Globalised but divided: European corporations and the EU’s geoeconomic turn against China

The European Union’s ‘geoeconomic turn’ against China is hotly debated among international political economy scholars, but the role of Europe’s leading corporations in this shift remains underexplored. This article focuses on the European Round Table for Industry, an elite forum of corporate executives tightly connected to the European Commission. The ERT played a key role in aligning European integration with corporate interests from the 1980s to 2000s. However, it has fallen out of step with the European Commission, whose posture has hardened since branding China a ‘systemic rival’. The disjuncture between the Commission’s assertive stance and the ERT’s more tentative approach to China prompts us to test and rethink what we know about state-business relations in a new geoeconomic age. Drawing on data under-used in IPE to chart ERT firms’ ‘territorial’ and ‘network integration’ with China, our analysis reveals a significant minority of firms deeply integrated into the Chinese market and supplier base, a small group of firms with minimal ties potentially receptive to the EU’s ‘geoeconomic turn’, and a large array of partially integrated companies in between these two positions. This uneasy balance of forces within the ERT explains why it is trailing rather than driving the EU’s stance.