The war in Ukraine reminded Germany the risk posed by economic dependence vis-à-vis non-democratic states. Exposure to China could become its Achilles heel.
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“We live a change of time. This means that the post-world is no longer the same as the world before. Basically, it’s about whether the force can transgress the right. “The speech by Olaf Scholz, at the historic session at the Bundestag, on February 27, 2022, marks a revolution in the approach of Germany of its foreign policy. Forced by the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Social Democratic Chancellor has made a reversal of the principles that guided Germany since the end of the Second World War: the country understood that it could not rely on the law and the law. economic interdependence between states to guarantee peace and stability.
It is also a break for the engine of the fourth economy of the world. Long, the doctrine of “Wandel Durch Handel” had attempted to reconcile these two approaches: the country was convinced that in maintaining close trade relations with non-democratic countries would eventually make the way to liberalization and democracy. This posture was all the more comfortable that Germany has largely benefited from the “dividend of peace”, a relative geopolitical stability, over the last twenty years. The Russian offensive, the main supplier of the country, in defiance of international law, brought out the fourth economy of the world of a geopolitical naivety become untenable.
“It’s still too early for companies to take the full extent of Olaf Scholz’s speech at the Bundestag. But I think it will fundamentally change the prospects, says Noah Barkin, expert in Europe-China relations within the Cabinetre Rhodium Group. Germany is currently examining its dependence on Russian gas. The next step is to examine its economic dependencies in terms of national security. “
The exposure of the German economy to the Asian giant is indeed much broader and much deeper than that vis-à-vis Russia, linked mainly to energy. Sixty billion euros were exchanged between Germany and Russia in 2021, including 20 billion imports of gas and oil, against a volume of exchange of 245 billion euros with China in 2021. The latter became the first economic partner of Germany; It caught 14% of investments abroad by German companies in 2020. In the three most important sectors of Made in Germany – the automobile, construction of machinery and chemistry – the People’s Republic is in the process of to become the first market of German companies.
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