The Geopolitics of Supply: Towards a New EU Approach to the Security of Supply of Critical Raw Materials?

06.07.2020

The importance of critical raw materials for Europe’s future key value chains is increasingly being recognised. This policy brief argues that, in order to achieve greater strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty, the EU needs to enhance its security of supply and mitigate its extensive dependences in this domain. Its current approach, devised more than a decade ago, faces considerable challenges and is out of step with today’s geopolitical environment and the Union’s evolved ambition. To address these issues, the EU needs to formulate a new strategy. In this endeavour, examining the recently revised US approach to critical minerals can yield valuable insights, which can be fruitfully adapted to European realities. An updated, geopolitically sensitive strategy on critical raw materials can also provide the EU with a blueprint for approaching security of supply issues more broadly, as well as for overcoming recent transatlantic tensions and cooperating with trusted partners on managing common challenges of strategic dependence.

Vasileios Theodosopoulos