Europe’s Real Trade War Is With Itself
Trump’s Tariffs Expose Brussels as Its Own Worst Enemy
On July 10, something rare happened in the European Parliament: Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was hit with a no-confidence vote. The last attempt to oust a Commission dates back over a decade, when Jean-Claude Juncker faced backlash.
The motion came from a Romanian MEP after von der Leyen violated transparency rules. She had refused to release text messages with Pfizer’s CEO about vaccine contracts, a refusal the EU’s General Court ruled unlawful. She survived the attack but it hit a nerve and the timing couldn’t be worse.
Because right now, any discord among member states could hurt the entire bloc. President Trump is proposing a 30% blanket tariff on EU imports. The U.S. buys about one-fifth of EU exports, so this would shake Europe’s economic foundation. As EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič put it: “It will be almost impossible to continue the trading as we are used to in a transatlantic relationship. Practically it prohibits the trade.”
Trump’s tariffs, however blunt, are delivering visible results. His 50% copper tariff has triggered a rush to build U.S. copper mines. What if the EU treated these tariffs not as a threat but as a wake-up call? Because if you can’t rely on exports, trying to stimulate internal demand sounds like a good idea.
Silent Tariffs
Zoom in on the EU’s own internal trade frictions, and you find untapped economic potential. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that non-tariff barriers within the EU equal a 44% tariff on goods (excluding agriculture, which alone faces 140% ) and 110% on services. These aren’t taxes or duties, but rules and standards that suffocate trade just the same.
Reuters gives a striking example (emphasis added):
To bring electronic scrap and other waste from across the European Union to its Belgian recycling plant, materials group Umicore (UMI.BR), can spend at least a month tackling a complex array of national shipment rules. […] Umicore's difficulties are particularly significant in that the company recycles 17 of the 34 minerals identified by the EU as critical for its green and digital transition. Chief Executive Bart Sap says a shipment may need to go by rail in one country, then transfer to a boat in another with a wealth of diverse documentation along the route. “With that ununified waste market, the internal hurdles are so high that actually 73% of waste is being exported,” he told Reuters in an interview.
In other words, Europe talks about “strategic autonomy” and controlling critical supply chains but it can’t even unify its own waste shipment rules.
Whether it’s product labeling, chemical safety, or digital compliance, businesses are tripping over a thousand internal barriers. As one research fellow from think tank Bruegel puts it: “These are low-hanging fruit economically, because basically they’re free.” Let’s explore why the EU won’t pick up this fruit anytime soon and what radical step would be necessary to accelerate this process.
Unify or Unravel
The term non-tariff barriers may sound sleep inducing, yet they can trigger fights charged with fury. These barriers are typically justified as safeguards for issues such as health, environmental protection, or workers’ rights. When the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was negotiated in 2015, protests erupted across Europe. The argument: scrapping non-tariff barriers would trigger a race to the bottom.
The removal of these barriers within the EU doesn’t typically cause mass protests, but it’s still a tough job since it faces resistance whenever it collides with entrenched interests. Lobby groups fight hard to protect their turf. In the early 2000s, for example, the German government—under pressure from the tobacco industry—sued the EU in a futile attempt to keep tobacco ads legal.
Nevertheless, the EU has removed many of these barriers over the decades by setting bloc-wide standards—”harmonization” in EU-speak. Striking a balance between lowering trade barriers and overregulating is tricky, though. The zeal to set standards can lead to overreach since a bureaucrat’s job is, by nature, to invent new rules. That dynamic is one of the main reasons the EU is often perceived as a red-tape monster. The universally hated cookie banner or the attached plastic bottle cap became memes of regulatory excess.
Technocratic nanny-state rules like this make it easy to forget harmonization’s purpose: reducing trade frictions and easing internal commerce. It’s an ongoing effort: new technologies, industries, and risks constantly emerge, tempting member states to erect fresh non-tariff barriers that Brussels then tries to harmonize.
