Uncommon “Common Sense”: Spain, China, and a “Great Politics” for the 21st Century

Spain’s progressive government hasn’t been blind to the risks of Europe’s growing trade imbalance with China, but has chosen openness and cooperation over confrontation with Beijing. This course puts Madrid at odds with Europe’s increasingly defensive posture towards China. Whether this proves a winning strategy or a doomed gamble is still up for debate. But it shouldn’t be read in isolation: it is part of Spain’s attempt to chart a new vision for Europe beyond permanent crisis management.

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Under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain has emerged as an exception to the worldwide drift towards conservative and reactionary politics. In matters of energy, climate change, social rights, and international diplomacy, among many others, Spain has reclaimed the enduring relevance of a progressive response to the global polycrisis – almost single-handedly at times. On more than one occasion, this trailblazing effort has helped shape and lend credibility to an emerging consensus. On issues such as Gaza, EU energy market reform, and the need to bolster state resources in the face of unprecedented crises, Spain has punched above its weight. In retrospect, it is generally seen as having been early rather than wrong.

On China, however, Spain’s distinctive approach diverges from the European mainstream in certain key respects. Since 2023, Sánchez has visited China four times, highlighting opportunities for bilateral cooperation and investment. Meanwhile, the Franco-German consensus – and therefore that of the EU – has become increasingly confrontational towards Beijing, stressing the threat posed by unfair competition and industrial overcapacity to European jobs and economic stability. In this context, is Spain’s position doomed to marginalisation?

Spain’s stance on China

The Sánchez government’s approach to China is fully situated within the European framework, which characterises the country simultaneously as a partner, an economic competitor, and a systemic rival.[1] It has repeatedly argued for the need to balance the EU-China trade deficit, initially calling it “significant”[2] and later “unsustainable”[3] and “unacceptable”.[4] All of this falls well within the contours of the European consensus.

Where divergence is visible is in Spain’s preference for engagement over confrontation with Beijing, whether on trade imbalances, investment, or security. Spain has been less inclined to support protectionist or punitive measures against China, as Sánchez has highlighted during his frequent visits there. On electric vehicles, renewable energies, and other frontier technologies, Spain has welcomed Chinese investment, with the proviso that it meet the requirements expected of development strategies. These include local value added, high-quality employment, and technology transfer.[5] Recent examples of this kind of development-oriented investment deal, which benefits both countries, include the revival of the Nissan factory in Barcelona[6] and the construction of the CATL-Stellantis battery gigafactory in Zaragoza.[7]

Spain has also been more tolerant of Chinese investment in security-critical areas such as surveillance and communications infrastructure. While the Spanish government cancelled a fibre-optic service contract with Telefónica over the use of Huawei gear in April 2025,[8] it did not introduce an outright ban on the Chinese tech giant, which the European Commission is planning to exclude from European telecoms networks.[9] In July of the same year, it awarded the company a multi-million-euro contract for the storage of judicial wiretaps.[10] Finally, Spain has been less vocal about China’s role in materially supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, favouring what it considers pragmatic engagement over a more hawkish position.

In these respects, Spain’s approach to China does deviate somewhat from the majority opinion in the EU, especially insofar as it favours dialogue and engagement over confrontation to resolve friction. The question, then, is whether this tactical divergence is reasonable and how it fits within Spain’s broader political strategy.

End of the vacation

Perhaps the largest elephant in the room is China’s overwhelming industrial dominance. The list of sectors in which China is a leading player is long, but in some of them, such as the so-called “new energy” sector (the group of technologies focused on clean and low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels), the gap with the rest of the world is staggering. In 2024, China accounted for three-quarters of global clean-tech investment,[11] controlling over 70 per cent of manufacturing capacity in almost every sector tracked by BloombergNEF. In some of those sectors, its dominance reaches monopolistic levels. These include rare earth refining (91 per cent),[12] solar cells (92 per cent),[13] and battery anode materials (97 per cent).[14] This reality makes it impossible to achieve the global and regional decarbonisation targets proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or set by the EU itself without relying on China’s manufacturing might.

Spain’s approach to China can be seen as part of the answer to a much larger question: What does Spain want Europe to be?

