Explain the failure to mobilize economic interests at the European level.

Summary By studying a series of mobilizations initiated by French mutuals against the European Union's "insurance" directives between the 1990s and 2010, the article seeks to uncover the interaction of different factors that can explain the failure to promote economic interests at the European level. The lack of strategic resources explains the difficulty of the actors studied to get their demands on the agenda. But once these resource deficits are overcome, their inability to have the legitimacy of the values that underlie their demands recognized by the Commission's agents ultimately explains the failure of their mobilization.