Cleverness by Halves

Three sober voices, in the same month, on the same matter. A sinologist, an economist, a data desk. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik explains that Europe is no great power — only China grants it that it "could be a pole" at all — and counsels Indian-style "multi-alignment": stop playing the great power, and move shrewdly among the big ones. Stefan Kooths, chairman of the Hayek Society, counsels accepting the gift: if China delivers its goods to us cheaply and subsidised, that is a transfer from Chinese taxpayers to European consumers; protective tariffs would only make this gift dearer for one's own population and conserve structures that are lost in any case. And the NZZ data analysis by Malte Fischer supplies the reckoning: since 2018 foreign trade has been adding to growth in China and braking it in Germany; the former engine has become a drag. The same item — once a drive, once a brake.

Three dialects, one message: adapt. Do not fight what simply is.

And we grant them their point. Without reservation on this one count: to fight the irreversible is the most expensive form of nostalgia. Europe, and Germany foremost, worked itself into this position over decades — through the squandered lead, through a regulation that posed as protection of the citizen and worked as a drawbridge, through the refusal to finance its own inventors, through the comfort of administering the present rather than building the future. Whoever has missed all that cannot make it up with a tariff. Protectionism now would freeze precisely the structures that have already failed. And the gift is real: a cheap Chinese electric car is a gain in prosperity for the one who drives it. To refuse it out of wounded pride would mean making the citizens poorer in order to protect a structure already lost. Up to this point the pragmatists are not merely in the right — they are the only adults in the room.

But let us see what the three share — not only the diagnosis, but the form of their answer. Each describes a current and advises how to swim in it. None asks where the current leads, or whether one might build a bank, a lock, a canal. Adaptation is their entire horizon.

And here the one word splits in two. There is adaptation as a bridge: one accepts the present in order to cross over to something one is building. And there is adaptation as a slide: one accepts the present because one has stopped building anything at all. The same posture, the same gratefully accepted cheap goods — in the first case it is called survival, in the second, disappearance. The pragmatists describe the posture flawlessly and leave out the one thing that decides which of the two it is: a project for the future.

Without that second half-sentence, "adapt cleverly" is not a strategy but an anaesthetic. A region that only reacts becomes, by definition, a function of others' decisions: it consumes what others build, defends itself with others' weapons, computes on others' machines — the kill-switch on computing power, of which we have written elsewhere — and drives others' cars. Each single step reasonable; the sum is disappearance. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik's multi-alignment among three powers works only as long as one carries something all three want. India can play the big ones off against one another because it has weight — population, nuclear potential, a technological base. A Europe that has outsourced its value creation has nothing to lay on any of the three tables. It no longer plays multi-alignment; it gets divided up. The pragmatic counsel, followed without a project, leads precisely into the utter insignificance it claims to avert.

And here we must be honest — against the grain of the three texts. They are too certain. We are not. We do not yet know what these future strategies look like in detail. We have first, still blurred ideas. But we know the form such a strategy must have, because we have long circled it: it is the fourth position that none of the three takes — neither fighting the present (protectionism) nor surrendering to it (pure market adaptation), but changing the architecture so that value creation stays in the country without abolishing the market. We know some of its vocabulary: structures that cannot be hollowed out, like bound capital; the offset principle that forces the seller to leave the value creation behind — which the Gulf states do by design and Europe forgets to do; owning a part of the value chain instead of renting it; building what makes destructive behaviour unattractive of its own accord, not by prohibition but by construction. What we lack is the concrete institutional shape for precisely this case — the China shock, the migration of value creation. That is the work before us, and we do not claim to have done it already.

So our quarrel with the three sober voices is not that they are wrong. It is that they stop at the comma. "Europe should adapt to what is —": yes. The sentence the pragmatists leave unfinished is the only one that matters: "— and at the same time build what it will be." Adaptation without that second part is not cleverness. It is the well-mannered name for going under.

We say this without despair. To name the missing half-sentence is the first, cheapest step toward writing it — and we do not exempt ourselves: we too have not yet written it. But a Europe that only learns to swim and never asks toward which shore will not drown dramatically. It will quietly dissolve in the water. And that is a fate one chooses by omission — by speaking only the first half of the sentence and calling it realism.