Will Europe Become Asia’s Appendix?

I. From cape to appendix

In the summer of 1919, with the slaughter of the World War barely over, Paul Valéry asked a question that sounded like a provocation at the time: whether Europe would become what it is in reality — “a little cape of the Asian continent”. Geographically this was never in dispute. Europe is a peninsula of Eurasia. Valéry meant something else: that the lead which had made this peninsula the centre of the world was not given by nature and could be lost.

A cape is mere location. The appendix is a sharper image. It is an organ that once had a task, hangs on the body and is supplied along with it. Medicine has since partly rehabilitated it: it serves as a reserve store for gut bacteria. It does not feed the body. Yet it is not harmless. It can become irritated, and usually the irritation passes. But if the inflammation grows stronger and stays, it bursts and, untreated, poisons the whole body. I have experienced this myself, with an emergency operation in the night at the last minute.

So the question is not whether Europe is becoming small. It has been small for a long time. The question is whether it is becoming functionless — whether the rest of the world still needs it for anything it cannot get elsewhere.

II. The bill

Let us begin with what can be counted. In 2025 the EU exported goods worth just under €200 billion to China and imported goods worth €559 billion from there. The deficit was around €360 billion. Exports fell by 6.5 per cent, imports rose by 6.4 per cent. Part of this is diversion: what the US keeps out with tariffs lands in Europe.

More revealing than the totals is what crosses the border. Europe supplies China above all with machinery, electrical engineering, measuring instruments, optics and pharmaceuticals — things with which other things are made. China supplies Europe above all with electrical equipment and machinery, increasingly finished products. Europe still sells the tools. That is a function. But every machine tool that goes to China becomes a lesson there, and the goal has been stated openly: to build the tool oneself.

III. The car

It is clearest where Europe was proudest. In the second quarter of 2026 the China sales of Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche collapsed by 30 to 41 per cent year on year. Volkswagen delivered 36.6 per cent fewer cars in China. Young Chinese buyers now call the German brands their parents’ cars.

To be fair: the Chinese market itself shrank by 24 per cent in the first half of 2026. Part of the slump is the business cycle, not displacement. But only part.

For the movement also runs the other way. In August 2026 Chinese brands reached a market share of 11.7 per cent in Europe; a year earlier it had been 5.5. Registrations doubled within a year. BYD is fitting out a plant in Szeged, Hungary; assembly is due to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026. Forty years ago Volkswagen and others went to China to assemble there what had been developed in Wolfsburg. Now BYD assembles in Hungary what was developed in Shenzhen. The direction has reversed; the pattern is the same.

IV. Other people’s bottlenecks

A body to which an organ is attached controls its supply. With the raw materials of electrification this is to be taken literally. According to the International Energy Agency, more than 95 per cent of refined rare earths and of battery graphite came from China in 2024, and around 70 per cent of lithium chemicals. In the solar industry at least 80 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity is located in China.

In October 2025 Beijing tightened its export controls on rare earths — in response to American tariffs, not to European policy. Europe was by-catch. The measures are suspended until November 2026. European industry is thus working with a revocable permit whose extension is negotiated in Washington and Beijing.

What that feels like was shown the same autumn by Nexperia. The chipmaker is based in the Netherlands but belongs to a partly state-owned Chinese group and has a large share of its chips finished in Dongguan. When the Dutch government took control, invoking a law from the war era, Beijing stopped exports from Dongguan. BMW, Volkswagen, Renault and Volvo had to fall back on emergency stocks. The parts in question were standard components costing a few cents. Europe owned the head of the company, China the hands. When it comes to it, the hands decide.

The attempt to grow hands of its own has so far failed. Northvolt, the great European battery hope, filed for bankruptcy in Sweden in March 2025.

V. The other body

Whoever looks only east overlooks the second dependence. In July 2025, in its trade agreement with the US, the EU accepted a tariff of 15 per cent on most of its exports and held out the prospect of energy purchases of $750 billion and investments of $600 billion. What it got in return was that things did not get worse. In security, data centres, operating systems and payments Europe depends on America; in goods and raw materials on Asia.

An appendix attached to two bodies is anatomically impossible. Politically it is the situation. Perhaps the right question is therefore not whose appendix Europe will become, but whether between the two it will become a transit organ: it passes on what others produce and secure, and keeps a fee for doing so.

VI. What speaks against it

A merciless analysis must also be merciless towards its own thesis.

First: there is no such thing as “Asia”. There is China, India, Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, and they are rivals. By its own account India has overtaken Japan as the fourth-largest economy and expects to pass Germany too in about three years. Japan fears China more than Europe does. An appendix needs a body. Asia is not a body but a continent full of bodies that mistrust one another. That gives Europe room to manoeuvre — if it uses it.

