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Is the United States Still a Partner to Europe?

Is the United States Still a Partner to Europe?

Ethics Is Not a Cost Centre. It's the Only Competitive Advantage Europe Has Left.

When the transatlantic alliance turns transactional, European business leaders face a choice: adapt with purpose — or be left behind.

The Partnership Has Changed. The Question Is What Comes Next.

Something fundamental shifted in the transatlantic relationship over the past eighteen months — and it is not the kind of shift that reverses with a change of administration. What was once a partnership defined by shared democratic values and mutual institutional trust has become, in the words of the Austrian Society for European Politics, a move “from value-based alignment to interest-driven and conditional cooperation.”

The consequences are concrete. European businesses have faced rising tariff exposure, disrupted supply chains, and a US posture that increasingly treats European digital regulation not as a sovereign prerogative but as an economic obstacle to American commercial interests. A 2025 survey of European businesses found that the majority expected US trade tensions to have a significantly greater impact on operations in 2026 than in the prior year.

The question for European leaders is not whether to disengage from the United States — the interdependence runs too deep for that. The question is more demanding: on what terms should European companies operate in a world where the rules of transatlantic engagement are no longer predictable?

New research produced within EIM’s own academic community offers a rigorous and empirically grounded answer.

The €4.1 Billion Signal

On 2 July 2026, the European Court of Justice dismissed Google’s appeal against the European Commission’s record-breaking antitrust fine — €4.1 billion for anti-competitive practices in its Android ecosystem. The ruling was not merely a legal outcome. It was a declaration.

It confirmed that European regulatory institutions have both the capacity and the determination to enforce European values in the digital economy, regardless of the political and commercial pressure applied from Washington. The US administration’s characterisation of European digital regulation as “overseas extortion” made the stakes explicit. So did the EU’s response: the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and a series of landmark antitrust actions that together constitute the most ambitious regulatory agenda in European institutional history.

For European business leaders, the Google ruling is instructive in a specific way. It demonstrates that companies that have built their strategies on the assumption that European regulation will ultimately yield to US commercial pressure should urgently reconsider that assumption.

What Research Actually Shows About Ethics and Performance

In 2026, Dr. Burkard F. M. Schemmel completed his doctoral dissertation at the European Institute of Management. The research examined the financial performance of 309 European firms through the lens of ethical business conduct — and the findings are remarkable in their clarity.

Schemmel found a statistically significant positive correlation between ethical business behaviour and financial performance across every measured dimension, with p-values below 0.0001. The correlation between ethical orientation and positive future financial outlook was particularly striking: an r² of 0.838, meaning that ethical conduct explains 83.8% of the variance in expected financial performance. This is not a marginal or theoretical finding. It is a compelling empirical case for treating ethics as core strategy.

The framework Schemmel developed — Alterocentric Business Ethics — takes its name from the philosophical principle of placing “the other” at the centre of moral consideration. In practice, it means building organisations around the genuine interests of all stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and society — not simply shareholders.

The research is published through EIM’s Research Institute for Societal Performance Development, which advances interdisciplinary work at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and business strategy. Its central thesis challenges one of business’s most persistent assumptions: that profit and purpose are in tension. The evidence suggests the opposite.

Six Principles — Applied to the Geopolitical Reality

Schemmel’s framework organises ethical business conduct around six interconnected principles. In the context of the current transatlantic recalibration, each has direct strategic relevance.

1. Alterocentric Business Strategy

European companies must incorporate the geopolitical shift into board-level strategy — not as a risk management exercise but as a fundamental reorientation of priorities. This means setting explicit targets for digital sovereignty, diversifying technology partnerships away from single-source dependencies, and treating the European regulatory framework as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance burden.

2. Holistic Stakeholder Engagement

The dependency of European firms on US digital platforms creates vulnerabilities that affect not just shareholders but employees, customers, and supply chain partners. European consumers and business customers are increasingly alert to data sovereignty concerns. Companies that engage proactively — consulting stakeholders on data preferences, building relationships with European technology providers — will be better positioned than those that react after exposure.

3. Predictable Decision-Making and Accountability

The complexity of operating under the DSA, DMA, GDPR, and AI Act simultaneously creates genuine risk of inconsistent decisions. Technology-enabled ethical frameworks — systematic processes for assessing the ethical and regulatory implications of procurement and deployment decisions — are a practical operational necessity, not a luxury.