China is also seeking to dominate other sectors it has identified as strategic and “emerging” or “future” in its latest Five-Year Plan,[15] including new materials, aerospace, AI, quantum computing, and biomanufacturing. To make this achievable, China can count on its continent-sized resources and population, guided by Beijing’s capacity to provide strong direction to both public and private companies – a form of indicative planning with sharp teeth. It is this industrial dominance that brings Sánchez to state that “China is rebuilding its greatness” and that it is destined, as in past centuries, “to play an essential role in the future of the world”.[16]

The European Union is no stranger to dealing with a much larger, more integrated, and more industrially capable partner. The entire history of European integration, beginning in the early 1950s, can be seen as a process of learning to live and thrive in the shadow of the United States. The key difference, in that case, was that this relationship of subordination was as much chosen by Europe as imposed on it. The “vacation from power” that Europeans enjoyed until very recently, to use a phrase coined by Dutch political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar, imposed severe limitations upon Europe but allowed it to see itself as a continental market with regulatory powers that did not need to bother with the nuisances of hard power.

Now that this understanding of Europe is collapsing, demolished by the very ally upon which it depended, the essential question for EU member states is how to survive, if not thrive, in that brave new world. Spain’s approach to China, then, can be seen as part of the answer to a much larger question: What does Spain want Europe to be?

The Europe Spain wants

The key to this question can be found in Spain’s repeated calls for further European integration and a significant expansion of its capabilities. Now that Europe must deal with “great powers” that might not have its best interests at heart, and without the ability to outsource its security, what counts as a “realistic” position is up for debate.

In 2025, in a speech to the Spanish Congress of Deputies, Sánchez advocated for a federal Europe and said it was unrealistic “to pretend to compete with great powers like the United States, like China, like India, without deepening our European integration”.[17] Without hard capabilities in industry, defence, digital technologies, and finance, to name just a few, it is impossible to gain sufficient leverage on the global stage. And without that leverage, a hawkish stance on China would end up being a convoluted suicide mission – mere verbal bluster without substance. Europe must be strong enough to work with others to deliver global public goods that guarantee the continuation of human civilisation as we know it, such as climate stability or some kind of rules-based international order.

Even in matters of defence, where Spain has often been singled out for not toeing the line on the 5 per cent target pushed by Trump, Sánchez has repeatedly called for the creation of a European army,[18] favouring the pooling of resources, the coordination of procurement, and the integration of operational structures over the wasteful expansion of 27 separate national armies.[19]

Spain’s preference for a more open form of strategic autonomy, informed by an awareness of current limitations, can be traced back to its recent history. Spain was one of the last countries in Western Europe to join the European Communities, having spent the so-called “golden years” of capitalism (1945-1975) as an underdeveloped fascist dictatorship. One of the country’s few national consensuses is support for further European integration and development, driven by Spaniards’ enduring memory of what it means to be cut off from their neighbours and Europe’s institutions.

Unlike Spain, many other EU member states thrived under the post-World War II order and fear they have much to lose from its unravelling. They cling to the fantasy of defeating China through an unlikely combination of confrontation at the negotiating table and austerity at home. Spain, by contrast, has been one of the most persistent member states in calling for greater European fiscal muscle to allow us to do what we must as a Union. This is demonstrated by both its proposals in 2020 and its even more ambitious initiatives in 2025-2026 advocating a permanent fiscal capacity and a European safe asset.

In adopting this stance, has Sánchez once again “skate[d] to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”, a direction that everyone else will eventually travel in? While Mario Draghi’s 2024 report – commissioned by Ursula von der Leyen to identify solutions to the “dwarf among giants” challenge – uses the more liberal-coded language of competitiveness and economic stagnation, it shares clear similarities with Sánchez’s discourse. These include advocating deeper integration as the only real solution Europe has at its disposal and acknowledging the need for public investment and industrial policy.[20]

Although the extent to which Draghi’s recommendations have become EU policy is contested, they carry significant weight, making it more difficult to dismiss Sánchez’s approach as mere folly. Instead, it can be seen as an attempt to present a green and progressive alternative that goes where the Draghi plan cannot – or will not. A simple anecdote speaks volumes about the self-imposed limits of the current consensus: Draghi himself once remarked, seemingly in passing, that “as much as I love this concept [of joint European debt], it is not the main thing in the report.”[21]

A new “great politics”

Europe today seems firmly embarked on a doomed course of action that offers nothing but an imaginary solution to a very real set of problems. Whether driven by conviction or by catastrophic opportunism, the new political majority in the European institutions is determined to curb immigration within an ageing continent, slash public budgets although new capabilities are desperately needed, and cling to dreams of absolute national sovereignty when only an authentic European sovereignty – however messy and incomplete – has any chance of succeeding.

