Addressing EU delegates at the EU Ambassadors Annual Conference, the bloc’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said that EU can no longer base its wealth on a dependency in Russia and China and outsource its security to the USA. He stressed that the bloc is amid a “perfect storm” and urged EU member states to “be bold.”
“The world we are facing […] is a world of radical uncertainty. […] We have to accept it and to adapt [to] it, prioritising flexibility and resilience.[…]
Uncertainty is the rule. Events that one could imagine that they will never happen, they are happening one after the other.
At this pace, the black swan will be the majority. It will not be white swans – all of them will be black – because one after the other, things have happened that had a very low probability of happening, nevertheless they happened, and they had a strong impact and certainly they happened.[…]
Europeans are facing a situation in which we suffer the consequences of a process that has been lasting for years in which we have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security.
Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia. Russian gas – cheap and supposedly affordable, secure, and stable. It has been proved not [to be] the case. And the access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. […]
Our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market. Clearly, today, we have to find new ways for energy from inside the European Union, as much as we can, because we should not change one dependency for another. The best energy is the one that you produce at home. That will produce a strong restructuring of our economy – that is for sure.
People are not aware of that but the fact that Russia and China are no longer the ones that [they] were for our economic development will require a strong restructuring of our economy. […]
