Between a Rock and A Hard Place: Negotiating the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act in Times of Populism and Geoeconomic Uncertainty

Scholarship on the European Union’s Geoeconomic Turn has been focusing on mostly on tools like the Anti-Coercion-Instrument, the Foreign Direct Investment screening mechanism, the International Procurement Instrument and the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, without considering the EU’s flagship instrument to secure its place in the global minerals race: the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA). The paper revisits Andrew Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism (LI) as the ‘baseline’ theory of European integration and applies it to the genesis of the CRMA in order to better understand constellations of domestic preferences in EU member states, dynamics of intergovernmental and interinstitutional bargaining as well as processes of institutional choice leading to the establishment of the Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) Board. The paper finds that in the context of the EU’s geoeconomic turn, the distinction between geopolitical and domestic economic interests in the context of national preference formation is increasingly blurred. It also identifies a dilemma that EU policymakers are facing. While the CRMA helps the EU explore partnerships with like-minded partners to diversify supplies and promote a renaissance of extractive activities in EU countries which challenge the Union’s attempts to reduce emissions, it remains highly dependent on third countries like China which are only beginning to use export controls and restrictions as powerful geoeconomic instruments. The paper relies on the analysis of internal policy documents, national EU CRMs strategies as well as expert interviews with policymakers involved in crafting the first legislative act on CRMs in the EU.