Despite the damage it causes to economic progress and the improvement of global well-being, the strength of globalization has been hindered by a trend toward re-establishing a bipolar world. This trend started long before COVID-19 and the conflict in Ukraine challenged Europe and the world in general. Building border walls and fences has become popular among policymakers worldwide since the early 1990s. Since the financial market crisis and economic turbulence in 2008, world trade has not grown faster than global production of goods and services.

Geopolitical conflicts are increasingly taking place through economic means, media strategies, and even cyberattacks. Threats of the use of nuclear weapons fuel fears. Food crises and refugee flows are used as political weapons. State interventions in free trade can be easily justified because they are not internalized by market processes. This way, worldwide conflicts have strong and costly side-effects on trade-dependent nations like Germany and China, as they hinder the benefits of the global division of labor.

Moreover, to achieve ambitious climate goals and address similar demographic imbalances, Europe and China have many important common areas for successful collaboration.

This highlights the need for better understanding and trust through intensified dialogue, beyond system rivalry. More in-person visits by leaders from both China and Europe would be advisable to foster exchange. However, such a strategy is not without risk given the significant gap between the views of European leaders and Chinese officials. Recent visits by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Germany"s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to China have revealed some of these differences. Nevertheless, the risks of missing potential benefits from collaboration appear to be far greater.

Strategic independence achieved through collaboration may foster peace and economic progress, but without peace, there can be no strategic independence for Europe.

The author, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, is the president of the Global Labor Organization, a Germany-based world-wide network of researchers investigating the path of globalization.