From ‘Strategic Indispensability’ to ‘Comprehensive Offers’: Mapping Proposals for the EU’s Offensive Geoeconomic Turn

Many European policymakers and commentators have judged the European Union’s (EU) recent ‘geoeconomic turn’ to be too defensive and insufficiently assertive for the new global context, calling for a more offensive approach to geoeconomics. While this broad approach it set to continue, the precise shape of the EU’s offensive geoeconomics in Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as Commission President remains unclear and is bound to be contested. Based on an innovative analysis of European foreign policy think tanks, it is possible to identify three interrelated and mutually reinforcing (potential) pillars that this realignment is likely to hinge on: the first refers to institutional adaptations that would centre geoeconomics in the Commission’s policy work by making policymaking more centralised and horizontally integrated; the second concerns a geoeconomically-attuned industrial policy that also cultivates ‘strategic indispensability’ by fortifying European chokepoints in key global supply chains to potentially weaponise them; and the third calls for a rethinking of the EU’s approach to international economic partnership in terms of making a ‘comprehensive offer’ to geoeconomically relevant actors.
Keywords: European Union; geoeconomics; industrial policy; think tanks; economic security