Editoriale di Furio Oldani – Macchine Motori 86
After nine months of investigations, on June 12th, the European Commission acknowledged the substantial subsidies that the Chinese government grants to its electric vehicle manufacturers, genuine gifts that allow brands from the Celestial Empire to sell in Europe below production cost. Hence the decision to impose additional tariffs ranging between approximately 17 and 38 percent on top of the existing ten percent. This measure would take effect on July 4th, and since today is June 18th, it is currently unclear whether it will indeed be implemented. This uncertainty is also due to the usual conflict between the economic and political interests of individual states and those of the continent as a whole. Germany has seen its automotive industries enter into numerous agreements with China to delegate their production to that country, while Hungary would oppose the tariffs for political reasons. Spain and Italy, on the other hand, would be in favor of the tariffs, while France remains undecided. Officially, it would support the tariffs alongside several Nordic countries, but within France, the Stellantis group opposes them.
Regardless of how things turn out, this is ultimately another farce that confirms how distant the possibility of European states uniting to form a common federation that protects their interests is at the moment. Everyone agrees with the idea of free trade, the free movement of people and goods, and a single currency, but no one is willing to lose part of their sovereignty to transfer it to a higher political organization. This is understandable. Unlike the United States, which has only 248 years of history and was born from the aggregation of the first 13 states, European countries boast millennia-old historical traditions that have always evolved around two basic concepts: conquest and independence. For centuries, Europeans fought to conquer others’ lands, and for centuries, the attacked defended themselves in the name of their independence. These impulses have not at all subsided today, and while it is true that we no longer fight with weapons, it is equally true that antagonisms persist at the economic level. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge this situation and accept reality, stopping the attempts to unify the un-unifiable through regulations aimed at achieving unshared objectives that common people perceive as acts of futile dirigisme. This is in anticipation of the succession of new generations, which may eventually mature the concept of continental socio-political unity that is still unreachable today.
Titolo: China is near, Europe is not
Translation with ChatGPT
