Skip to main content

Europe’s Imperialist Climate Policy

From the series European News

Climate policy is now openly the object of the imperialist contention.

The EU, driven by the German acceleration, has set itself targets that impose a fast pace on continental industry: climate neutrality by 2050 and, as an intermediate step, a 55% reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. In July, the Commission presented the Fit for 55 package, which details in legislative proposals the objectives of the Green Deal formulated in 2019.

A decisive decade

The EU plan is initiating a major fight between the powers, the political forces and the large groups. It has set a thirty-year agenda, but the next decade will be crucial, said the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The reform will require a qualified majority in the Council and in the EU Parliament, a process that will probably take two years.

The Financial Times reports that France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Latvia, Ireland and Bulgaria have already raised concerns about the possible social effects. The Eastern states, largely dependent on fossil fuels, are expressing their discontent over a climate agenda tailored to the innovation capabilities of the German industrial power. Ursula von der Leyen herself, before the plan was presented, had to face opposition from at least 7 of her 26 Commissioners. The €72 billion Social Climate Fund is facing resistance from the frugal countries, including the Netherlands.

Risks and opportunities

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) accuses the EU plan of being a regulatory monster, which places no trust in market mechanisms, such as the carbon price, and expects to regulate every detail for the next 30 years through public intervention. But the central issue is that Europe, the first mover in the field of climate standards, will have to face competitive disadvantages and higher costs in the short term. The EU accounts for only 7% of global emissions: will it succeed in setting standards? Will China and the US follow suit?

Europe could be penalised compared to powers that do not adopt equally ambitious climate constraints: How does the EU intend to prevent oil prices, due to the European renunciation of fossil fuels, from falling elsewhere, thereby increasing consumption?. Interviewed by Handelsblatt, Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans replied: Much of our oil and from third countries gas comes [i.e., outside the European Economic Area]. Reducing our dependence not only reduces costs, but is a strategic advantage. As for the industry’s concerns, he noted: Many EU regulations have been criticised using competition as an argument. Think of all the regulations and standards that we apply to the chemical industry. In the end, they worked for the EU, because they became global standards. […] I firmly believe that whoever changes first will have an advantage. The economy will change all over the world, but not at the same pace. If Europe leads the way, it will profit from it.

According to Timmermans, we are facing an industrial revolution: For every transformation there are frictions, […] but we have calculated that the new economy has the potential to create two million jobs. Of course, there is also the other side: in some areas, jobs will disappear or change. Our challenge, however, is professional qualification and vocational retraining in order to fill the new jobs. With our demographics, it will already be quite difficult.

The FAZ summarises: The costs and risks are enormous, but so are the opportunities.

A Green Europe that protects

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAS), the Green candidate Annalena Baerbock advocates a new industrial policy towards China: We must ensure that standards are met […] for example through an increase in tariffs for companies that are subsidised on the Chinese market or for which there are no environmental standards, We Europeans need to define key technologies ensure that such and work […] to products can be produced in Europe. The EU will not be able to isolate China, stresses Baerbock, but we must remain sovereign and not surrender completely to an authoritarian regime that also works through unfair economic methods. We need a different policy towards China, a policy which looks at all sensitive economic areas and uses the common strength of the EU.

In the current European line, however, Timmermans underlines that multilateralism prevails: The border adjustment has only one objective, and that is to avoid carbon leakage [i.e., relocating production to other countries with laxer emission constraints]. I am absolutely convinced that we can bring it into line with WTO rules. […] And if other countries pursue climate protection as we do, […] a huge space could emerge, where our Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is not necessary.

In an interview with the French newspaper La Croix, Ursula von der Leyen also locates the ultimate reason for the climate agenda in the global contention: Industry is increasingly our ally in change. European companies are already the engine of the green transition, because it offers them immense opportunities to create sustainable and clean product markets all over the world. They understand that the European Green Deal is their chance to beat the competition at a global level and exploit the advantages of those who ‘come first’.

The European continent, writes Handelsblatt, wants to be a pioneer and to make its economic weight count to affirm global standards: As a result of their union, Europeans have a significantly greater influence than individual member states could have. Others may be militarily superior. But the EU’s soft power is unmatched.

