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Vol. 44 (2024)
General Articles

Escaping into Economic Security. How Can the European Union Use Foreign Direct Investment Screening in Times of Crises? Lessons from the United States

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  • Ewa Bujak
Ewa Bujak
Doctoral School of Kozminski University

Published 2025-11-14

Keywords

  • economic security,
  • COVID-19 pandemic,
  • FDI screening,
  • European Economic Security Strategy,
  • national security review

How to Cite

Escaping into Economic Security. How Can the European Union Use Foreign Direct Investment Screening in Times of Crises? Lessons from the United States. (2025). Polish Yearbook of International Law, 44, 321-346. https://doi.org/10.24425/PYIL.2025.156724

Abstract

The rapid transformation of the international economic order from a lib
eral arrangement of economic interdependencies to a geoeconomic competition between 
states changed attitudes regarding foreign investment. This arguably protectionist 
turn toward national security is an attempt to safeguard against multidimensional 
consequences of crises. To protect the EU’s strategic autonomy, Regulation 2019/452 
came into force in 2019, laying the foundations for the European Foreign Investment 
Screening framework. Soon afterwards, FDI screening served as an instrument in the 
EU’s policy for addressing and mitigating risks rapidly arising from an international 
crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. This experience influenced another recent measure – 
the European Economic Security Strategy (EESS) – together with the proposal for the 
New FDI Screening Regulation.
 This article argues that the experience of the COVID-19 crisis inspired dualistic 
changes in FDI screening, transforming it into a protector of European economic secu
rity. The EESS and the proposal for the New FDI Screening Regulation are juxtaposed 
against the United States’s experience in controlling FDI for the aim of assessing FDI 
screening as a tool for safeguarding European economic security in light of the EU’s 
inexperience in the matter

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