There are major divisions in the E.U. about how to handle the pandemic and economic crisis, the domination of Germany and France, and relations with China and the U.S. Mark Blyth on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to the Analysis News, please don't forget the donate button, subscribe button, share button, and we'll be back in a second with Mark Blyth. In an article in Politico.eu, Paola Tamma writes that European "'strategic autonomy' is the EU's latest catchphrase, its label for the bloc's push to increase self-sufficiency and boost its own industry in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. After the 'America first' motto and Beijing's 'Made in China 2025' strategy, it's the old continent's turn to gaze inward but. Before they can implement it, leaders across the EU have to agree on what it means exactly.” Tamma writes that some smaller countries "are scared that this push for greater autonomy is simply going to give Franco-German industry a new edge – and regulatory incentives – at the expense of smaller economies. A coalition of 19 countries who call themselves 'friends of the single market largely' abhor what they see as protectionism in disguise. "It's a license to kill small and medium enterprises," said one EU diplomat from this camp, which includes the Baltics, the Nordics, Austria, Benelux, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Malta, Portugal, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and Spain." And to what extent is strategic autonomy directed at resisting U.S. pressure not to get too close to China? Tom Fairless writes in The Wall Street Journal that "the struggle between the U.S. and China for global influence has come to Europe's gritty industrial backwaters, where China is steadily co-opting local economies, starting with their railroads. China overtook the U.S. as the European Union's biggest trading partner for goods last year, a historic turning point driven in part by Europeans' hunger for Chinese medical equipment and electronics during the Covid-19 pandemic. Increasingly, those goods are arriving in Europe through a new trade corridor consisting of railroads, airport hubs, and ports built with Chinese support, often as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the giant global infrastructure effort aimed at binding China more closely to the rest of the world." And he writes that with some alarm. Now joining us to discuss what European strategic autonomy is and how European governments are handling the current crisis is Mark Blythe. He's a political economist at Brown University. He researches the causes of stability and change in the economy, and he also talks about “why do people continue to believe stupid economic ideas in spite buckets of evidence to the contrary”. I should add, he's also a European. So, let's start with the situation in the EU. On the face of it, you'd think Europe would want to be more autonomous. What is this about and why are so many smaller European countries, it seems, so against it. Mark Blyth What is this all about? Hello, first of all. OK, so what's this all about? It's about France. A few years ago, I did a project with some colleagues and we produced a book called The Future of the Euro, and a guy called Mark Vail, who's a wonderful political economist, wrote this wonderful paper about France, and it's about the whole of the EU after the euro crisis and the euro and all that sort of stuff, and it had the best title, which was "Europe's Middle Child". So the middle child is basically never the favorite, the one who is usually ignored, and France,
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