The EU vaccination marathon

The continental approach is also bearing fruit in the pandemic crisis. EU leads vaccine marathon after losing sprint is the headline of an editorial in the Financial Times [August 13th]. The bloc as a whole has overtaken the US in terms of first and second doses per 100 people. It should surpass the UK within a few weeks. […] The EU met its target of administering one jab to 70 per cent of adults by July and should hit its next one of fully vaccinating 70 per cent in the coming seven weeks. […] The vaccination rate in the US and UK is now half of the EU’s. Europeans lost the sprint, now they are well placed in the marathon.

In the face of crises, Angela Merkel pointed to the constant dialectic between efficiency and tolerance with regards to EU diversity, The deficit of centralisation involves laborious and slow syntheses, which are intended to be inclusive and equipped with institutional counterweights. But finally, in this way, European imperialism expresses the strength of its continental weight, as in the case of the production and distribution of vaccines.

The European method

Johannes Leithäuser, in the FAZ, writes that the Merkel method consists of patience and perseverance in the search for the political centre of gravity. Merkel’s many foreign policy successes appear to be the synthesis of many different interests and have the boring aspect of compromise, but this does not mean that they are less relevant. This was already the case in 2007, when in the Treaty of Lisbon she managed to save the European Constitution rejected in 2005. In foreign policy, Merkel indicated that she prefers the term setback to failure. An approach, notes Leithäuser, which has been going on for 7 years in the Ukrainian crisis and for 6 years in an attempt to improve relations with Turkey. However, her entire chancellorship has been a model for European synthesis with which Europe has faced different crises. This European approach means, first and foremost, in the wake of Helmut Kohl, close and strong links with France: at the request of France, the Chancellor sent the Bundeswehr to Africa and, in turn, she brought François Hollande with her to sign the Minsk agreements on the Ukrainian crisis.

Only in the Franco-British military intervention in Libya (in 2011) did Berlin not follow Paris. At the time, Germany’s refusal aroused accusations and suspicions that the Germans were again a taking a special path (Sonderweg) and were not reliable in the Western camp, recalls Leithäuser. Similar accusations had struck the Schröder government in 2003, when in agreement with Paris it opposed the American war in Iraq. But in both cases Berlin’s intention was to build a common EU position. In Libya, an immediate European neighbourhood, France instead forced a unilateral adventure in its historical area of projection.

In January 2020, in Berlin, after nearly a decade of civil war and chaos in Libya, Angela Merkel in Berlin brought her opponents inside and outside Libya, including Russia and Turkey, to an agreement. The process is not progressing smoothly or quickly — acknowledges the FAZ — but so far none of the parties involved has turned back. Assuming this reality principle, writes Leithäuser, Germany has meanwhile become an authority, an arbitral power in the Mediterranean region, recently also in the Turkish-Greek conflict over energy raw materials. And in this role it is even stronger than other European countries can claim for themselves. In short, the strength of Merkel’s Mediterranean policy lies in the weight of the EU.

In this reconstruction, Leithäuser emphasises a German-led initiative in the Mediterranean: after Hollande’s trip to Minsk, part of Germany’s area of projection, this is precisely the situation we indicated as a possible test of the establishment of a real EU foreign policy.

Future developments will betoken a low-profile German influence in Euro-Mediterranean policy.

The Afghan litmus test

As the Afghan crisis shows, however, Europe is paying for its military inferiority. German comments express dismay and frustration at the American withdrawal. The FAZ sees a break for world politics, in the sign of Atlantic decline: Washington is no longer willing to pay the price that is required of a superpower.

One of the most emphasised aspects is the lack of coordination with European partners in the U.S. unilateral decision to leave Afghanistan SO hastily. After the Trump years, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger notes in the FAZ, doubts about America’s reliability persist even under Biden. Emmanuel Macron’s reflection on the brain death of NATO and the lack of a transatlantic directorate recurs.

Thus, by revealing European impotence, the Afghan crisis once again indicates the need to strengthen the European pillar of NATO, in order to increase the EU’s strategic autonomy in the transatlantic framework.

