Can Trump stop globalization and return the world to its own cramped backyards? Most of the public is convinced that the customs threat to the world (to China and the EU, to be precise) is merely a negotiating tool; after all, neither the USA, China, nor the EU are large enough, let alone self-sufficient entities to function in a pre-industrial mode. The world has become addictively interconnected. China has never built an internal consumer market, so there is no one to buy at home; the USA has development but lacks production; the EU has neither.
However, the geopolitical agenda also directs business flows, so the decision on whether to expand business in the USA or China has now entered the category of strategic. Croatian companies have traditionally been oriented towards Europe – trade with EU member states accounts for about 68 percent of total exports (and about 77 percent of imports). However, Europe is struggling to extricate itself from stagnation; it is questionable whether it will succeed by the end of the decade (regardless of the shift to ‘green’ sources), by which time European money that has been pushing Croatia for several years like a wave will dry up. Therefore, the question of whether to at least throw some cards towards America or China is no longer a Hamlet-like dilemma for Croatia. Because it is necessary! The only question is whether to the right or left of Greenwich.
Kristijan Kotarski from the Faculty of Political Science clearly states: to the West! – European exports to the USA account for three percent of the EU’s GDP, while exports to China account for less than 1.3 percent, with a tendency to slow down over the past five years. On the other hand, imports from China account for three percent of the EU’s GDP compared to imports from the USA, which account for two percent. Additionally, the EU is far more dependent on direct foreign investments coming from the USA compared to Chinese foreign investments. Less than eight percent of accumulated foreign direct investments in the EU come from China, compared to 33 percent from the USA. At the same time, EU foreign investments in China and the USA are equal, and both economies are significant destinations for investments from EU companies – Kotarski specifies, adding that Germany, as the European locomotive, has been primarily oriented towards the Chinese market regarding exports for years.
China has been a more important destination for German products compared to the USA (the difference in relation to the overall position of the EU!). This has, of course, irritated the USA in its efforts to win the EU over to its side in the rivalry with China, which Trump demonstrated during his first term when he actually earned the nickname ‘tariff’. – However, at the beginning of this year, things are changing again, and the USA is becoming a key export market for Germany. Germany has invested three times more in the USA than in China this year – concludes Kotarski.
However, no matter how much Germany has shifted from the Chinese market to the American one and tried to patch up its crumbling production, it has not yet succeeded. The strongest European economy will also end this year in the red (about 0.2 percent), although forecasts from the beginning of the year (and the entire first half of 2024) expected growth (not exactly heroic, but even a meager 0.3 percent would be growth that would show it had escaped recession). Therefore, the correct answer is not ‘either – or’ but ‘and’.
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