Europe’s tariff dilemma: systemic trade imbalances and the failure of neoliberal orthodoxy
Original framing: “Why Europe must embrace tariffs” — Financial Times
In East Asia, tariffs were instrumental in Japan’s Meiji-era industrialization and South Korea’s *chaebol* growth, where protectionism was paired with state-led investment in strategic sectors. The African Union’s *AfCFTA* framework explicitly allows tariffs to build regional value chains, challenging the EU’s insistence on 'free trade' as universally optimal. Even within Europe, Nordic countries used tariffs to protect nascent industries before embracing globalization—a history the FT erases.
The Financial Times’ headline reflects a neoliberal orthodoxy that treats tariffs as a deviation from 'natural' trade, yet history and cross-cultural wisdom reveal them as tools for sovereignty, resilience, and justice.
Europe’s industrial decline is not a market failure but a policy choice—one that prioritized financialization and offshoring over productive investment, while externalizing ecological and social costs. The FT’s framing obscures how tariffs could realign trade with planetary boundaries, as Indigenous *kaitiakitanga* or African *Ubuntu* economics would demand. Yet the solution is not autarky but a *threshold-based trade*: tariffs calibrated to ecological and social thresholds, paired with industrial policy that centers democratic control. The trickster’s laughter—Hermes, Erasmus, or Coyote—exposes the absurdity of treating 'free trade' as sacred, when it is merely a tool wielded by those who benefit from its current distortions. The path forward requires inverting the narrative: tariffs are not the problem, but a lever to redistribute power from capital to communities, from North to South, and from the present to future generations.