Lotta Comunista, July-August 2021

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Chinese Rearmament Projects Itself in Asia

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 5 From the series Asian giants Trends in rearmament spending and comparisons of military equipment are increasingly set to dominate coverage of the contention between powers in the crisis in the world order . The military factor has entered the strategic debate, accompanied by a wealth of figures and technical details. The increase in military spending as a percentage of GDP represents a widespread sign of the rearmament cycle at this juncture, but spending alone cannot entirely explain the situation, given the qualitatively different natures of the arsenals being compared. Nor are comparisons between this or that type of weapon useful in themselves, because ultimately all weapons are only ever used in combination with the complex military means available to a power, either in alliance or in conflict with other powers in the system of States. Therefore, while it is difficult to assess the real significa...
Read more

Uneven Development, Job Cuts, and the Crisis of Labour Under Global Capitalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Uneven development is a fundamental law of capitalism. We have a macroscopic expression of this in the changing balance of power between States: Atlantic decline and Asian rise are the key dynamics behind the political processes of this era, including wars caused by the crisis in the world order. But behind all this there is a differentiated economic trend, starting from companies and sectors: hence the differentiated conditions for wage earners. And this is the element to keep in mind for an effective defensive struggle. It’s only the beginning The electrical and digital restructuring imposed by global market competition affects various production sectors. The car industry is the most obvious, due to the familiarity of the companies and brands involved. We have already reported on the agreement reached before Christmas at Volkswagen, which can be summarised as a reduction of 35,000 employees by 2030. Die Zeit [De...
Read more

Political Battles of European Leninism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...
Read more

German Socialism in 1917

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement  According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for ...
Read more

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...
Read more

Historical Constants and Strategic Surprise

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...
Read more

Bolsonaro Squeezed between Pandemic, Lula Card and Armed Forces

This article is taken from Intervenção Comunista — the journal of our Brazilian comrades We wrote in May last year that the ‘tropical Trump’ causes a perfect storm . This first quarter of the year seems to demonstrate this clearly: GDP decline (-4.1%) and increased unemployment (14.2%); an end to emergency aid and a delay in the resumption of a new, much leaner aid plan; a record number of deaths and Covid infections. With 2.7% of the world’s population, the country accounts for about 12% of Covid-19 deaths. In March alone, Brazil recorded an increase of about 33% in its daily deaths. The pandemic crisis, coupled with historical imbalances, is shaking up the dysfunctional government of Jair Bolsonaro, who has just appointed his fourth health minister in a year. Increased dependence on the Centrão The second half of Bolsonaro’s term began — for their politics — with the election of Arthur Lira (Progressive Party-Alagoas) as president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Rodrigo Pac...
Read more

Price War in the US and EU

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 7 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The contention in the biopharmaceutical field between the two sides of the Atlantic addresses the issue of costs, in two different ways. In a letter to the Financial Times published on April 23rd, Vas Narasimhan and Paul Hudson, the CEOs of Swiss company Novartis and French company Sanofi respectively, presented a harsh diagnosis of the state of European biopharmaceuticals compared to their major competitors, the United States and China. Narasimhan, an American son of immigrants from Tamil Nadu, and Hudson, a Briton, head two of the world's ten largest pharmaceutical multinationals. The two executives see "a strong outlook for the US – thanks to policies and regulations conducive to fast and broad patient access to innovative medicines". In contrast, Europe, "while home to some of the most important biopharma companies in the world"...
Read more

Forces and Consequences of the New Strategic Phase

The new strategic phase in the world balance, with its new corresponding political cycles within powers, requires attention to the materialistic, historical and dialectical method of political analysis itself. The changing forces and basic trends need to be identified; we can make conjectures about the developments in single political battles, but the outcome of these battles will always require us to contemplate a plurality of solutions: some more probable. others less. but never Just a mechanical consequence of long-term economic movements. Many fixed points of the method of political analysis are usual tools in our Marxist elaboration, but this does not mean they must be taken for granted: it is of use to recall them, in relation to the new unknowns of the political battle. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from t...
Read more

The Defeat in Afghanistan — a Watershed in the Cycle of Atlantic Decline

In crises and wars there are events which leave their mark on history because of how they make a decisive impact on the power contention, or because of how, almost like a chemical precipitate, they suddenly make deep trends that have been at work for some time coalesce. This is the case of the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, which is taking the shape of a real watershed in the cycle of Atlantic decline. For the moment, through various comments in the international press, it is possible to consider its consequences on three levels: America’s position as a power and the connection with its internal crisis; the repercussions on Atlantic relations and Europe’s dilemmas regarding its strategic autonomy; and the relationship between the Afghan crisis and power relations in Asia, especially as regards India’s role in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Repercussions in the United States Richard Haass is the president of the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations; despite having ...
Read more