300 to 800 factories yearly closed their doors in France since the introduction of the Euro. Italy faces a lesser but still steep industrial decline. In the meanwhile, industrial output boomed in the German hinterland of Eastern Europe.
I’m Italian and I can see our country becoming such a centre of attraction in certain fields (fashion and advertising in Milan, for example; food in Emilia; motor-racing in Romagna; tourism in Tuscany...). I’m not terribly worried that our widget-making capabilities have lowered - we are still paying the economic and social price of 60s-style industry in some areas (Taranto, Pozzuoli etc).
In the end it always boils down to this annoying tribalism - in a global world, thinking that French and Germans and Italians and Spanish must be separate and autonomous little tribes, is as silly as thinking that Nice or Lyon should be completely separate and autonomous from Paris and Calais.
This has absolutely nothing to do with isolationism or tribalism. Gee, I hate this sort of strawman argument.
Our globalised, ultra-lean, efficient world was built on a humongous influx of fossil fuels and other limited resources that destroyed our climate while being so "efficient". Fossil fuels (and phosphates) that will become scarce at some point or another.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with isolationism or tribalism.
This has absolutely all to do with tribalism. If industries had closed in France and opened in Belgium, making them operatively indistinguishable from French industries for all intents and purposes (as distance is negligible and half of them basically speak the same language), people would still go on about lacking French industry. Why? Because Belgium is conceptually "not France". Nobody complains (anymore) about a single factory serving an entire country, why should we worry about a single factory serving half a continent? Do you seriously think you should have a widget-making factory in every city or town, for each different type of widget...? "OMG the world might end, we need to be able to make Gucci shoes in every town!"
> fossil fuels and other limited resources that destroyed our climate
I do not disagree, but that's something that effectively started 300 years ago and is not going to end anytime soon, unless you enjoy riding horses and going to bed with the sun. We will find alternatives (in some areas we already have, effectively; they are just not equally distributed yet).
There is such a thing as sovereignty, and it doesn't matter at which scale it happens; sovereignty implies having control on whatever things you can't do without. Can Europe or the US be sovereign without steel mills? maybe. Car manufacturing? possibly. Chemistry and pharmaceutical production? not so sure. Oil? see our leaders grovelling at MBS' knees while he's butchering Yemen. Ah.
In the US, some top brass came recently to the realisation that the US can't make a war plane without Chinese input anymore. That may be a problem sooner or later.
Similarly, the impact of the transfer of industries and money across Europe isn't a problem per se, it's only a problem because nothing provides any equilibrium -- no transfers at any significant scales. So far Germany sends cars and machines across Europe, and gets paper in exchange. At times, some important German minister or another goes harping that someday, that TARGET2 balance will have to be cleared. Does this even make sense? Can we have a European money, but not a European industry? I don't think so. Something will have to give at some point or another.
Have you got a source on that? The data I can find [1] says 600 total have closed between 2009 and 2018.
[1] https://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/entreprise/depuis-janvier-il-y...
from this source: https://fr.slideshare.net/dcousquer/2018-un-ralentissement-e... , slide 5.
This has been more or less the trend from 2001 to 2016. There was a slight upturn for 2017-2018, then it went down again in 2019.