In principle, it’s exactly what Europe should double down on: if the continent can’t defend itself in a world of tariffs, removing internal frictions becomes all the more urgent, especially given the IMF’s estimate. For this to work, member states must trust that harmonization—for all its flaws—serves their interests. After all, every new EU law chips away at national sovereignty. However, when a Commissioner is facing a no-confidence vote, that trust has clearly eroded.
War on Dissent
Nothing about the way von der Leyen handled the situation suggests she’s rebuilding that trust. Instead of addressing the concerns, she attacked the initiators of the vote as conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and Putin apologists.
It’s just the latest example of discrediting EU-critical voices: Ahead of Italy’s 2022 election, von der Leyen warned that the EU had “tools” it could use if the result went in a “difficult direction”—widely understood as a threat aimed at a potential far-right victory. In Romania, unfavorable election outcomes were quickly pinned on Russian interference. In Hungary, the Commission activated its so-called “conditionality mechanism”—used to cut off an EU member state from receiving EU money—just weeks after Orbán’s re-election. The timing wasn’t exactly subtle.
This dynamic has consequences. It makes any harmonization initiative from Brussels easy to frame as yet another power grab rather than a move to strengthen Europe’s economy. Von der Leyen’s statement ahead of the no-confidence vote only reinforced that impression. “We have entered an era of struggle between democracy and neoliberalism,” she said.
That’s a bizarre choice of words from an EU Commissioner. At its core, the EU itself is a neoliberal project, built on market liberalization, free movement of capital, goods, and workers. Framing neoliberalism as the enemy of democracy is a left-wing trope: code for more top-down control, used to push whatever the dogma of the day happens to be.
Under this leadership, boosting internal demand by lowering trade barriers is pure fantasy. Member states will only give up pieces of their sovereignty if they believe they’ll come out stronger in the end. That’s the trade-off. And right now, that belief is gone. The way the EU works today, integration feels like dilution: Brussels asks more—just this week the Commission unveiled its $2 trillion budged proposal—and delivers less. Member states feel weaker, not stronger, for playing along. That’s why deeper integration stalls and why EU-critical political parties surge across the continent.
Reset Button
To deepen integration, Europe needs a radical pivot: a Europe-first strategy that ditches the moral grandstanding and starts focusing on power, prosperity, and resilience. That means dropping the hollow “values” rhetoric, shelving sanctions that hurt Europe more than their targets, and moving past the net-zero dogma that’s gutted industrial competitiveness.
To make Ursula’s blood really boil, this initiative could be called MEGA: Make Europe Great Again. Putting Europe first and telling the world so. No more platitudes. Just strategic clarity and operational seriousness.
Today’s EU leadership isn’t capable of that pivot because they’ve run out of political capital. If a real reset is to happen, it won’t come from the same faces. They’d have to resign sooner rather than later and make space for leaders who understand how to rebuild trust. Obviously, von der Leyen’s resignation is wishful thinking, but it would be the fastest way to get Europe back on track. Intentional or not, that’s what Trump’s tariff threats are forcing Europe to confront.
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All that stated is the very reason why we, British, voted to leave the EU despite the fury of the elite in Parliament, the Civil Service, and the Media. Horribly, that break which should have freed us from the dictatorial laws, rules and the edifice of bureaucratic meddling has failed, for the time being. The political shafting will be addressed at the next general election, when those responsible are made history. But of course, as we have been informed, the pressures on us as a nation from the awfulness of the past three decades of government could well burst the dam of constraint and erupt into civil disturbance, even war. The states of the EU are similarly poised.
I am taken aback by the scale of these internal barriers in the EU - so much has been done to free up movement of goods and capital, one would thought that instead of trying to micromanage everything, the Commission would be looking to collect that low-hanging fruit, as you called it.
You are also right in that the EU has suffered from low internal demand for too long. The high tax burden overall means that any gains from growth thay could be had through greater consumption are constantly being sacrificed for ever more mediocre social provisions.