There is a defiant new vocabulary in Brussels these days on trade policy, centring on words such as “robust” and “muscular”, contrasting with what was apparently the ineffectual “naivety” of earlier eras. It has been brought out by the effect of watching China’s broad-spectrum engagement with Europe, particularly as conducted through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), along with a sense that Beijing has taken the EU for a ride in the past.
The lexicon has had a good workout recently with the rather perfunctory EU-China summit on Tuesday with Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier — followed by his rather longer “16+1” meeting in Zagreb with the central and eastern European countries Beijing has targeted with BRI.
Last week my colleague Jim Brunsden and I interviewed Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU trade commissioner. Her defiantly mercantilist language — and this from a politician from Sweden, a northern liberal member state — was quite striking. “[T]rade policy is not about just stupidly opening up for everybody,” she told us. “It’s mutual, and the European Union is the biggest trader in the world.”