Between openness and security: The EU’s conflicted identity in a new age of superpower rivalry

The EU’s recently unveiled Economic Security Doctrine, the ReSourceEU Action Plan, and the Omnibus I package signal a tentative shift toward a more (neo)realist approach shaped by geopolitical rivalry and security concerns. This, however, sits uneasily with the EU’s enduring commitment to open markets and (neo)liberal values, reviving familiar questions about the bloc’s global role, its scope for cooperation with other powers, and the lessons it can draw from its own regional history and its partners’ industrial experiences.

Key takeaways:

Recent policy initiatives and the question of credibility

At the end of 2025, the European Commission unveiled what has been dubbed the Economic Security Doctrine, an upgrade of its 2023 Economic Security Strategy. As noted by the Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, Maroš Šefčovič, the primary objective is to consolidate existing instruments under a single framework and shift the EU’s (foreign) economic policy from a reactive posture centered on risk identification to a more proactive, risk-mitigating one.

The Commission has described this as a “paradigm shift,” though several questions remain. Chief among these is how to measure supply-chain resilience. Several analysts have pointed out that merely quantifying levels of dependence does not suffice; genuine resilience requires mapping dependencies across supply-chain segments and identifying viable alternatives. The doctrine identifies six high-priority areas, including reducing reliance on third countries for materials, goods, and services.

The communication was published alongside the ResourceEU Action Plan, which, similar to the doctrine, builds on earlier initiatives, namely those under the 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act. The plan has been praised for providing measurable de-risking targets and defined timelines, addressing a persistent gap between rhetoric and reality. Indeed, several studies suggest that, despite repeated calls for diversification, dependencies on critical raw materials (CRMs) have deepened since the announcement of the 2024 act.

The plan draws inspiration from Japan’s approach to resource security, namely the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security’s initiatives on intelligence gathering, stockpiling, and joint purchasing. However, the EU’s initiatives fall well short of those of its Japanese counterparts. Institutional capacity for oversight and enforcement remains limited. In addition, financial incentives to sustain durable public-private partnerships based on two-way information flows appear insufficient, a major problem given the lack of market incentives for CRM activities.

All of this reinforces the perception that the EU lacks credibility and, more fundamentally, the right kind of power relative to China and the United States, both of which pursue increasingly mercantilist agendas with limited regard for the broader international community. The 2025 US National Security Strategy explicitly calls for a return to spheres of influence, underscoring the Trump administration’s hegemonic worldview and a clear shift away from the Washington Consensus. Within this logic, US military adventurism can be justified so long as it remains confined to the Western Hemisphere and serves national interests defined in terms of material needs (and wants), an approach consolidated by recent military action in Venezuela and a seeming intent to take over Greenland. Gone are the days when such actions required normative justifications and adherence to international (or at least domestic) legal constraints.

Meanwhile, China has made its intention to reshape the existing world order explicit through a series of complementary global frameworks. These include the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Governance Initiative, all of which emphasize the core Chinese principles of national sovereignty, hub-and-spoke multilateralism, state-led economic growth and other particularities inherent in the Beijing Consensus.

By contrast, the EU is often portrayed as strategically adrift, struggling to articulate a coherent geopolitical position. Oxymoronic formulations such as “principled pragmatism” and “open strategic autonomy” are invoked to reconcile the Union’s liberal commitments to democracy, human rights, and open trade with a realist equation: supply-chain resilience equals economic security, and economic security equals national security.

A history of tensions and contradictions

These tensions are not new; they are inherent to the European project. They can be traced back to the unresolved debate between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, which has long shaped the trajectory and form of European integration. Several European leaders, most notably French President Emmanuel Macron, have repeatedly called for strengthening EU-level competencies, whether through deeper capital markets integration or the creation of a European army and intelligence agency. Recent geopolitical developments have increased support for such proposals, as reflected in both the Letta and Draghi reports.

Initiatives such as the Economic Security Doctrine and the sustainability omnibus package­—the first in a series of simplification packages proposed by the Commission and recently approved by the European Parliament—signal, at least superficially, an ambition to move closer to a security-driven agenda. Yet the scope and depth of this shift remain constrained by a lack of political will. This, in turn, reflects the enduring conflict between supranational and intergovernmental interests, with several member states expressing concern that the ongoing securitization trend encroaches on national competencies, particularly in foreign and security policy.

A second, overlapping conflict exists between normative (neoliberal) ideals and strategic (neorealist) interests—or, in economic policy terms, open competition and industrial policy. Bernd Lange, a German MEP and chair of the Committee on International Trade, has explicitly warned against using economic security tools as vehicles for increased protectionism, arguing that they should instead preserve openness.

