The European Union's 'geoeconomic turn' against China is hotly debated among international political economy scholars, but the role of Europe's leading corporations in this shift remains underexplored. This article focuses on the European Round Table for Industry, an elite forum of corporate executives tightly connected to the European Commission. The ERT played a key role in aligning European integration with corporate interests from the 1980s to 2000s. However, it has fallen out of step with the European Commission, whose posture has hardened since branding China a 'systemic rival'. The disjuncture between the Commission's assertive stance and the ERT's more tentative approach to China prompts us to test and rethink what we know about state-business relations in a new geoeconomic age. Drawing on data under-used in IPE to chart ERT firms' 'territorial' and 'network integration' with China, our analysis reveals a significant minority of firms deeply integrated into the Chinese market and supplier base, a small group of firms with minimal ties potentially receptive to the EU's 'geoeconomic turn', and a large array of partially integrated companies in between these two positions. This uneasy balance of forces within the ERT explains why it is trailing rather than driving the EU's stance.
Wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) are digital forms of central bank money designed for high-value transactions among financial institutions and corporations. The main jurisdictions have moved along this 'road' to wCBDCs at different start-times and at different speeds: China has been a first mover, also setting up a mini-lateral arrangement; the European Union (EU) has been a second mover, mostly focusing on the intra-EU dimension so far; and the United States (US) has been a late mover and quite reluctant to travel along the path. What explains this variation? This paper argues that geoeconomic dynamics, especially the quest for autonomy concerning critical financial infrastructures and currency statecraft, are central to understanding the uneven development of wCBDCs. Empirical evidence is drawn from public documents, media coverage, and 20 elite interviews across jurisdictions. The paper contributes to the literature on the weaponisation of finance and international currency rivalry, demonstrating that wCBDCs are utilised to mitigate vulnerabilities and expand monetary influence.
Why and how do state authorities seek to deflect and harness technological disruption? Under what conditions do they shift between welcoming disruptive innovation as a driver of economic modernisation and seeing it as a threat to political and financial stability? We examine these questions in the context of how authorities handled the emergence of payments systems attached to digital platform companies within mainland China, where Ant Group and Tencent are used by over 1 billion people, and their international expansion to Southeast Asia. We argue that intermediation and the informational power derived from it are central to the political economy of Fintech disruption. Authorities and banking incumbents were accommodating of disruption to the extent it aligned with goals of increasing economic modernisation and efficiency. However, they were less tolerant of Fintech disruption that compromised their intermediary positions and informational power, and acted more strongly to deflect or block it. Similarly, Chinese fintechs in Southeast Asia have been limited by intense competition in target markets, as states in the region manage potential disruption of their international monetary orders. States are able to deflect the trajectory of Fintech disruption towards their own objectives, even if they cannot entirely stop or determine it.
This article refines the developmental network state (DNS) concept by arguing that DNS functions are not generic capabilities but fundamentally growth stage-specific, particularly in capital-intensive, technology-intensive sectors undergoing rapid scaling. The key theoretical contribution is that internal protection against the structural risks of hyperscaling (solvency risk, demand volatility, operational errors and cost cliff dynamics) operates independently from external protection against unfair competition. While external protection (tariffs, trade remedies) receives substantial theoretical and policy attention, internal protection remains undertheorised despite being equally consequential. By looking at the case of EV battery scale-ups in Sweden and France, we show that internal protection operates through two analytically distinct mechanisms: ex-ante institutional embedding, which makes firm failure politically more costly by anchoring firms within state-coordinated value chains and strategic ownership structures; and ex-post crisis support, which provides refinancing, demand stabilisation and restructuring capacity when hyperscaling collides with macroeconomic shocks. The article argues that neither mechanism alone suffices; effective DNS requires both forms of credible commitment signalled across political cycles. This theoretical framework enables a more precise diagnosis of why industrial policy succeeds or fails in high-stakes technological transitions, moving the literature towards analysis of institutional alignment between protection mechanisms and firm lifecycle stages.
