This workshop is co-organized with the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence (RSC EUI).
Venue: Villa Schifanoia (Via Giovanni Boccaccio 121)
Workshop program: tbc
Industrial policy has stopped to be an anathema for European policy makers, struggling to stop the relative decline of industrial production in the EU in face of strong competition from China and Asia. Trump’s tariffs have only but amplified efforts to achieve technological autonomy, while at the same time de-risking strategies aim to reduce dependency on China. The specter of deindustrialization and its political outfall (support for anti-European, right-wing populists) make even pro-market policymakers to revisit the wisdom of orthodox competition policies, especially in a world, in which other major powers don’t abide to international rules. The never-quite invisible hand of the state is coming back in European markets as well, while it had always been strong in China and among other Asian competitors. The hegemony of neoliberalism appears to give way to new (or old?) forms of state capitalism, in which governments intervene directly into private business. How does the emergent constellation rearrange the shopfloor and how will it reconfigure international trade? Will state capitalism reverse globalization? Will it really “give back control” and empower workers, or will it rather strengthen big business?
Our workshop explores these questions on one of the most globalized industries, which has experienced a seismic shift over the last fifty years (since the oil crisis): shipbuilding. While being a seismograph of global trade, shipbuilding is also a seismograph of state-business relations because of its traditional proximity to governments. Our workshop is a follow up on two international conferences about deindustrialization, reindustrialization and regional/global changes in industrial production in Regensburg in 2022 and Vienna in 2023 and one on industrial policies in global and European comparisons in Munich in 2025. In order to dig deeper in the complexities of national economic policy making on the one hand and shopfloor organization on the other, the workshop will focus on two countries: Italy and China. We will look both into the national contexts and how they intersect with global trade, and into two specific shipyards. We want to test our hypothesis of the intersecting emergence of varieties of state capitalism on two cases that appear counterintuitive: Italian Fincantieri, as one of the few surviving big shipbuilders in Europe – which is still majority state owned. Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Group, one of the leading shipbuilders in the now dominant global force of shipbuilding, the PR China, which has been privatized in 1999. This comparison allows to revisit the effects of state ownership on efficiency and to explore the causes for resilience (Europe) and rise (China).
Since the turn of the millenium, Fincantieri, which was operated in the postwar period as part of the state industry holding IRI, has become the largest shipbuilding company in Europe. That is also due to the fact that Fincantieri did not go bankrupt in contrast to major German and Eastern European companies, which the organizers of this workshop have studied in a previous project (Brunnbauer/Ther et alia, 2025). The resilience of Fincantieri is all the more remarkable because civilian shipbuilding has become ever more competitive since the late 1970s, and is a key element of the third and most recent period of globalization.
The survival of the Italian company could be attributed to its business strategy and its concentration on the profitable and technologically demanding segment of cruise ships. But at this workshop we would like to explore a second specific development of Fincantieri going against a general trend in the period of neoliberal transformation (Ther 2016): the long hand of the state and a continuous majority state ownership. Although the company got listed on the stock exchange in 2014 under the reformist social democratic government of Matteo Renzi, the Italian government still owns the majority of the shares. That „heteredox“ business history was based on the strong influence of the trade unions, which resisted a stock market listing for two decades since the dissolution of the IRI. The past power the unions leads to our third focus of this workshop beyond global competition and business history: the changing role and shape of labor. In the past decade Fincantieri pursued a double strategy of internationalization: Outsourcing production to cheap suppliers in Eastern Europe (mainly Croatia and Romania), and importing labor from abroad, above all from Bangladesh.
Our Chinese case study which we have been pursuing since 2022 (we did not publish anything yet to avoid future research restrictions) provides some interesting lessons as well. The predecessor of the current Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Group was established as a part of the Third Front Industrialization in 1956. The national and global rise of the company occurred in the troubled 1990s, i.e. prior to the official government declaration of shipbuilding as a „strategic industry“ in 2006. It rose due to the ambition of its long time CEO Ren Yuanlin and an orientation to global exports. Unlike several large competitors, the Yangzijiang shipyard was privatized in 1999 by selling shares to its employees, a second round of capitalization by shares sold to the middle and top ranks of the company in 2002, and then a listing at the Singapore stock exchange in 2007 (Ren Yuanlin 2024). After the turn of the millenium and access to the WTO in 2001, China did achieve a leading market share in global shipbuilding. However, that is more due to dynamic private enterprises like the Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Group than to the SOE. Our case study therefore contradicts several conventional wisdoms about the PRC, such as lavish state subsidies, price dumping and other unfair business practices. The expansion of the Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Group and the neighbouring New Times Shipyards seems rather due to the internal competition with SOE which forces private enterprises to grow mainly through exports. A key factor in increasing competitiveness is, much like in Italy, the organization of labor. In the new millenial Chinese capitalism, more and more work is outsourced to subcontracting companies which employ predominantly internal migrant laborers. This industrial reserve army can be hired and dismissed depending on the market situation.