The EU’s raison d’être and China

The EU’s current predicament more closely resembles its position during the Cold War than the immediate post-Cold War era, although the “New Cold War” analogy should be treated with caution; not least because the roles of external actors have changed, and because, at a global level, today’s situation bears closer resemblance to the interwar period, when the 19^th century liberal order effectively ceased to exist. Whereas the United States acted as a key driver of European integration during the Cold War, it now plays an increasingly constraining (if not countervailing) role. Its current position toward Europe echoes its early engagement with Southeast Asia, where it pursued a hub-and-spokes system based on bilateral ties, and where regionalism emerged despite, rather than because of, the US influence.

Cold War-era European regionalism emerged from and was shaped by external security dynamics, with its internal dynamics overlaid by global bipolarity. By contrast, the early post-Cold War period was defined by economic regionalism and deepening globalization. This historical perspective suggests that prioritizing geopolitics and security is not inherently incompatible with the European project, as some may believe. European integration preceded the global neoliberal turn, implying that the EU could, in principle, pursue a more strategic agenda without undermining its foundational character.

Calls to accelerate the securitization turn are particularly pronounced in the context of EU-China relations, where, as others have argued, the EU’s identity as a principled pragmatist contrasts sharply with China’s pursuit of “holistic pragmatism.” A core assumption underpinning the EU’s insistence on balancing values and interests has been that European and Chinese interests were broadly aligned. While this may still hold in some areas, it overlooks the hierarchy of Chinese interests, in which all policy objectives are ultimately subordinated to national security considerations. As a result, the EU’s long-standing expectation that economic interdependence would stabilize cooperation has consistently misread the strategic logic driving Chinese policymaking, a logic that persisted even during the most open era of Chinese economic policy under Deng Xiaoping.

In fact, the eras of Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao were characterized by deliberate learning processes, reinforced by capital controls that ensured imported know-how contributed to China’s industrial development. In a manner reminiscent of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia—which absorbed US Fordist techniques before becoming largely self-sufficient and capable of challenging the very models they had learned from—Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mercantilist China, which pursues self-sufficiency through selective engagement with the neoliberal order, represents the culmination of this learning trajectory.

What is to be done?

Persistent calls for the EU to recognize that the world, both its allies and adversaries, has changed and that it must therefore reform itself are grounded in valid empirical realities. Calls for the EU to emulate either the United States or China, however, are far less convincing. Not only is the capacity gap, particularly in emerging and disruptive technologies, between the three increasingly difficult to bridge, but the EU remains, at best, a great power with limited ability to shape the emerging order. This constraint is further compounded by a lack of political willingness to act decisively.

A more viable course of action may lie in prioritizing cooperation with other great, regional, and middle powers that, like the EU, have an interest in preserving at least some aspects of the (neo)liberal order, even if only at a smaller (sub)regional scale. The EU already appears to be moving in this direction, as seen in its deepening cooperation with countries such as India and Japan, as well as with regional groupings such as MERCOSUR, a South American trade bloc, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Setting aside normative arguments about selective economic liberalization, further cooperation with other regional blocs, including trade agreements such as the CPTPP, should the EU choose to follow the UK example, or with countries experienced in navigating economic coercion by both China and the United States, could prove particularly fruitful. Japan stands out in this regard, given its experience with Chinese rare earth export controls in the 2010s, as well as earlier trade frictions with the United States in the automotive and semiconductor industries that peaked in the 1990s.

This points to the need to further strengthen the “partner” pillar of the Economic Security Strategy. A fourth “learn” pillar could also be added. By working with Japan and drawing on its experience, the EU could benefit not only from complementary industrial strengths, such as semiconductor manufacturing equipment, but also from shared economic models and manufacturing structures. Indeed, while hardware-software cooperation is a long-standing feature of the US-Japan relationship, Japanese industrial organization is more akin to that of Germany (and, to a lesser extent, France and Italy). Unlike the United States or the United Kingdom, these economies have not fully embraced the neoliberal model domestically, nor have they undergone deindustrialization to the same critical extent. Their declining share of global manufacturing output is better explained by relative changes in economic size than by absolute industrial decline.

Cooperation with such “like-minded” countries would also allow the EU to preserve, at least in part, its status as a normative and regulatory power. Contrary to proposals to dilute the EU regulations, a push epitomized by the omnibus package, the EU could play a bigger role in the global adoption and dissemination of economic security standards, thereby preserving elements of the (neo)liberal order while adapting it to new empirical realities. At the same time, if the EU chooses to pursue this path, it should consistently defend its principles regardless of which country violates them; the era of selective enforcement based on country-specific considerations must come to an end.