MSC Geoeconomics Project “Beyond Lose-Lose”

Over the next three years, the new MSC Geoeconomics Project “Beyond Lose-Lose” aims to contribute to enabling decision makers to meet current geoeconomic challenges, with a particular focus on the role of the European Union and the so-called Global South. The project is funded by Stiftung Mercator.

The world has entered the age of geoeconomics. States are increasingly using trade instruments to pursue national security interests and gain relative advantage. This practice threatens to create a downward spiral, making cooperation for mutual benefit and the provision of global public goods even more difficult. A "win-win" would become a ”lose-lose,” where the only question is who loses more.

In order to navigate this tension between the need to reduce the risks of interdependence and the danger of all-encompassing securitization, a positive vision for redesigning the economic order is needed, taking into account principles such as fairness and inclusiveness as well as resilience. As the most open economic area in the world, and against the background of mercantilist trade policies in both the US and China, the European Union has a central role to play in developing and implementing such a vision. This also requires a reorientation of economic relations with the countries of the Global South, which, like the EU, would suffer from the fragmentation of world trade, but which also have greater scope for cooperation in the face of global power shifts.

As part of the project, the perspectives of relevant stakeholders from different regions and sectors will be brought together in a series of roundtables over a period of three years. Various publications serve to outline the geoeconomic challenges, raise awareness of the link between economic and security policy, and identify trade-offs.