4. Anchoring in Leadership

Schemmel’s research found that employees actively monitor leadership signals and mirror them. Authentic ethical behaviour at the top produces measurable improvements in engagement and performance. Senior executives who treat DSA compliance as a cost to be minimised — or who signal, even implicitly, that European regulation is an obstacle — will undermine the culture needed to sustain ethical performance. Those who model the behaviour they expect create the feedback loops the research identifies as drivers of long-term outperformance.

5. Responsible Business Behaviour

The European Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package of June 2026 represents a significant investment in the European digital ecosystem. Companies that align their procurement and investment strategies with this agenda — supporting European cloud providers, investing in European AI capabilities, participating in the Eurostack initiative — are not merely acting as good corporate citizens. They are positioning themselves to capture the regulatory and market advantages that will accrue to early movers.

6. Credible Transparency

In an environment of geopolitical uncertainty, transparency is a strategic asset. Customers, employees, investors, and regulators all have a legitimate interest in understanding how a company manages its exposure to transatlantic risk. Companies that disclose — in accessible and meaningful terms — where data is stored, which platforms are used and why, and how regulatory risk is being managed will build the institutional trust that Schemmel’s research identifies as a key driver of long-term financial performance.

“Nostalgia Is Not a Strategy”

At the 2026 World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a phrase that has since become something of a strategic touchstone for European policymakers: “We know the old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

The transatlantic relationship is not ending. The EU-US trade deal of July 2025, which established a 15% tariff ceiling on most EU exports, provides a degree of stability that should not be dismissed. But the deeper structural shift — away from value-based alignment toward conditional, interest-driven cooperation — reflects trends that will persist regardless of who occupies the White House. Economic nationalism, the fragmentation of the global digital economy, and the divergence of regulatory philosophies are not temporary phenomena.

European companies that treat the current turbulence as a temporary disruption to be managed with minimum effort will find themselves increasingly exposed as the structural shifts continue to unfold. Those that treat it as an opportunity to deepen their ethical foundations — diversifying stakeholder relationships, investing in European digital infrastructure, and building cultures of credible transparency — will emerge from this period stronger.

The Schemmel research makes the business case without ambiguity: ethical orientation is not merely a moral imperative. It is, empirically, a measurable driver of financial performance.

Building Leaders for This Moment

The strategic landscape Schemmel describes — and the leadership competencies required to navigate it — is precisely the terrain that EIM’s postgraduate programmes are designed to address.

The Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) at EIM is structured for senior professionals who want to convert complex, real-world strategic challenges into original, publishable research. Candidates working on questions of business ethics, stakeholder strategy, digital sovereignty, or European competitiveness will find a programme — and a research community — built for exactly this kind of applied inquiry. The work of Dr. Schemmel himself exemplifies what DBA-level research can produce: findings with genuine policy and strategic implications, developed within a fully online, Oxbridge-supervised academic framework.

The MBA in Professional Services and SME Management equips mid-career professionals with the strategic, digital, and leadership tools to build resilient organisations in precisely the kind of uncertain environment the Schemmel research describes. Modules in business strategy, ethical leadership, and stakeholder management translate directly into the competencies the Alterocentric framework demands.

For professionals seeking a faster entry point into postgraduate business thinking, the PGCert in Strategy and Leadership offers an accredited, stackable credential that can be completed alongside a full-time career — and applied immediately to the strategic decisions that the current environment demands.

All programmes at EIM are delivered 100% online, using the Oxbridge-style tutorial model that places Andragogy and experiential learning at the centre of every interaction. Research and practice are not treated as separate domains. They are integrated by design.

The Question European Leaders Need to Ask

The central question the Schemmel research poses to European business leaders is not whether to maintain commercial relationships with the United States. It is: on what terms, and at what cost to European values and long-term competitive position, should those relationships be maintained?

An Alterocentric standard does not endorse reflexive anti-Americanism. Nor does it accept passive acquiescence — allowing European companies to benefit from European regulation while outsourcing the costs of digital sovereignty to others. It asks a more demanding question: Whose interests are served by our current strategy, and whose are harmed?

In a world where the United States can no longer be taken for granted as a reliable institutional partner, European companies that have invested in digital sovereignty, stakeholder relationships, and ethical foundations will be better positioned to navigate whatever comes next.

The business case for ethics has never been stronger. The moment to build for it is now.

Research Source

This article is informed by the doctoral research of Dr. Burkard F. M. Schemmel, conducted at the European Institute of Management and published through EIM’s Research Institute for Societal Performance Development. The full study is accessible at eim.education/researchinstitute-spd.

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