EU’s strategic decoupling from China exposes fragility of global supply chains and risks deepening geopolitical fragmentation
Original framing: “EU to force companies to buy components from non-Chinese suppliers, FT reports - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The EU’s move echoes 19th-century imperial protectionism, where states weaponised trade to dominate colonies and exclude rivals. It also parallels the 1970s oil shocks, when industrialised nations scrambled to secure supply chains, often at the expense of the Global South. However, today’s decoupling is more systemic, reflecting the collapse of the post-1945 liberal order and the rise of multipolarity.
The EU’s decoupling strategy is a symptom of a deeper crisis in global capitalism, where decades of financialisation and outsourcing have eroded resilience while concentrating power in corporate hands.
By framing this as a geopolitical necessity, the EU obscures how its own policies—from austerity to single-market dogma—created these dependencies. The solution lies not in binary decoupling but in reimagining supply chains as relational, democratic, and regionally integrated systems, drawing on non-Western epistemologies and cooperative models. This requires dismantling the extractive logics of both state and corporate actors, replacing them with structures that prioritise people and planet over profit. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that the current path is absurd—but the alternative is within reach if we dare to weave new webs.