High-road or low-road? Europe’s EV battery rollout and the tradeoffs of green industrial policy in a geoeconomic world

The global expansion of clean-tech investment is widely framed as a triple win for decarbonization, industrial renewal, and geopolitical resilience. Yet on the ground, outcomes diverge sharply. While some projects generate clean production and domestic capacity-building, others produce environmentally harmful, low value-added enclaves that deepen dependency and provoke backlash. This article examines how such divergent outcomes emerge in the European Union’s (EU) electric vehicle (EV) battery rollout. It develops a typology of minimalist and maximalist paths to compare how countries navigate three core tradeoffs in green industrial policy: fast clean-tech rollout versus sustainable production; foreign-led expansion versus domestic capabilities; and physical localization versus geopolitical resilience. The analysis draws on a novel project-level dataset of planned and operational gigafactories and a comparative analysis of five EU member states: Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, and Sweden. Findings show that shallow compliance dominates across much of the bloc – driven by fragmented EU governance structures that fail to enforce coherence. Read more broadly, the EU case illustrates latecomers’ challenges in hosting clean-tech investment without entrenching dependency under Chinese technological dominance and intense geoeconomic competition. Europe’s internal divisions undermine its ability to respond strategically and secure a favorable position in an emerging global ‘green division of labor’.