The general consensus at the EU institutional level is that existing regulatory frameworks offer an appropriate starting point from which the Union may navigate a (safe) route to a fruitful and profitable Nano-Future. Despite the novel properties exhibited by engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), the assumption running through official commentaries is that the interests of both industry and consumers can be accommodated without any radical (and costly) shift away from free-trade oriented regulatory interventions.

However, as this article explains, there are grounds for disputing this assumption. The root of the problem lies in the fact that the EU is very much a creature of The Market and, as such, the ethos underpinning and directing its policy and law is inevitably skewed in favour of free trade. Moreover, on a purely practical level, the rapid rate at which new products are being developed ensures that the proposed ‘tweaking’ of existing legislative frameworks to accommodate the (uncertain) risks associated with ‘the nano’ will certainly prove to be highly problematic in practice.

History evidences, very clearly, the inability of market driven regulatory systems to deal with unanticipated risks: take for example, the BSE/vCJD crisis of the 1990s, or the cocktail of persistent chemicals that now contaminates both the environment and our daily bread. In light of such warnings, the fact that critics are already expressing concerns about potential gaps in the laws governing the infant nanotech industry must surely be cause for concern. The reality is that commercial innovation has already outpaced the law’s ability to keep abreast of new developments, belying the Union’s claim to be pursuing a proactive – and where necessary, a precautionary - policy agenda.