Get Ready for a More Protectionist Europe

The long, stale and jargon-filled communiques that come out of the marathon European Union summits in Brussels are not an easy read. Intentional or not, the prose is a barrier obscuring what the leaders of what is effectively the world’s third-biggest economy are up to. Investors and the common folk alike usually ignore them. They shouldn’t.

A chunk of next week’s summit deliberations will be dedicated to industrial policy, and the draft of the joint statement points to the direction of things in the years ahead. The central themes are “autonomy” and “sovereignty,” two terms repeated throughout the text.