EU at crossroads regarding expansion says Portuguese ambassador to EU

The bloc is faced with the division of pushing ahead with enlargement while seeking to strengthen its strategic autonomy in a new geopolitical world, said Pedro Lourtie, Portuguese ambassador to the EU, during a Thursday debate on ‘the EU in a changing world’.

“It’s clear to the Union that the world is changing. Today, there are several global powers whose aim is to change the balance that was achieved in the post-World War II and post-Cold War period, and the European Union must be able to act in this new geopolitical world in a relatively autonomous way,” said Lourtie.

The EU “realises that excessive dependence is a risk for it,” said Portugal’s permanent representative to the EU bloc.

Lourtie added that enlargement “is one of the instruments for its geopolitical strengthening” but emphasised that “there are two sides to it”.

On the one hand, the EU “cannot frustrate the expectations of the countries that want to join” and “by enlarging, it gains a new and more important political weight, but the Union knows that to act in a world where geopolitics overlaps with economic globalisation, it has to develop in terms of its integration and its deepening,” said Pedro Lourtie.

At the same time, the EU has “another challenge: how to gain its strategic autonomy,” he said.

“This is not easy,” he acknowledged, giving an example: “We are 27 different countries, particularly in the area of foreign policy. We have great economic weight, and we work together in many areas. We have some difficulty in using some instruments that would be obvious, such as trade policy.”

“This dichotomy is one of the great challenges facing the European Union at the moment,” he said.

In terms of foreign and security policy, he continued, the bloc doesn’t have a European army, but it has been developing a defence policy and “wants to develop its capabilities in the defence industry, within the framework of the Atlantic Alliance”, because “it realises that the political autonomy that these instruments will provide is indispensable”.

The EU “realises that it has to be able to take decisions strategically and autonomously at an economic, technological, political and security level,” said the former Socialist Secretary of State for European Affairs.

“It must not have excessive dependencies in certain critical areas, a lesson that the European Union has learnt from the latest crises, such as Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine,” he said, also pointing to “technological and raw material dependencies” areas in which the EU “must know how to build its autonomy”.

“This is at stake in the dialogue with China, but the member states are not questioning their ability to relate to China,” said Lourtie.

On the other hand, the diplomat downplayed differences in positions between the member states.

“It is characteristic of democracies that opinions are expressed freely. On the other hand, because it is not a country, the Union’s decision-making processes are more transparent,” he said, emphasising: “We often have moments of visible disunity, only to end up with a united decision.”

(Joana Haderer – edited by Pedro Sousa Carvalho | Lusa.pt)