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Securing Europe’s Economic Sovereignty

  • To protect European economic independence, the EU needs to better integrate economic policy and geopolitics. Europeans like to believe that the European Union has the collective economic size and capacity to determine Europe’s economic destiny. They think the EU can determine its own rules for economic life, negotiate on an equal footing with partner economies, and even set economic standards and regulations for the rest of the world. But perhaps the EU has been lucky so far. Perhaps its apparent economic independence was always the result of the fortuitous absence of geopolitical interference. Perhaps it could only flourish under the benevolent aegis of a real superpower. Perhaps, in other words, its independence only endured because no serious power was willing to challenge it, and because the United States was willing to protect it. Now the behaviour of other powers is increasingly calling Europe’s economic sovereignty into question. China and the US, in particular, do not separate economic interests from geopolitical interests in the same way that the EU does. They are increasingly using economic connections, from cyberspace to financial links, to serve geopolitical goals. Europe’s economic sovereignty is now at stake. Until recently, the EU took for granted that the global system provided a functional framework for international economic relations, which could be regarded as separate from the sphere of geopolitics. Of course, the economic rules of the road were determined by power relations that arose in the wake of the Second World War. But in the years that followed, even the US largely followed them. The economic and geopolitical spheres often overlapped, particularly during the Cold War. But the US regarded the economic integration of ‘Western’ countries as conducive to the strength of the free world, and it stood by this principle even after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The EU’s very construction reflected this disposition: most international economic powers were given to EU-level bodies, and most security and foreign-policy instruments were left to individual member states. Accordingly, the EU was able to conduct an international economic policy that was reasonably insulated from geopolitical concerns. This separation of the economic was always fragile. It now looks hopelessly outdated. The US and China have fundamentally different relationships with Europe, but neither separates economics from geopolitics. In general, national-security issues are gaining prominence everywhere, as is the relationship between economics and national security. Economic connections, from cyberspace to financial links, are becoming the primary areas of great-power competition and are at risk of being weaponised.1 Increasingly, the US and China follow neither the letter nor the spirit of the rules in their relationships with the EU and its member states. In the US case, its decision to make full use of the centrality of its currency and its financial system to enforce secondary sanctions against Iran was a major shock to European partners. Washington’s abandonment of core principles of the global multilateral trading system and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change were also disruptive. As for China, the EU now accepts that Beijing is behaving as ‘an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance’.2 It is essential that Europeans respond to this challenge. The collective capacity of EU countries working together to preserve their economic independence underpins the value of European integration to European citizens. That value is further bolstered by the EU’s ability to participate in defining the rules of the game for the global economy – what Germans call Handlungsfähigkeit and the French call Europe puissance. The challenge for Europe is substantial but manageable. The EU and its member states should adopt an economic-sovereignty agenda to protect European economic independence through a variety of tools ranging from competition policy to the international role of the euro. To do so, the EU needs to better integrate economic policy and geopolitics.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Mark Leonard, Jean Pisani-Ferry, Elina Ribakova, Jeremy Shapiro, Guntram Wolff
Parent Title (English):Survival - Global Politics and Strategy
Publication year:2019
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:75
Last Page:98
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2019.1662148
Release Date:2020/02/25
Volume:61
Issue:5
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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