Nicoletta Kouroushi has an interesting European Conservative piece on Europe's failure to grasp the significance of its faltering ability to manufacture and innovate.
Europe’s China Reckoning: The Cost of Outsourcing Sovereignty
Europe is beginning to recognise that sovereignty is not merely a legal or political concept, as it also rests on the capacity to produce, innovate, and sustain economic power.
China now accounts for roughly 30% of global manufacturing value added and has established itself as the world’s dominant manufacturing power. Europe once believed that globalisation would make such concentrations of economic power largely irrelevant. Today, however, policymakers in Brussels are increasingly discovering that economic dependence can quickly become a strategic vulnerability.
The implications of that concentration are becoming increasingly difficult for European policymakers to ignore. As the European Union debates tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, investigates state subsidies, and seeks ways to shield domestic industries from unfair competition, it is confronting a reality it has long preferred to overlook: economics and geopolitics can no longer be separated.
The issue is not only one of trade balances or market access but also of resilience, competitiveness, and Europe’s capacity to act autonomously in an increasingly contested international environment.
The whole piece is well worth reading as Europe, including the UK, slowly drowns in a swamp of incompetence, bureaucracy and useless ideology.
In the case of the UK, replacing Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham as Prime Minister will to nothing whatever to turn this around, their power struggle is wholly irrelevant.
For decades, many European governments assumed that industrial capacity could be taken for granted. Manufacturing was often viewed as a legacy sector rather than a strategic asset, while policymakers focused on regulation, finance, services, and climate governance, paying comparatively less attention to maintaining competitive production. At the same time, energy costs rose, permitting procedures became increasingly cumbersome, and businesses faced mounting regulatory obligations.
