France’s president Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, made clear that the restructuring of Airbus must maintain “absolute equilibrium” in employment and technology. The pain of 10,000 planned job cuts has been shared this week between France, Germany, the UK and Spain.

Indeed, traditionally the workforce at the aircraft manufacturer is geographically distributed in proportion to national ownership stakes. It is hard to make sense of this from the point of view of productive efficiency. It is an instance of economic nationalism, whereby governments distort private transactions among economic actors by discriminating against foreigners in the name of the national interest.