectory set by the 2022 constitutional reforms. The 2022 reforms were designed within the EU accession framework to depoliticise the judiciary and prosecution service by reducing direct political influence over appointments and dismissals, thereby encouraging greater self-governance within the justice system. Against that baseline, the current legislative package risks reversing these developments, illustrating how the European model of judicial self-governance may itself become vulnerable to abuse where hierarchical powers of chief prosecutors and court presidents facilitate tighter internal control over rank-and-file judges and prosecutors.

The Centre for Judicial Research (CEPRIS), a Serbian judicial policy think tank, identified several highly contested elements of the reform. These include abolishing the High Prosecutorial Council’s commission responsible for reviewing objections to mandatory prosecutorial instructions, requiring ministerial consent or approval for prosecutorial international cooperation, and reassigning appointment competences for the Special Prosecutor for High-Tech Crime. Further concerns include the possibility of additional mandates for court presidents and acting high chief prosecutors, potentially enabling certain incumbents to extend their tenure and preserve hierarchical influence over judges and prosecutors; and the establishment of a new ordinary court and prosecutor’s office in Belgrade, which may reshape territorial jurisdiction and the distribution of politically sensitive cases. Taken together, these developments will effectively dilute the functional safeguards that the 2022 constitutional amendments sought to strengthen.

The effects of the amendments are highly asymmetrical. While formally system-wide, the reforms disproportionately affect the institutional stability and personnel continuity of specialised prosecutorial bodies, most notably the TOK.

The functional core: restructuring the TOK

The most consequential element of the reform concerns the large-scale reassignment of prosecutors currently serving in the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime (TOK). This intervention would be significant under any circumstances. In the present Serbian context, however, it acquires particular constitutional salience because the TOK is not a routine specialised body: it currently carries the burden of some of the most politically sensitive proceedings in the country, including cases directly implicating senior public officials and politically exposed figures.

Under the new framework, a significant number of prosecutors assigned to the TOK are required to return to the previous posts that they held before the TOK was established decades ago, without their consent and within a short transitional window. Formally, this does not constitute a dismissal. Prosecutors remain in service and retain their status. Yet the functional impact is far more disruptive. Complex organised crime and corruption investigations rely on continuity, accumulated case knowledge, and stable investigative teams. According to the Statement of the Collegium of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime, abrupt personnel turnover risks fragmenting prosecutorial strategy, delaying proceedings, and creating procedural vulnerabilities precisely in those cases where institutional robustness is most needed.

The current case portfolio of the TOK underscores why personnel discontinuity matters. The office handles high-level corruption cases and, among other matters, pursued the investigation into Culture Minister Nikola Selaković in the “General Staff” case. It is also responsible for investigating corruption charges in the fatal canopy collapse at the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, a focal point of public outrage and a catalyst for sustained protests against the government, with widespread suspicion that systemic corruption in major infrastructure projects has contributed to the tragedy. Restructuring a specialised prosecutorial body while it is handling politically sensitive investigations risks blurring the line between neutral administrative reform and functional interference.

This mechanism represents a paradigmatic example of neutralisation through reassignment. Rather than directly removing prosecutors, an approach that would trigger visible international scrutiny and citizens’ outrage, the legislature has opted for a formally lawful restructuring that nonetheless can still produce effects functionally comparable to a partial institutional purge.

Officially, the reforms are justified as measures to improve efficiency and coherence and to address perceived dysfunction within specialised prosecutorial bodies. Yet, considering the politically sensitive environment and the nature of the cases they currently handle, the reforms carry clear hallmarks of subverting the rule of law.

Formal compliance and functional erosion

One of the most striking features of the “Mrdić laws” is not merely their formal restraint but their sustained insistence on ostensibly technical adjustments that, in practice, significantly recalibrate the balance of power within the justice system.

Contemporary rule-of-law erosion increasingly operates through compliance-preserving subversion: maintaining the outward form of independent institutions while altering their internal operating environment to reduce their competencies effectively. The Serbian reforms fit squarely within this emerging pattern.

EU conditionality and the problem of grey-zone reforms

The European Union has already expressed concerns over the amendments, framing them as a potential step backwards in Serbia’s accession trajectory. Yet the episode also exposes the structural limits of existing rule-of-law monitoring frameworks.

EU conditionality mechanisms focus heavily on formal legal compliance: constitutional guarantees and statutory alignment with international standards on paper. They struggle to identify reforms that preserve formal guarantees while effectively eroding operational independence. The Serbian case thus reinforces the need for rule-of-law assessment tools that assess institutional reforms more functionally and can detect institutional neutralisation by design. It simultaneously underscores the structural limits of a centre–periphery model of EU rule-of-law promotion that privileges formal convergence over functional scrutiny.

The Venice Commission is said to prepare its opinion on the reform package, which will hopefully provide a more granular analytical framework for assessing the cumulative impact of these changes on the functioning of the Serbian judiciary.

Institutional re-engineering and the changing logic of capture

The “Mrdić laws” illustrate the evolving grammar of rule-of-law erosion in contemporary hybrid regimes. Rather than openly dismantling prosecutorial independence, the Serbian legislature has pursued a more calibrated strategy: targeted restructuring, hierarchical consolidation, and large-scale personnel reshuffling.

Individually, many of the amendments can be presented as technical or efficiency-driven. Taken together, however, they stand to substantially erode the continuity and specialised capacity of Serbia’s anti-corruption prosecution at a particularly sensitive political juncture with potentially far-reaching implications for the country’s political trajectory.

For observers of democratic backsliding, the lesson is increasingly clear: today’s most consequential threats to prosecutorial and judicial independence rarely come through overt dismissal or formal constitutional overhaul. Instead, they materialise through calibrated institutional redesign that preserves legal form while shifting the underlying distribution of power.

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