EU fractures as members pursue rival alliances, risking continental unity

In Barcelona this autumn, Chinese acrobats performed alongside Catalan pipers at La Merce, the city's centuries-old cultural festival. Shanghai had become the first Asian metropolis invited as guest of honour, a symbolic moment that reflected something larger: Spain's deliberate pivot toward Beijing, even as the rest of Europe grew wary.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has visited China's President Xi Jinping four times in as many years. He has pushed the European Union to improve relations with China since Donald Trump's return to the White House two years ago. But this courtship has fractured European consensus. Germany and France, the bloc's largest economies, have united around a harder line on Beijing, seeking to give Brussels the power to block subsidised Chinese competitors and address what the European Commission says is a trade imbalance of roughly one billion euros per day. Other EU countries worry about China's technological and economic support for Russia's war in Ukraine, even as Beijing denies direct military assistance.

Spain's warming to China is driven by concrete economic interest. Chinese investment in Spain has doubled in the past year alone, according to ICEX Spain Trade and Investment, the government's official agency. Battery manufacturers like CATL and Hithium are building gigafactories in Spanish cities. Chery Automobile, a major Chinese carmaker, opened its first European hub in Barcelona two years ago, reviving the defunct Spanish brand Ebro. The longest freight rail link in the world—stretching over 13,000 kilometres from Yiwu in eastern China to Madrid—now carries car parts and electrical goods westward, Spanish ham and wine eastward. Victor Cortizo, a lawyer and academic specialising in Sino-Spanish relations, frames the choice plainly: Chinese investment is rising while American investment is sinking. Net US investment in Spain fell by roughly one billion euros, according to Spain's Economy Ministry. A Pew Research Center poll published this summer found that 54 percent of Spaniards viewed China favourably, compared to just 30 percent who held a favourable view of the United States. Trump's tariffs and threats of economic sanctions against Spain over defence spending have made Washington feel less reliable than Beijing.

Yet Spain's embrace of China carries security costs that alarm its European partners. Last year, Spain's Ministry of the Interior awarded Chinese tech giant Huawei a 12.3-million-euro contract to store and manage sensitive judicial wiretap data. Members of the European Parliament from multiple political groups warned the decision endangered the entire bloc. Markéta Gregorová, a Czech Pirate Party MEP, cautioned that introducing a high-risk vendor risked "poisoning the well of European intelligence sharing." Juan Ignacio Zoido Álvarez, a Spanish opposition politician, said the contract put "the entirety of the EU at risk." Spain's defence ministry continues to deny any security vulnerability, but Julianne Smith, former US Ambassador to NATO and co-founder of the geostrategic advisory firm Clarion Strategies, warns that Spain's deepening relationship with China could "further derail the EU's ability to speak with one voice and create added security vulnerabilities for both Spain and wider Europe."

Spain is far from alone. Finland, which shares a 1,300-kilometre land border with Russia and joined NATO in 2022 seeking collective security, has grown doubtful that Washington will honour the alliance's mutual defence clause. No longer confident the US would defend it if attacked, Helsinki has turned to Israel for advanced defence equipment, including the David's Sling air-defence system and Spike anti-tank missiles. Finland renewed its contract with Israel at the height of the recent Gaza war, despite public reservations about Israeli activity in the occupied Palestinian territories. Minna Alander, a fellow with the Transatlantic Defence and Security Programme at the Center for European Policy Analysis, explains the calculus: "There is a sense in Finland that we can't always afford a moral superiority. Survival comes at a price."

Greece has made a similar choice. Perceiving Turkey as a constant security threat and doubting that the US will mediate as it once did, Athens signed the "Achilles Shield" agreement with Israel in late August—one of the largest defence export deals in both countries' histories. The deal provides Greek forces with Israeli technology to counter drones, aircraft, and missiles. Though Greece has a history of public sympathy for the Palestinian cause, the political and public reaction to the Israeli agreement has been, as analyst Nick Malkoutzis notes, "more muted than might have been expected." The reason is straightforward: security concerns about Turkey override other considerations. Malkoutzis adds that Greece and Finland both want to be seen as "good Europeans," yet their scrambling in different directions complicates the unified European voice on defence and security that Brussels and NATO say they desperately need.

EU and NATO leaders warn that this fragmentation—what analysts call "mini-lateralism"—comes at the worst possible moment. Russia, emboldened by Chinese support, threatens Europe's eastern flank. The United States, once Europe's anchor, now seems distracted or unpredictable under Trump. Smaller coalitions and regional partnerships are nothing new; the E3 (Britain, Germany, France) coordinated on Iran; Nordic nations work together on Arctic defence; the Visegrad Four long functioned as a pressure group. But the scale and urgency of current realignment is different. Europe's adversaries are watching closely. China and Russia see a continent fracturing, each member state hedging its bets, each pursuing national gain over collective strength. The question now is whether Europe can still find its voice before the moment passes.