The fact that Spain – in historical terms an unlikely candidate – has offered the most coherent and realistic alternative to this path underlines the urgency of articulating a new political centre. This must acknowledge the present threats and enjoy sufficient support to begin delivering solutions at scale. Perhaps we must first endure various attempts to solve new problems with old solutions – in the form of all possible combinations of conservative and nationalist “small politics”.[22] It is important to note that these are by no means the exclusive domain of right-wing parties.

Spain’s preference for a more open form of strategic autonomy can be traced back to its recent history.

The silver lining to the highly volatile era in which we live, characterised by weak and shifting loyalties, is that enough people may begin to demand real solutions to their increasingly severe problems. When that moment of acute crisis arises, the ability to offer a “great politics” that offers solutions to the defining issues of the century – from the climate crisis to soaring inequality, technological destabilisation, and the obsolescence of the post-war social contract – will prove crucial.

It is possible that no such force will assemble to counter Europe’s decline, leaving us poorer, fragmented, and subjugated. But if it does, accompanied by a new great politics that can help forge a social contract fit for the current context, then Spain’s first coalition governments since the Second Republic of the 1930s – personified internationally by Sánchez but made up of a number of political actors – might be seen in retrospect as an early laboratory for a “new common sense”.[23]

If such a politics emerged, it would no doubt choose openness and multilateralism over closed borders and transactionalism. Here, the perspective of those who have themselves been migrants, or of younger generations who are further removed in time from imperial nostalgia, might prove crucial.

A new European great politics would also choose scale and ambition over austerity and stagnation, since the major problems we face can only be addressed with major solutions. Humanity’s powers of creation and destruction are immense; they must be used for the better good. The alternative – dreaming of a future in which they simply vanish without first laying waste to our societies – is futile.

The way forward is more clean energy, more liveable cities, improved production practices, and the expansion of democracy into more spheres of life. The astounding productivity gains of recent decades must be diffused throughout society. Progressive forces need to remember that only the most repressive social contracts can prevent this from happening in the long run. Those battles should not be conceded before they are even fought, and here it does not matter whether we are talking about the energy transition, digitalisation, or AI.

Finally, if a great politics of the 21st century did emerge, it would understand that the new social majority is much more diverse, with distinct interests that must be respected. This would, of course, include those fighting for social rights but might also include those concerned about issues that are traditionally coded as conservative but are being abandoned by the reactionary bloc, such as regulatory stability or international competitiveness.

“Uncommon” sense

Spain’s strategy towards China – and its broader vision for Europe – is characterised by an exceptionally uncommon common sense and may be an early glimpse of such a “great politics”. But even under the most optimistic scenarios, this vision for Europe would not be the only one. Any plausible new European consensus would also have to accommodate those who favour more coercive and defensive postures – such as the recent Franco-German agreement on the need for a “kill switch” to cut off European single market access for countries such as China[24] – and those constrained by the ever-present demands of domestic politics, a limitation that Sánchez knows very well.

Whether the Spanish approach is wiped out from the commanding heights of European politics – either as a temporary setback or the definitive end of a doomed gamble – is a question for Europe’s citizens. On Europe, China, and beyond, the legacy of the Spanish experiment should not belong to Spaniards alone. It is up to us all to decide its fate.

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[1] European Commission & the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (2019). Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council: EU-China – A Strategic Outlook (JOIN/2019/5 final). 12 March 2019. Available at <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52019JC0005>.

[2] President of the Government of Spain (2025). “Comparecencia ante los medios de comunicación del presidente del Gobierno, Pedro Sánchez, tras su viaje a Vietnam y China”. 11 April 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/4jBVnf9>.

[3] President of the Government of Spain (2026). “Lecture by the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, at Tsinghua University”. La Moncloa. 13 April 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4jy6bed>.

[4] President of the Government of Spain (2026). “Joint press appearance by the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron: Speech by the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez”. 30 September 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4BkrrdK>.

