The geo-economic turn of the European energy transition: ‘strategic vulnerabilities’ and the re-definition of interdependence

In a context of a rising geo-economic order, debates and policies on the energy transition have become growingly embedded into wider geo-strategic considerations. The EU and its member states have toughened their screening mechanisms on foreign investment on grounds of national security and introduced new mechanisms to curtail externally subsidized foreign transactions, affecting the energy sector in particular. The goal of reducing the EU’s strategic vulnerabilities in the green energy supply chains has also given place to a number of initiatives such as the new strategies and European Alliances on batteries, critical materials and hydrogen. The EU thus seems to be following the US geo-economic strategies of ‘shielding’, ‘stifling’ and ‘spurring’ (Roberts et al. 2019) to fend off and decouple from China and other strategic competitors. This paper examines (i) the ideational and institutional drivers of this geostrategic turn, focusing on the notion of ‘strategic vulnerabilities’, and (ii) the extent to which the newly adopted instruments are leading to building new interdependencies or decoupling from global value chains.