This article claims that the EU’s progress on competitiveness is stalled by a paralysing ideological divide between northern market liberals and southern state interventionists (dirigistes), arguing that these philosophies can be reconciled. Five key reforms are proposed, including creating a true Capital Markets Union to unlock private investment, establishing a harmonised European business code, reforming competition law to allow for market-led consolidation, creating a pan-EU research and development agency modelled according to the US DARPA blueprint, and finally, allowing for more legislative output in the form of Regulations instead of Directives, to avoid the gold-plating of rules at the national level and to foster legal certainty.