The European Union (EU), for decades a pillar of openness and multilateralism, has recently shifted towards a more assertive commercial policy relying on the development of new geoeconomic instruments designed to level the playing field and deal with the increasing blurriness between economy and national security. Alongside the new EU FDI screening framework for national security in place since 2020, the EU recently proposed and adopted another FDI screening mechanism to tackle market distortions arising from foreign subsidies in the context of European mergers and acquisitions. Why is the EU introducing this new policy instrument right now? What political economy forces shape the institutional design? And why does this instrument enjoy broad support in the Commission, Council of Ministers and European Parliament despite its likely redistributive impacts on Member State economies? Our paper uses process tracing, expert interviews, media research and secondary literature to trace the history of this policy project from its inception to its entry into force in mid 2023. In particular, we question why the decision was made to embed this policy under the competition arm of the European Commission, unlike FDI screening for national security which is managed by the trade policy arm. The paper finds that framing foreign subsidies as a competition issue sought to insulate the policy from accusations of disguised protectionism and ensured political support across the EU. Whereas more activist Member States, services of the European Commission and Members of the European Parliament see the instrument as a steppingstone toward a European industrial policy and more assertive foreign policy, vis-à-vis notably China, others perceive it as a long overdue measure to close regulatory gaps and to strengthen EU competition and state aid policy as well as relevant WTO rules. The paper contributes to the growing literature on EU foreign economic policy at the nexus between International Political Economy and Security Studies by shedding light on one of the most prominent new policy initiatives in these domains.

The overwhelming American economic and military power over the past six decades had a major impact on global attitudes towards the United States. Power breeds admiration as well as resentment, and seemingly unchecked, unilateral American power partly fueled the phenomenon known as anti-Americanism in the first decade of the millennium. The financial crisis of 2008, however, acted as a revelator of the relative decline of American power, at least in the economic sphere, leading to the popularization of the concept of a “post-American world”. If the power of the US impacted its international image negatively, should we expect the decline of this power to impact its image positively? This paper investigates whether the “post-American world” will also be a “post-anti-American world”. Using data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, we explore three hypotheses on how the relative decline of American power can affect global attitudes towards the US and ask whether anti-Americanism has the potential for being replaced by anti-China sentiments. We find, instead, that opinions about the US and China are often correlated and appear to be linked to other sets of attitudes, including ant-globalization sentiments and xenophobia. Moreover, we find that some of the factors that contributed to anti-Americanism can still exist in a “post-American world”.

The European Union (EU) has taken a geoeconomic turn since 2017 by creating a series of new unilateral instruments designed to preserve European autonomy and adjust to the progressive unravelling of the liberal international economic order. The most controversial of these instruments is the 2023 Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI), designed to deter third countries from targeting the EU and its member states with economic coercion through measures affecting trade or investment. This article analyses why this new policy instrument was created, traces its institutional genesis and explores its implications by asking whether the ACI represents an intentional attempt to transform the foreign policy issue of coercion into a commercial one. Using process tracing based on interviews and primary and secondary materials, we argue that ‘foreign policy becoming trade policy’ through the ACI was an unintended consequence both of external pressures to institutionalise the trade–security nexus and of the EU's uneven internal competence base.

Heightened geopolitical tensions and the growing securitization of economic exchange over the past decade have prompted many countries to adopt new geoeconomic tools. Long resistant to this geoeconomic turn, the European Union (EU) has since 2017 created a panoply of innovative policy tools that blend trade and investment with essential security concerns. This article asks why and how the EU has been able to operate the doctrinal and policy changes necessary to put economic tools at the service of geopolitics. After introducing a typology of the defensive and offensive geoeconomic tools deployed by advanced industrial economies, we present the novel geoeconomic toolkit quickly assembled by the EU, which we explain by the confluence of external factors that triggered European leaders' beliefs that change was necessary and internal factors that made such change institutionally and politically possible, a trend reinforced by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This paper asks what explains the creation and comparative features of national Investment Screening Mechanisms (ISMs) in Europe. After providing a brief history and definition of ISMs, we provide descriptive patterns about the similarities and differences in the investment screening features of national ISMs in EU member states. We then explain differences in national screening policies by focusing on the role of public debt, Chinese investment, R&D expenditures and various geographic groupings. Finally, we make three policy arguments about the rise of ISMs in Europe: (1) ISMs have not been designed as protectionist instruments, (2) the politics of inward investment screening reflects a shift from economic to security logic in addressing the fundamental tension between the benefits and vulnerabilities of open markets and (3) the EU can use the ‘commercialisation’ of security to extend its own competence in the security sphere. We conclude by considering how the rapid expansion of investment screening in Europe could affect economic openness, as well as the role of the EU as a global actor.

