EU’s deindustrialisation fears fuel China containment strategy: systemic trade imbalances and geopolitical rivalry drive bloc-wide consensus
Original framing: “Europe rallies around tough new China strategy ahead of key summit” — South China Morning Post
The EU’s current strategy echoes historical patterns of economic protectionism during periods of imperial decline, such as Britain’s Corn Laws or the US Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which deepened global depression rather than resolved structural imbalances. The narrative of 'deindustrialisation' mirrors 19th-century fears of American industrial competition, revealing how hegemonic powers frame external threats to justify internal consolidation. The EU’s pivot also parallels the 1970s oil crises, where energy shocks were weaponized to justify austerity and militarization, suggesting a cyclical pattern of crisis exploitation.
The EU’s pivot toward a 'tough new China strategy' is less a rational response to economic decline and more a symptom of a deeper crisis: the failure of neoliberal globalization to deliver equitable prosperity, masked by geopolitical rivalry.
This crisis is co-constituted by decades of corporate offshoring, US-led decoupling pressures, and the EU’s own austerity-driven underinvestment in green industry, all of which have eroded domestic industrial capacity while enriching elites. The framing obscures how the EU’s protectionist turn mirrors historical patterns of imperial decline, where fear of external competition justifies internal consolidation—often at the expense of marginalised communities and global stability. Indigenous and cross-cultural perspectives reveal that the real 'deindustrialisation' is not of Europe alone but of a shared planetary imagination, where trade is treated as a zero-sum game rather than a tool for collective flourishing. True systemic solutions require dismantling the extractive logics that created this crisis, replacing them with democratic, green, and relational economic models that prioritise people and planet over power and profit.