EU summit: Support for Merz and Macron: Europe is preparing a “second strike capacity” against China

Brussels, Shanghai. The EU heads of state and government want to instruct the EU Commission at their summit in Brussels to quickly prepare new instruments against Chinese market distortions and to better protect European industry from unfair competition.

The Europeans want to focus more on deterrence in the future without giving up dialogue with China. The model is the old foreign policy maxim of US President Theodore Roosevelt: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Negotiate, but at the same time have the means to assert your own interests.

The Commission should “urgently expand the EU’s range of instruments with new instruments” in order to “better counteract these imbalances,” says the draft summit declaration, which is available to Handelsblatt.

The EU leaders see initial successes in the negotiations with China as confirmation of this new strategy. There is also agreement from industry: “Europe is in a better situation today than it was a few years ago because we have tools to correct distortions in the market,” said Carlo D’Andrea, Vice President of the European Chamber of Commerce in China on Thursday at a media roundtable in Shanghai. “That doesn’t mean making threats.”