In early 2017, three of Europe’s most powerful economic ministers — Brigitte Zypries from Germany, Michel Sapinfrom France, and Carlo Calenda from Italy signed a letter that quietly reshaped the European Union’s approach to global investment.
Their message, addressed to Cecilia Malmström, then European Commissioner for Trade, was brief but momentous. It called on Brussels to act — to protect Europe’s technological future from what they saw as a wave of strategic takeovers by foreign investors.
Europe, open and proud
The letter began on familiar ground.
“Freedom of investment constitutes a core principle for the European Union and its member states.”
The ministers praised Europe’s openness, its innovation, and its ability to attract global capital.
They reminded the Commission that this openness was not only an economic choice but a political identity proof that Europe remained a space of trust, competition, and transparency.
But the tone quickly changed.
A subtle but serious alarm
In the following lines, the ministers raised a concern that had been growing quietly in Berlin, Paris, and Rome:
“Non-EU investors have taken over more and more European companies with key technological competences for strategic reasons.”
This was not about ordinary market operations. It was about state-backed acquisitions, often from China, targeting companies that possessed technologies vital to Europe’s industrial future.
The reference was clear to anyone following the news at the time: the 2016 acquisition of the German robotics champion KUKA by a Chinese investor had shocked policymakers.
The three ministers were sounding an alarm Europe’s open markets were becoming instruments of foreign strategy.
Reciprocity, or the lack of it
The letter went further. It highlighted the asymmetry between Europe’s openness and the protectionism of some of its trading partners:
“European investors do not enjoy the same rights in the respective countries of origin as these non-EU investors in the investment-friendly European Union.”
In other words, Europe was playing by liberal rules that others were exploiting.
Its companies faced restrictions abroad, while its own borders remained wide open.
What began as a reflection on free trade was, in reality, a call for strategic realism.
The fear of selling Europe’s future
The phrase that would echo most strongly from the letter came next:
“A possible sell-out of European expertise.”
It was a dramatic choice of words and intentionally so.
The ministers were warning that Europe’s openness risked becoming a liability, a channel through which its know-how, technologies, and industrial capabilities could quietly drain away.
They were talking about economic security, long before the term became fashionable in EU vocabulary.
No tools, no defense
The ministers then made a candid admission:
“We are currently unable to combat [it] with effective instruments.”
There was no European framework to screen foreign investments, no mechanism to evaluate whether a foreign acquisition might endanger critical technologies or public security.
This was a policy vacuum and the letter sought to fill it.
A Common Paper, A Common Purpose
The letter concluded with a clear proposal:
“We have elaborated a common paper, which you will find attached to this letter.”
This “common paper” was the first Franco-German-Italian initiative for a European investment screening mechanism.
Two years later, their appeal would bear fruit with the adoption of Regulation (EU) 2019/452, which created the EU’s first-ever framework for screening foreign direct investments.
It was, in hindsight, the birth of Europe’s economic sovereignty policy — a moment when the EU began to reconcile openness with strategic caution.
A quiet revolution
The tone of the letter was diplomatic yet firm.
It reaffirmed liberal values, but its subtext was unmistakable: Europe could no longer afford strategic naïveté.
Openness had been its strength, but without reciprocity and safeguards, it risked becoming a weakness.
What began as a three-page letter from Berlin in February 2017 evolved into a defining principle of today’s European economic policy:
the right to remain open and the ability to say no.