European ports are no longer merely logistics hubs; they have become strategic nodes of the continent’s economic security. From Chinese capital’s penetration into terminals in Piraeus and Hamburg to member states’ growing reliance on foreign investment screening tools — in Italy, the Golden Power mechanism — the question of ownership and governance of port infrastructure has become a battleground between commercial openness and national security protection.
This panel examines the tensions within the EU’s industrial strategy on ports: on one hand, the need to attract investment and remain competitive in a global maritime market dominated by a handful of major powers; on the other, the need to protect infrastructure considered sensitive from a geopolitical and security standpoint. The discussion will address how to harmonise national foreign investment screening mechanisms with a genuine, shared European industrial policy capable of strengthening the resilience of logistics chains without sacrificing the attractiveness of the continent’s port system.
The session will offer the audience a reading of how Europe — and Italy in particular, given its strategic position in the Mediterranean — can turn its ports from a potential vulnerability into a lever of geoeconomic competitiveness.
