This Saturday begins Spain’s rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. The one that starts is one of the calls “closing presidencies”. The open projects must be finalized because the legislature of the European Parliament (of five years) comes to an end next year and elections will be held in June. We review the next challenges of the 27 and what this period has given of itself with Carmen ColominaPrincipal Investigator at CIDOB (Barcelona Center for International Affairs) and Associate Professor at the College of Europe in Belgium.
Question: Is there, as they say, a “new European order& rdquor; to which the European Union will have to adapt in the coming years?
Answer: Of course. There is a new European order, not only internal but external. There has already been a process of adaptation to all the changes brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is already a new order, for example, in matters of security and Defense; an evolution of the concept of strategic autonomy; an adaptation to the new global order and disruptions in global supply chains. How to make a European Union more resilient to all these external changes that affect you internally? And then there is the new European order that will come out of the elections on June 6-9 of next year. This legislature was the first in history in which the two great families that had shaped European politics, the Social Democrats and the European People’s Party, together did not add up to half plus one of Parliament. It has been a legislature of variable geometries and seeking alliances. It depends on what happens in June of next year, that can go further.
Q: Is there a strong push from the extreme right in the European Parliament?
A: There are no general surveys that can give a clue, but if you look at the electoral results in the different Member States, you can clearly see a rise of the radical right. They were already strong parties, but now they are in coalition governments, as we have seen in the Scandinavian countries recently. Now there are elections in Spain. This autumn there will be in Poland, where Jarosław Kaczyński’s party, Law and Justice, rules, a strong party in number of deputies in the European Parliament. We have to see how the situation in Italy evolves, with the revulsion that the victory of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has brought to the Conservatives and Reformists, a European group that has also been gaining muscle in this legislature.
Q: What issue would you say has marked the EU over the years?
A: The Russian invasion of Ukraine, because all the items on the agenda prior to February 24, 2022 have acquired a new dimension after the start of the war. I refer first to the concept of “geopolitical Europe”, which was already the electoral promise of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Commission. It is about ensuring that the European Union has a place in the world, about how to make Europe global. The concept itself acquired a new relevance after the return of the war to European soil.
Q: And, beyond geopolitics?
A: I would highlight the double objective of preparing Europe for the green and digital transitions. Those (geopolitical Europe, the green and digital transition) were the three main priorities that Ursula Von der Leyen presented in 2019. Three months later, we entered a global pandemic, and supplies were disrupted and the dependence on critical matters. The confinement led to digitization processes. The coordination of vaccination and the joint purchase of vaccines was quite a leap forward. Later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine further altered the concept of security. A certain consensus was reached on a Europe of Defense that did not exist before. Now, the unknown is how the disruption of Russia’s hydrocarbon dependencies will impact the green transition process.
Q: Do you really believe that there is unity at the Defense level?
A: There has been a leap forward, perhaps with a paradox. On the one hand, progress has been made in the integration of the Europe of Defense with a consensus that did not exist before. It is true that it is a consensus that is the result of urgency and that we have to see what it will be like later. But, at the same time, military and strategic dependence on the United States has increased, because war aid to Ukraine is led above all by them.
Q: Where do you think the EU is going in the coming months?
A: One of the great issues that mark the near future of the European Union is clearly its relationship with China. Not only because of what it means commercially, but because Brussels is under pressure from the United States, which wants to take the 27 towards a much tougher and more forceful line against the Asian country. The EU seeks its own equilibrium point in this bipolar confrontation that Washington and Beijing determine. On the other hand, we are seeing a legislative acceleration in terms of digital and technological governance. In this legislature, a Digital Services Law has been approved. It is the only site in the world with a governance framework for large technology platforms, and that includes the ability to penalize them with million-dollar fines. Now an artificial intelligence law is being prepared, with efforts to make it an ethical approach. There is another paradox there: the EU leads in legislation, but not so much in innovation.
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Q: Do you think the way the Union is governed will be changed? Spain and other countries are trying to do away with the requirement of unanimity in certain aspects.
A: One of the issues that will be discussed in the Spanish presidency of the Council is to change the issues on which votes are voted by qualified majority, that is, on those that do not require unanimity. For example, sanctions or foreign policy. We will see.