The Vice President of the European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell (in the center), this Monday at the Menéndez Pelayo International University in Santander.ROMÁN G. AGUILERA / EFE
The vice-president of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, said this Monday that “it is on the table to provide the European Union with competencies in health matters” to face possible new pandemics in the future, given that “now we have had one ( pandemic) and there may be more ”.
The Catalan stressed that, although the EU "was not conceived for this";
the covid-19 pandemic has been a before and after in the consideration of global problems.
"Europeans have become aware that there are more and more problems for which there is no national solution," he pointed out.
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The also high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Common Security Policy has participated this Monday in the Quo Vadis Europa? IX. Towards a geopolitical European Union, within the framework of the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP), in Santander. Borrell has given as an example of European collaboration the acquisition of vaccines against the coronavirus. "We have gone together to buy vaccines and we have had supply problems and delivery times, imagine what would have happened if the 27 had gone to the market on their own to try to buy theirs," he said.
According to the Vice-President of the Commission, this cooperation has allowed European countries not to have “entered into competition with each other” generating a price war, “each trying to save their skin”. "The result would have been infinitely worse," he added. "Faced with the threats that weigh on Europe, there are many European countries that if they were alone they would have nowhere to hold on," he continued.
Borrell has recognized that the coronavirus "has changed all the parameters of the international scene" and has predicted that the world to which he goes after the pandemic will be "much more unequal, more Asian and more digital", three characteristics, as he has said. , "Not necessarily good" all of them. In his opinion, in that world there will be many more inequalities between countries and also within the countries themselves; There will be an acceleration in the shift of economic power to Southeast Asia and it will be more digital after the world has discovered the usefulness of digital instruments that have entered everyday life with COVID.
In addition, he has warned that "it will be a more dangerous world too" in which tensions and conflicts will have been "exacerbated" and will be dominated by the "inevitable and logical" rivalry between China and the United States. He also considers that it will be a "very multipolar, but less multilateral" world, something that, in his opinion, is not in Europe's interest. "We would like the world to be more multilateral because if it is not, it will end up being a world where the law of the fittest will be imposed," he warned.
