Why nationalist economic policies will inevitably make a comeback in the euro zone

The key issue for the euro zone is that monetary unification inevitably increases the heterogeneity between countries. This results from the fact that the elimination of currency risk enables countries to use their comparative advantages and leads to increasingly divergent productive specialisations from one country to the next. The situation of the United States also shows that the degree of heterogeneity in the euro zone is still low compared to what it will be in the future. So what happens when Europe carries out a policy to develop strategic industries (medicines, electronics, electric batteries, hydrogen, artificial intelligence, etc.)? These industries will be located in the few countries or regions where comparative advantages attract them. This means that many countries will not see these strategic industries develop domestically and will not be happy for them to simply grow elsewhere in Europe. These “dispossessed” countries will then want to conduct national development policies, as they will hardly benefit from Europe’s policies.