The peripheralisation of Europe’s battery industry: derisking regimes, productive models, and the geography of green industrial policy

Why has Europe’s battery boom bypassed the fiscally powerful core and clustered in the continent’s peripheries? The answer, this article argues, lies in the fit and misfit between national derisking regimes, through which states absorb investment risks, and the productive models through which firms organise industrial production. Because the EU created an electric-vehicle market without imposing a dominant battery-production model, three rival configurations emerged to supply European carmakers: a venture-capital configuration backing European startups in North-Western Europe, an FDI-attractor enclave configuration hosting Asian manufacturers in Central and Eastern Europe, and an FDI-broker configuration assembling Sino-European ventures in the Southern semi-peripheries. Production stabilised where derisking absorbed the risks firms faced and collapsed where it did not, above all in the EU core. Bridging the state-centred literature on green industrial policy and firm-centred global production network analysis, it shows Europe achieving green industrialisation through integration with, not strategic autonomy from, Chinese firms.