There are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and that’s fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts as possible and buying agencies preference for local providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.

They’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.

> Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing

please revisit the dictionary

There’s no local industry to protect if you ain’t self-sufficiency. And it’s damn hard to protect self-sufficiency long term without protectionism if possible at all.

protectionism is an optional downstream branch of self-sufficiency - being self-sufficient does not automatically imply that it will devolve into protectionism

But without protectionism self-sufficiency is very likely to fall apart. Be it Chinese manufacturing or EU agriculture.

this is also how AWS started. amazon created a setup they needed and found out that they can sell it to others as well.