In March 2019 the European Union adopted the first pan-European investment screening framework, thus joining the bandwagon of growing investment screening mechanisms around the world. This article explores why the European screening framework was adopted swiftly and with no politicisation, even as the negotiations unfolded against the background of heightened politicisation of trade and investment policy. The paper develops three expectations: (1) converging member state preferences; (2) securitisation of investment policy; and (3) Commission entrepreneurship. It then explores them empirically through process-tracing, drawing on extensive interviews with the actors involved. We argue that the European Commission played a pivotal role. To avoid falling into another strand of politicisation and to defuse political mines, the Commission engaged in a ‘pre-emptive depoliticization’ strategy that shortened the policy process, limited the number of actors involved, and justified the policy options in a legalistic framing.

Facing recent global disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate change, and the race for raw materials and technology needed for the green transition, economic interdependence—not least unilateral dependence—has increasingly come to be seen as a security threat. In response, the EU has put resilience and strategic autonomy at the centre of its trade and investment agenda. The EU was long resistant to this geoeconomic turn, that is, the use of economic tools for geopolitical purposes in normal times. Since 2017, however, the EU has placed greater emphasis on identifying and mitigating the security vulnerabilities that accrue from open markets. This geoeconomic turn has culminated in the June 2023 release of the European Commission’s Economic Security Strategy, which aims to maximise the benefits of economic openness while minimising the risks from economic interdependence. The aim of this thematic issue is to analyse the foundations of this new European focus on economic security and, more specifically, on the increased use of geoeconomic instruments. Coming at this objective from a variety of disciplinary traditions, methodologies, and substantive focus, our contributors tackle, among others, the following questions: Why has the EU abandoned its reluctance to use geoeconomics and finally made the switch towards economic security? How does the EU’s approach compare with other major global players? And, what are the long-term implications of the EU’s economic security strategy for European integration, its relationship with partners and allies, and the global economic order?

Since the 2008 financial crisis, many advanced industrialized economies, while eager to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), have also implemented or tightened investment screening mechanisms (ISMs), which empower governments to restrict foreign takeovers. ISMs, at the nexus between international political economy and international security, are an understudied phenomenon, although they have recently gained in policy prominence worldwide as a result of emerging technological risks and new threat actors. This research note introduces the Politics and Regulation of Investment Screening Mechanisms dataset, a newly coded dataset on ISMs in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 2007 to 2021, examining the evolution of seven key features of investment screening over time. Based on these novel data, we then describe patterns in the evolution of foreign investment screening policies. Next, we consider likely applications of the dataset to answer questions about the politics of investment as well as broader questions of economic exchange and institutional design in an age of great power competition—including by providing some initial statistical exercises on the relationship between Chinese FDI and R&D spending on ISM features. Finally, we suggest how investment screening fits within the new arsenal of unilateral instruments of economic statecraft currently being developed by liberal democracies.

Perceptions of the United States in European public opinion greatly improved around 2008, while perceptions of China simultaneously deteriorated. The Transatlantic and Sino-European relationships stem from radically different historical contexts. Yet could the image of China and the image of the U.S. be related in the eyes of Europeans? This paper examines whether attitudes towards China have contributed to determining attitudes towards the U.S. in Europe by analyzing data from the Transatlantic Trends survey taken in 2010, a critical juncture in Europe’s relations with both the U.S. and China. We investigate three hypotheses about this relation: the “yin and yank” or negative correlation (the more Europeans fear China, the more positive they become about the U.S.; the more favorably Europeans view China, the more negatively they see the U.S.); the “open vs. closed” or positive correlation (the more favorably Europeans see China, the more favorably they see the U.S.; the more negatively they see China, the more negatively they see the U.S.); and no relation (European attitudes towards China and the U.S. are independent). To the question of whether anti-Chinese sentiment has the potential for replacing anti-Americanism in Europe, our main conclusion is that positively correlated attitudes towards the U.S. and China reveal a deep cleavage in Europe between those who are “in” and those who are “out” of globalization. 

Under what conditions does the internal cohesiveness of the European Union determine its external effectiveness on the world stage? This book asks this question, investigating the frequent political assumption that the more cohesive the EU presents itself to the world, the more effective it is in achieving its goals. Contributions to this book explore this theory from a range of perspectives, from trade to foreign policy, and highlight complex patterns between internal cohesiveness and external effectiveness. These are simplified into three possible configurations: internal cohesiveness has a positive impact on external effectiveness; internal cohesiveness has no impact on external effectiveness; and internal cohesiveness has a negative impact on external effectiveness. The international context in which the EU operates, which includes the bargaining configuration and the policy arena, functions as an intervening variable that helps us to explain variation in these causal links. The book also launches a research agenda aimed at explaining these patterns more systematically and determining the marginal impact of cohesiveness on effectiveness. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.