Europe’s Creeping Deindustrialization

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

Forgive my absence last week. I was on vacation, and then, on Friday, I flew to Berlin to participate in “Transatlantic Partnership in a New Era,” a conference organized by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and its German-Hungarian Institute for European Cooperation.

The conference brought together right-of-center voices from Hungary, the United States, and Germany’s Christian Democratic bloc to think through what it takes to strengthen Europe and the Western alliance in the face of today’s realities. I was asked to speak on labor and deindustrialization, and delivered the following remarks, which have been lightly edited for publication here:

Somewhere toward the middle of Capital, Karl Marx wrote that “epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other by strict and abstract lines of demarcation than geological epochs.” The point is that the largest-scale social transformations don’t usually announce themselves beforehand, with bells and whistles; often you don’t notice that they’ve taken place until you find yourself in the aftermath.

But Marx’s dictum doesn’t always hold. The creeping deindustrialization of Europe is one of those rarer instances in which the indicators of social change—terrible social change—are flashing red, and the question is whether the Continent’s leaders are prepared to act decisively, to bend the historical trend in a different direction.

Here are some of those indicators:

• In March, the European Trade Union Confederation warned that the Continent had lost a million manufacturing jobs in four years.

• Germany lost 129,000 industrial jobs in that period, and, according to Forbes, the country’s industrial sector shrank by 14 percent in the six years ending in 2023.

• Family-owned, medium-sized manufacturers, the pride of Germany and of Europe, are feeling especially squeezed, but industrial giants like BASF are also anxiously wondering if their future lies in North America and Asia. And on and on.

Europeans don’t need me to tell them any of this. What I must say, from an American perspective, is that deindustrialization is a geopolitical, social, and even spiritual catastrophe. We Americans have been learning the hard way that it matters if our economy is dominated by finance and services, or one in which the production of tangible goods is prized. I can only briefly and schematically outline the awful impact of deindustrialization on the United States.