[5] La Moncloa (2026). “Spain and China sign three agreements to strengthen economic cooperation and open new trade opportunities”. 14 April 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4yHltRQ>.

[6] Invest in Spain (2026). “Ebro Motors pone en marcha una nueva línea de producción en Barcelona”. 2 July 2026. Available at <https://www.investinspain.org/es/noticias-main/2026/ebro>.

[7] Stellantis (2025). “Contemporary Star Energy, S.L. inicia la construcción de su giga factoría en Zaragoza”. 26 November 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/48fB6Vu>.

[8] Reuters (2025). “Spanish government cancels contract with Telefonica for using Huawei gear”. 29 August 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/3WqM1sR>.

[9] Sam Clark (2026). “Huawei ban to cost the EU up to €40 billion, says industry”. Politico Europe. 22 July 2026. Available at <https://www.politico.eu/article/telecom-industry-estimates-huawei-ban-cost-europe-40-billion/>.

[10] Tomorrow’s Affairs (2025). “Huawei at the centre of Spanish security—will Madrid pay the price of trust?”. 13 July 2025. Available at <https://tomorrowsaffairs.com/huawei-at-the-centre-of-spanish-securitywill-madrid-pay-the-price-of-trust>.

[11] Oktavia Catsaros (2025). “China Dominates Clean Technology Manufacturing Investment as Tariffs Begin to Reshape Trade Flows: BloombergNEF”. BloombergNEF. 28 April 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/3UDIQ0u>.

[12] International Energy Agency (2026). “Rare Earth Elements: Executive summary”. 8 April 2026. Available at <https://www.iea.org/reports/rare-earth-elements/executive-summary>.

[13] Clean Investment Monitor (2026). “Tracking Global Clean Technology Investment: Key findings”. 18 March 2026. Available at <https://www.cleaninvestmentmonitor.org/reports/global-clean-investment-2025>.

[14] International Energy Agency (2026). “Energy Technology Perspectives 2026: Supply chain risks and industrial competitiveness”. 26 March 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/3UeKndi>.

[15] Xinhua (2025). “Key recommendations document outlines priorities in China's next five-year blueprint”. The State Council of the People’s Republic of China. 25 October 2025. Available at <https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202510/25/content_WS68fc10abc6d00ca5f9a0703e.html>.

[16] President of the Government of Spain (2026). “Lecture by the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, at Tsinghua University”. La Moncloa. 13 April 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4jy6bed>.

[17] President of the Government of Spain (2025). “Comparecencia del presidente del Gobierno para informar sobre el nuevo escenario geopolítico de la Unión Europea y las conclusiones del Consejo Europeo celebrado el pasado 20 de marzo en Bruselas”. La Moncloa. 26 March 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/4BibQvr>.

[18] EuroEFE (2025). “Sánchez abre la puerta a crear un «verdadero» ejército europeo”. 26 March 2025. Available at <https://efe.com/euro-efe/2025-03-26/sanchez-europa-seguridad/>.

[19] President of the Government of Spain (2025). “Declaración institucional del presidente del Gobierno sobre el acuerdo con la OTAN”. La Moncloa. 22 June 2025. Available at <https://bit.ly/4snkDbe>.

[20] Mario Draghi (2025). The Future of European Competitiveness. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Available at <https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en>.

[21] Thomas Moller-Nielsen (2024). “Common debt not ‘essential’ for EU competitiveness, says Draghi”. Euractiv. 30 September 2024. Available at <https://www.rapporteur.com/news/common-debt-not-essential-for-eu-competitiveness-says-draghi/>.

[22] A term coined by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. La piccola politica (“small politics”) focuses on routine political tasks and the maintenance of power. By contrast, la grande politica (“great politics”) is characterised by transformational change. See Quaderni del carcere (“Prison Notebooks”), first published in 1947.

[23] For Gramsci, “common sense” refers to an uncritical and unquestioned body of assumptions. A “new common sense” represents a transformed, counter-hegemonic worldview. Ibid.

[24] Finbarr Bermingham & Xiaofei Xu (2026). “France, Germany call for new weapon allowing ‘immediate cut off’ of China from EU market”. South China Morning Post. 5 October 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/3UJpNBV>.