European standardization and the illusion of invisible power
When the world is competing to own the rules, invisibility is not a strategy.
Thumbnail photo by Guillaume Périgois on Unsplash.
Europe is reforming how it sells standards while the rest of the world is competing to own them. This contrast finds its most visible expression in a single phrase from a post published this week on LinkedIn by CEN and CENELEC1:
Standards to “remain the trusted, invisible engine of the Single Market”. This is a striking image, and a deeply revealing one. As the United States is leveraging bilateral trade deals to redraw the rules of international standardization, and as China consistently executes its strategy to lead the technical bodies that define the technologies of tomorrow, Europe’s response is not to change, to transition from documents to digital services, and to embrace invisibility as a guiding aspiration.
Is this a vision? Or is it a concession dressed in the language of transformation?
