Caught between China and the US, Europe stumbles towards its independence day

In a dramatic speech in Berlin on Saturday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen painted a dystopian picture of today’s world as she reiterated her calls for an independent Europe.

“Europe is facing up to another seismic change in the way the global economy works. We may be approaching a shift in the international order – one increasingly defined by power, whether economic, technological or military,” she said.

Declaring a new “era of geoeconomics”, von der Leyen described unnamed powers trying to “create chokeholds on countries and industries, to exert control and impose coercion on others”.

The German official was clear that with its current methods, the European Union was not fit for purpose in a “world of transactionalism and zero-sum games … in which the global economy as we know it is giving way to a permanent state of flux and disorder”.

“Europe cannot do things the same way any more,” she told the Berlin Global Dialogue. “We learned this lesson painfully with energy. We will not repeat it with critical materials … It is time to speed up and take the action that is needed.”

European independence has been a recurring motif in leaders’ speeches since US President Donald Trump threatened to tear away the American security blanket that protects much of Europe and to turn digital and technological dependencies against it, forcing Brussels to change its own laws.

  

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