AVRUPA BİRLİĞİ'NİN ABD VE ÇİN ARASINDAKİ KÜRESEL ÇİP TEDARİK ZİNCİRİ ÜZERİNDEKİ REKABETE VERDİĞİ TEPKİLER

This thesis examines the European Union’s (EU) strategies, the European Chips Act (ECA) and the Critical Raw Materials Act’s (CRMA) effectiveness in responding to the technological leadership rivalry between the United States (US) and China and their weaponization of monopolies in the global chip supply chain. While this thesis focuses on the period between 2019 and 2025 to highlight changing power dynamics and the EU’s position, it also considers historical developments of chip strategies that enabled the current position of the EU, the US, and China. The research question of this thesis is: While rivalry between the US and China continues, how effective are the EU's ECA and CRMA strategies in reducing the EU's critical dependence on the US’s core chip Intellectual Property (IP) and China’s Critical raw material (CRM)? The main argument is that, contrary to liberal institutionalist assumptions on resilient global cooperation networks linking the US, China, and the EU in chip and critical raw material (CRM) production, this thesis explains the EU's crisis in responding to global chip supply chain challenges within a political realist framework, arguing that both the US and China use the EU's dependence to maximize their interests. The introduction presents the thesis framework and literature review. The second chapter examines the EU’s chip industry and current strategies. The third and fourth chapters analyze EU–China and EU–US relations in the chip industry. The fifth examines the effectiveness of the ECA and CRMA strategies, and the last chapter presents the conclusion.