Globalization Unravelling? ASML and the Geopolitics of Europe-China Tech Decoupling

This article investigates the geopolitical dynamics driving Europe’s emerging technological decoupling from China. Focusing on the semiconductor industry and the Dutch semiconductor firm ASML, it examines how technonationalism emanating from the US has shaped a small European member state’s policy response amid intensifying US-China rivalry. The article analyses how national security arguments and US strategic influence aimed at undermining China’s advances in high-tech has reshaped the Dutch semiconductor export control regime in a way that seemingly contradicts both ASML’s corporate interests and Dutch long-term economic interests. Moreover, cutting the dependency ties of China to one of the few chokepoint industries and tech firms in the EU arguably undermines its commitment to ‘technological sovereignty’. We explain these puzzling outcomes through the inherent contradictions within technonationalism and the tensions between state and corporate actors strategizing around different national security and profit-oriented interests. As such, we argue that the case of ASML offers a useful prism through which to study the ongoing ‘geoeconomic’ shift in the global political economy in which the alignment of the geopolitical and capital logics characteristic of neoliberal globalisation is coming apart, with state and corporate actors attempting to realign these logics into different configurations.