This chapter explores the role of enforcement networks in the governance of EU Internal Market policy. It looks closer at the structure and performance of two enforcement networks at the centre of the European integration project, the European Competition Network and the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network. The chapter studies the institutional dynamics within the networks, tracing the interaction, horizontally, between national enforcement bodies within each network, as well as vertically, between the Commission and constitutive national entities. This dynamic is then analysed along four parameters: effectiveness, participation, horizontal empowerment and vertical empowerment (centralization). Transnational networks have been hailed as a governance arrangement countervailing the shift of power to the supranational level and preserving the link to democratically elected national institutions. Their advantage is seen to lie in offering possibilities for experimentation and learning from difference. The chapter puts these expectations to the test. Importantly, it highlights the ambiguous place of institutional diversity, viewed, at once, as a source for creative institutional experimentation and as an undesired impediment to coherence and efficiency. The overarching task is to critically evaluate the effectiveness and legitimacy of enforcement networks and their influence on the distribution of power in the multi-level institutional landscape of the Union.

The concluding chapter reviews the EU’s handling of current crises and its search for sustainability and resilience. Beginning with its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health crisis which threatened to scupper the free movement of goods and people on the internal market, the chapter goes on to examine the EU’s recent actions in the area of the environment, climate change, financial stability, and immigration. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the challenges that the EU needs to overcome in order to achieve resilience, more precisely, through improved coordination of policy initiatives on the European and national levels, continued public support for resilience and sustainability, and a strengthened ability to exercise global leadership and influence, particularly in regard to the global agenda for climate mitigation and sustainable development.