The Mirage of Territoriality: EU Law’s Extraterritorial Reach Between Protectionism and Altruism

The paper examines the evolving extraterritorial reach of European Union law and its implications for the principle of territoriality in international public law. Focusing on internal market regulation, it argues that the EU’s legal framework increasingly generates extraterritorial effects through access-to-market conditions, competition enforcement, and sustainability obligations. The study traces this development from the early effects doctrine in competition law to recent instruments such as the Foreign Subsidies Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive These measures illustrate how internal policies acquire external dimensions — sometimes as protective tools safeguarding the internal market, sometimes as altruistic instruments promoting global public goods. The paper categorises the extraterritorial effects of EU law as productive, structural, and behavioural, demonstrating how the Union projects regulatory power beyond its borders while formally adhering to territorial limits. It concludes that the EU’s regulatory expansion reflects a tension, and often a mirage, between protectionist self-interest and altruistic globalism, demanding careful calibration of its external reach and internal legitimacy.