Mario Draghi once again sounds the alarm for the European Union. In a dialogue with Martin Wolf, as part of the event ‘The Global Boardroom: Strategies for Growth and Disruption’ organized by the Financial Times, the former Prime Minister sent a warning to Brussels, just the latest in a long series of worrying warnings: “Or Europe acts together, becoming a deeper Union, capable of expressing a foreign policy, as well as an economic policy and a common defense policy, or it will not survive except as a single market. We need much higher productivity, also to support an aging society. We can only achieve this through investments with high added value and a high level of technology and we must act to increase Europe’s weight in the technology sector. To achieve this, we can only start from human capital, skills, education, to areas such as digitalization and artificial intelligence”.
Draghi continues his speech, speaking almost like a future European leader: “The geopolitical model on which Europe has been based since the end of the Second World War, the United States’ support for defense, exports directed mainly to China, the supply from energy to cheap countries from Russia, no longer exists. To express a unique and powerful political vision in today’s world, Europe needs much, much more integration.”
“The war in Ukraine – stressed the former prime minister – was preceded by a long series of retreats from our fundamental values. Russia’s admission to the G8 despite the failure to recognize Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, the failed promise of intervention in Syria in the event of Assad using gas as a weapon, in Crimea, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The lesson from this is that we should never, ever compromise our core values. And these fundamental values are the same ones on which the European Union was built, peace, democracy, freedom, national sovereignty. Committing to them means questioning the Union’s own assumptions.”
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
