READ OUR LATEST NEWSLETTER – As we reach the midpoint of 2026, we are pleased to reconnect with our readers, partners and friends by sharing an overview of the European Institute for Asian Studies’ activities over the past six months. While this edition marks our first newsletter since the end of 2025, it reflects a period of sustained engagement, new partnerships and continued research across Europe and Asia.
From Polish tanks to Czech nuclear reactors and battery factories across Central Europe, South Korean companies are becoming increasingly visible across the European Union. These developments are more than isolated economic projects. They reflect a broader shift in EU–South Korea relations, which are gradually expanding from trade into security, energy and technology cooperation. As global politics become more uncertain, the partnership between Brussels and Seoul may be entering a new and more strategic phase.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces the most advanced chips in the world, is positioning itself in a strategic position in the global economy. On one hand, the geopolitical tensions and domestic resource constraints are pushing TSMC to diversify manufacturing overseas. On the other, the European Union seeks to attract investment through the European Chips Act to reduce dependence on external suppliers. It has resulted in the EU–TSMC joint venture “European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC)”, a pilot initiative to assess whether TSMC’s efficient production model can be adopted to Europe. Although the European Chips Act provides subsidies, it fails to address the underlying structural barrier. The sustained EU–TSMC semiconductor ecosystem cannot be built with financial support alone, but requires comprehensive reforms to address regulatory fragmentation across the EU’s single market and knowledge transfer through TSMC’s production and management model. Therefore, to strengthen EU–TSMC cooperation, prioritising regulatory simplification, reducing administrative fragmentation and establishing an exchange and training scheme that facilitates efficiency and training programmes that support operational learning from TSMC’s business model.
As the EU leverages the 2026 Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) to diversify CRM supply chains, India becomes a strategic supplier of minerals such as bauxite, lithium, and rare earths. Yet CRM extraction and mining in India has long intersected with indigenous (Adivasi) rights conflicts, where deposits on or near indigenous lands trigger disputes over land acquisition, forest rights, and community consent. India’s formal framework, including the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA, and the Forest Rights Act (FRA), offers robust protections, but implementation gaps and corporate pressures endure. FTA‑driven CRM expansion risks deepening Adivasi land rights conflicts unless EU‑level due diligence and sustainability commitments are matched with effective, consent-based safeguards at the local level. The credibility of CRM‑linked, value‑based supply chains depends on the EU aligning its green‑industrial ambitions with effective protection of Adivasi land rights, as well as on India’s capacity to put Free, Prior and Informed Consent-like (FPIC) safeguards into concrete practice.
Submarine-cable security has arrived on the European agenda as a sabotage problem, and the European Union has answered it well: a comprehensive Cable Security Toolbox built on operational resilience rather than perfect protection. Read against the empirical record, however, the threat lies elsewhere. Cable damage is overwhelmingly accidental and, in Europe, declining; what climate change alters is not why cables fail but how badly a failure ends. That acute risk concentrates in the Pacific Island Countries, where the cable is second-order infrastructure with first-order consequences: often a nation’s only link, with repair capacity an ocean away and failures that escape the legal and disaster-risk architectures meant to record them. The Toolbox already points the right way. What it invites is not a new instrument but a change of orientation: carrying proven repair, detection and reporting know-how outward, in coordination with partners and on Pacific terms.
Amid a global healthcare crisis marked by a depleting workforce coupled with ageing population concerns, the fast-paced development of artificial intelligence is often presented as a transformative solution to these issues. Yet, the adoption of the AI Act by the European Union in May 2024 has significant implications for the innovation of AI medical tools. If the European Union wants to play a role in the development of the latest health technologies while maintaining its ethical standards, it should seek collaboration with like-minded partners in Asia, such as Singapore, a country that has established itself as a health innovation pioneer while upholding rigorous regulatory standards.
Climate governance may be one of the few areas where the EU and China still possess overlapping interests. CBAM could either worsen tensions by forming the basis for another trade dispute, or it could create a narrow but meaningful space for technical cooperation around verification, data quality and standards.
Tightening immigration policies in traditional hubs such as the U.S. creates new opportunities for Europe and China to cooperate in attracting and retaining young European talent in China. This opportunity is not merely theoretical; since Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up reforms in the late 1970s, the outbound flow of Chinese talent to Europe has thrived, resulting in more than 68,000 Chinese students and professionals contributing to Europe’s academic and professional landscape.
Giacomo Arosio and Sara Gianesello, Policy Analyst at ECDPM argue that EU-NATO engagement in the Indo-Pacific is fragmented rather than strategic, with both institutions moving in parallel with the same partners. The upcoming Ankara summit must deliver better coordination to secure a meaningful and lasting role in the region’s security architecture.