Europe — and the broader Eurasian region — are entering an uncharted era of multi-vector reality. After decades of deindustrialisation, thinly veiled by service-sector expansion and financial engineering, the continent now faces an existential crossroads: to reindustrialise or risk becoming, as some critics grimly put it, “the world’s most expensive open-air museum.” The warning signs are unmistakable. Since 2008, the U.S. economy has expanded by 87%, while the European Union’s growth has barely reached 13%. Germany’s industrial powerhouses are shutting down production lines and moving operations to China. Skyrocketing energy costs have made European manufacturing increasingly uncompetitive, while a deepening demographic crisis hastens the decline.
Yet amid this sobering reality, a counter-narrative is emerging-one grounded not in nostalgia but in strategic necessity. Europe has unveiled a raw materials security doctrine that marks a historic pivot from passive regulation to active industrial governance. The United States has adopted what can only be described as the “Chinese playbook” for strategic industries, deploying billions in subsidies through the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act. And most significantly, the geopolitical centre of gravity for critical raw materials is decisively shifting to the Eurasian heartland – particularly Central Asia.
This is where the MINEX Forums enter the equation, not as peripheral trade events, but as essential platforms connecting resource-rich nations with resource-starved industrial powers at perhaps the most consequential moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