Second: Europe still has organs that function. Without the lithography machines of ASML from Veldhoven no leading-edge chip is made anywhere in the world, not in Taiwan, not in Korea, not in Arizona. And Europe is inside each of these machines twice over: the high-power laser that generates the extreme ultraviolet in the first place is built by Trumpf in Ditzingen, the mirror optics that focus it by Zeiss in Oberkochen. Three companies, one bottleneck on which the entire semiconductor world depends. European machinery, measuring technology and pharmaceuticals are still what China buys from Europe. Add a single market of 450 million people, high private savings and universities that train students from all over the world.

Third: Europe knows its diagnosis. Mario Draghi delivered it on behalf of the Commission in September 2024, and it was unsparing: without catching up, a slow agony.

VII. Diagnosis without treatment

This is exactly where the third counter-argument tips into its opposite. A year after the report the Brussels think tank EPIC took stock. Of 383 recommendations, 43 had been fully implemented, just over eleven per cent. Almost a quarter had not even been touched. Transport had advanced furthest; least had happened in clean technologies, digitalisation and energy — precisely where Europe feels other people’s bottlenecks.

A patient who knows his diagnosis and does nothing is not ignorant. He has made a decision. The reasons are known and are described in “Who Cedes?”: joint projects in which everyone takes part and to which no one contributes, because every hour spent on the common project is missing from one’s own.

Where this leads can already be seen on a small scale. In 2012 the Chinese state group China Minmetals opened a copy of the Austrian village of Hallstatt in Guangdong province, with church, market square and lakeshore. The people of Hallstatt learned of it only when construction was well advanced. The mayor travelled to the opening, saw an opportunity for tourism and signed an agreement on cultural exchange.

Huawei has gone a step further. At Songshan Lake near Dongguan the company has built a research campus for more than 25,000 employees, divided into twelve quarters, each modelled on a European city: Paris, Verona, Bruges, Oxford, Bologna, Freiburg, Český Krumlov, Heidelberg. A railway on the Swiss model connects them. Heidelberg Castle stands there not as a ruin but complete. The Chinese social anthropologist Biao Xiang says it is not about a deep interest in history but about the wish to have a picture of the world on one’s own doorstep. Behind these façades thousands of engineers develop the products of the future.

That is the role of the appendix in two pictures: template for the copy, backdrop for other people’s work, destination for tour groups — and grateful for all of it. The backdrop, incidentally, is better preserved than the original.

VIII. What remains

A television documentary on the new globalisation ends with the sentence: “Globalisation historically started from Europe and changed the world. Now the world is changing Europe.” That is the friendly version of Valéry’s question. The unfriendly one is that the world does not need to change Europe at all. It is enough that it changes without Europe.

Will Europe become Asia’s appendix? Not necessarily, and not because of Asia. No country in Asia is planning Europe’s insignificance. It is enough that building goes on there while administering goes on here.

The decision is made in three places. Whether Europe nurtures the bottlenecks it still has instead of selling or outsourcing them. Whether it occupies new ones where it can actually arrive, instead of joining in a little everywhere. And whether in joint projects it finally asks who gives something up before it asks who pays.

If that does not succeed, the harmless outcome is still the better prospect: Europe is supplied along with the rest and no longer needed. The dangerous outcome is the other one. An organ without a function becomes inflamed more easily, and Europe has done so before. Four times a European inflammation has turned into a world conflagration: in the Seven Years’ War, fought at the same time in North America, the Caribbean and India; in the Napoleonic Wars, which reached from Egypt to Moscow and pushed Latin America into independence; and in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Before and between them lies an almost countless series of wars that Europe brought to other continents, from the Crusades through the Conquista to the colonial wars of the nineteenth century. And the inflammation has spread. The United States wages its wars as a non-European power, but in the European spirit — or the European disease. Its self-image is Roman down to its architecture: a Senate, a Capitol, the eagle, a Pax Americana. That it emerged from an uprising against a European colonial power changes little. Rome, too, began as a republic that had driven out its kings. After 1945 the European Union was the treatment for this inflammation, and it worked. But it works only as long as it treats and does not merely administer. Since 2022 war has again been waged on the continent.

A continent that loses its significance but keeps its resentment, its weapons and the memory of its greatness is not a dormant organ. It is a focus of inflammation. Whether the world will accept once more that a European inflammation spreads across it is doubtful. A body whose appendix keeps flaring up eventually decides on the incision.