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The EU’s new industry chief has called for a “Europe First” strategy for key business sectors, in a bid to prevent the bloc from becoming collateral damage in a potential global trade war launched by Donald Trump.
vice president of the European Commission Stéphane Séjournéa former French foreign minister and close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, told the Financial Times that Europe must act “on the offensive” to promote its strategic business interests and avoid being swamped by heavily subsidized imports from China.
“I fundamentally believe that Europe has everything to gain from being open to the world,” said Séjourné, who is in charge of the bloc’s industrial policy. But “when China says ‘Made in China’ or the USA says ‘America First’, we have to say: ‘Made in Europe’ or ‘Europe First'”.
New commission has pledged to restore the bloc’s competitiveness over the next five years, a task that will become more difficult if US President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his threats to impose sweeping tariffs on all imports, scrap trade deals and cut regulations for US companies.
Séjourné said his “greatest fear” is that Europe will become a “collateral victim of a global trade war”.
“If all the world’s markets are closed, the only open market left cannot be the European market,” he said. “If the United States gets closer to Latin America, India, China, the European market cannot be the destination for all the excess capacity in the world, otherwise we will find ourselves in a situation of short-term economic crisis.”
Brussels must send “a strong message to the United States to tell them that today we see no reason to devalue our trade discussion and our trade exchange,” he said. “The new administration must understand that . . . they also have none of the trade war.”
He rejected criticism that the EU is following a protectionist agenda.
“It’s not about protectionism at all because Europe really has no interest in a global trade war,” he added. “We have a strategic and technological interest in developing our own industry, creating jobs and growing.”
Séjourné acknowledged the “negative music” about the European economy, which has been hit in recent weeks by layoffs at car and steel makers and the collapse of Swedish electric battery maker Northvolt, which had been heralded as a leader in the continent’s green transition.
He said the Commission would focus efforts on strategic sectors including steel, car manufacturing and aerospace, as well as clean technologies.
“It will be necessary to do this in a very targeted manner, in important strategic sectors. But you have to do it offensively, not defensively,” he said.
“Historical” industries must be protected because they provide “very important support” to the clean technologies that are key to the green transition, Séjourné argues.
“In reality (steel production) is strategic because there are no wind turbines without steel. Without steel, there is no car production,” he said. “So if we want to develop other industries, we need the steel industry.”
At the same time, clean technologies like hydrogen and digital technology could be “plugged in” to the most polluting industries to reduce emissions.
The new commission, which took office on December 1, will define critical sectors in the first 100 days, he said. Another key policy effort would be to finally bring the bloc’s capital markets together to create a better investment environment – a long-standing ambition that has been thwarted by objections from member states.
“We want to give life to European industrial policy and economic doctrine, which we haven’t had before,” he said. “Until now, we had a juxtaposition of different measures that were sometimes not coherent with each other.”
In a major blow to Brussels’ existing industrial strategy, Northvolt, the EU’s best-funded start-up, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, resulting in hundreds of millions of euros in losses for investors including Goldman Sachs and the EU itself , who guaranteed about 300 million euros in company loans.
Séjourné said he wanted to reassure investors that “Europe will not abandon the battery industry”.
“We must not have any remorse that we founded this sector, that we helped and subsidized them, and above all, when they go through a technological problem, we must not allow everything we did in the past to be destroyed by the first difficulty,” he added.
