By Agathe Demarais and Abraham Newman

    Geoeconomics—the interplay between trade, finance, technology, and national security—has become the new buzzword in Brussels. Europe’s ability to remain relevant on the global scene depends on its ability to tackle geoeconomic challenges, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s mounting economic coercion. It will also matter for handling the United States’ new leader. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to ramp up tariffs against European partners, could upend transatlantic cooperation to curb Russia’s financial resources used to wage war against Ukraine, and may even lift sanctions on Moscow.

    To surmount these troubles, European Union officials have announced all kinds of policies in recent years, such as creating an instrument to defend the bloc against economic coercion, identifying strategic technologies, and boosting European production of material critical for the transition to clean energy. Europe’s success, however, will take more than drafting agendas and appointing well-meaning leadership. Hamstrung by an overly complex distribution of responsibilities across its numerous institutions and 27 member states, the EU suffers from internal dysfunction when it comes to geoeconomics. These divisions make it perennially difficult to impose and enforce sanctions, export controls, and other tools of economic statecraft.

    If the bloc cannot come up with a more collaborative system to conduct day-to-day operations, it will be unable to chart an independent path through growing international challenges. Thankfully, the EU can draw on its own experience in other fields, including competition policy, data privacy, and medicine, to find a way forward. In these areas, the EU has knit members’ various capabilities into a system of collective oversight. In a similar manner, member states must now pool their resources to address their shared geoeconomic concerns.

    To achieve this goal, it is time for the EU to create a European economic security network. This network would bring together representatives from member states’ economic security bureaucracies to share best practices and coordinate policy. The EU must do this quickly: the world is becoming more chaotic, and if the bloc cannot create a functioning geoeconomics apparatus soon, it will find itself outmaneuvered by allies to its west and foes to its east.