After the parenthesis caused by his last positive for covid, from which he has already recovered, and before flying to New York next Sunday to participate in the UN general assembly, Pedro Sánchez presents this Friday, at the CEOE headquarters in Madrid, his proposal to strengthen the strategic autonomy, economic security and global leadership of the European Union. It is the great bet of the acting President of the Executive, during the Spanish presidency of the community club, that the heads of State and Government of the 27 member states will debate at the informal European Council to be held in Granada on October 6 .
The document that Pedro Sánchez presents this Friday, and to which La Vanguardia has had access, is the result of a collaboration project that its authors consider pioneering, which has been developed for almost a year, and in which more than 250 people have participated. experts from 80 ministries of the 27 member states, the European Commission and the Council of the EU, under the coordination of the National Foresight and Strategy Office of the Spanish Executive. In addition, they have had the advice of a hundred academics and representatives of the private sector.
Resilient EU2030, as Sánchez's proposal is called, continues the work carried out by the EU during the last two years around open strategic autonomy and projects it into the future to answer, according to its authors, a key question: What should How can the EU adapt to the new world order and guarantee its economic security and global leadership between now and 2030?
In response, Resilient EU2030 proposes “deploying a holistic and anticipatory strategy, with nine axes of action that bring several new features to the debate.”
Firstly, a “rigorous diagnosis” of the changes that are occurring in the world. Using extensive empirical evidence, the document argues that “a process of deglobalization or economic fragmentation is not taking place – as some point out – since trade exchanges between regions continue to grow, even between East and West, and the supposed trade blocs non-aligned countries.
Even so, the strategy recognizes the need to strengthen the European industrial fabric, and identifies a series of strategic goods, services and raw materials in which the EU should increase its productive capacity between now and 2030. Special emphasis is thus placed on certain developments. of Artificial Intelligence, wind turbines, electrolyzers, transmission networks, organic fertilizers, solid batteries and active pharmaceutical ingredients, among others.
Furthermore, the proposal claims "the importance of betting on innovative solutions that science is developing and that European governments and companies should scale to reduce their strategic dependencies on foreign countries." Solutions, the document points out, such as sodium and lignin batteries, quantum computers, the use of bacteria for the recovery of rare earths, or livestock feed made with protein from algae, insects and microbes.
The strategy also reflects on the type of industrial policy that will be required to develop these capabilities, and the need for it to be implemented in a European manner so that, “without subtracting competitiveness or creating internal inequalities, it helps to correct the distortions that other foreign powers cause in the global economy and encourage private investment.”
The Spanish proposal also shows how the ecological transition can become “a catalyst for European resilience”, and advocates “transforming the European industrial fabric into a symbiotic and circular system in which waste generation is reduced to a minimum, and waste from some sectors become the resources of others.”
The project also defends the need to “flee from protectionist temptations and put an end to the binary logic that associates openness with vulnerability and autarky with resilience.” “The European economy, like any other developed economy, - the document points out - is inextricably linked to the rest of the world. On certain occasions, this interdependence is a source of risks. But above all, it is a source of solutions and opportunities to guarantee the prosperity of our citizens.”
For this reason, the Spanish strategy recommends that, “far from closing in on itself, Europe takes advantage of the current geopolitical context to increase and reconfigure its participation in the global economy, launching a new commercial expansion aimed at consolidating, diversifying and expanding its links with the abroad, and promoting a renewal of the multilateral architecture.”
