The European Union needs to incorporate two or three states if it wants to regain the trust it has lost in recent years due to geopolitical tensions and the departure of the United Kingdom. At the threshold of the elections to the European Parliament, this is the recipe of Federica Mogherini, rector of the College of Europe and former high representative for foreign affairs and security policy of the EU, who participated this afternoon in the 39th edition of the Meeting of the Cercle d’Economia, held in Barcelona
“Adding Montenegro, Albania or Moldova would be very positive to recover self-esteem about the European integration project. We have lost the meaning of why we are together. And welcoming new states would not only be positive for recovering self-esteem, it would also be positive for security and geopolitical borders,” he said before the public gathered at the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya.
According to the Italian academic, excuses about the need to strengthen the internal institutions of the EU before adding new members are “not valid”: “if the EU acts in a coordinated manner, it has the capacity to act quickly, so these excuses They mean lack of political will.” In the same sense, Mogherini has rejected those who use as an excuse the violation of human and democratic rights of the countries that want to integrate. “It is not a challenge or a problem for Europe, but a global problem that we must monitor and avoid trivializing,” he said.
Regarding the integration of Ukraine, which many states propose in solidarity with the war it is suffering against Ukraine, Mogherini has recognized that it would be a challenge at the budgetary level, since the states would have to increase their financing to help the country rebuild itself at all levels. levels.
The intervention, which was moderated by Pol Morillas, the director of the Cidob think tank, also addressed the conflict in Israel. Mogherini, as he has maintained in the past, believes that the solution lies in the recognition of Palestine as a State and has regretted that the Hamas terrorist group has appropriated and led the conflict.
Given the growth of global conflicts, Mogherini has valued the European project as an example of cooperation between countries and a formula for achieving peace. “We can try to rebuild the policy of multilateral pacts and alliances. It is a complex system but from the EU we have seen that it is better to cooperate than compete,” she said.
Regarding the relationship between the United States and China, Mogherini has said that it is necessary to recover an effective multilateral system, in which the European Union negotiates with each power in question, without thinking of going as a bloc with the United States. Regarding Russia, he has predicted the loss of weight in the future of geopolitics.
