14 March 2018, Germany, Frankfurt am Main: An Airbus A380 (L) and a retro design Boeing 747-8 cross each others path at the ramp of Frankfurt Airport.

European governments continued to call for a negotiated settlement to trade disputes between the United States and the European Union (EU) on Thursday.

The latest plea comes a little more than a week before American tariffs of between 10 and 25% are scheduled to take effect on billions of dollars worth of European exports, ranging from civilian aircraft to agricultural products like cheese and wine.

An array of finance ministers gathered in Luxembourg for monthly meetings told CNBC that the escalating global trade disputes represented a significant threat to European economies, but that the imposition of tariffs by Washington would nevertheless force Europe to respond in kind.

Mario Centeno, the Portuguese finance minister who steers the regular gathering of his euro zone counterparts, said the uncertainty over trade and the threat of fresh tariffs were risks to the economic order that were "political in nature."

"They are not based on fundamentals of our economy," he told CNBC in an interview. "They don't respond to any sort of imbalances that we really have in the global economy."

The Trump administration's impending tariffs on $7.5bn worth of European goods are scheduled to kick in on October 18th, in retaliation for decades of European nations' subsidies to aircraft manufacturer Airbus, and subsequent non-compliance with previous World Trade Organisation rulings.

The director general of the Geneva-based multilateral trade arbiter, Roberto Azevedo, acknowledges that some of Washington's other recent trade moves, executed outside the WTO's framework, have been "unorthodox."

But even though the new EU-targeting sanctions will be entirely permissible under WTO rules, he told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche in an interview Thursday that he hoped the US and EU would "sit down, talk and find a negotiated solution, because the last thing we need at this point in time is an escalation of tariff barriers and trade restrictions."

He posited that sanctions and trade conflicts have been "provoking the level of uncertainty that is slowing down the economy, the global economy across the board."