Draghi to the Ft: “The EU must not compromise. Either she gets her act together or she won’t survive”

Europe must not compromise on fundamental values. And it is not possible to stand still, without reacting, in the face of global and geopolitical challenges. These are the messages that emerge from the conversation between Mario Draghi and Martin Wolf, as part of the event «The Global Boardroom: Strategies for Growth and Disruption» organized by the Financial Times. According to the former prime minister and former president of the European Central Bank, the EU needs to strengthen integration to count more in a changing world.

First the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, the maxi inflation and now the conflict in the Middle East are throwing Europe into turmoil and risk causing the path undertaken in recent decades to lose direction. Draghi starts from afar to explain today’s situation. «The war in Ukraine was preceded by a long series of retreats from our fundamental values: the admission of Russia to the G8 despite the failure to recognize Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, the failed promise of intervention in Syria in case which Assad had used gas as a weapon, Crimea, the withdrawal from Afghanistan”, he points out. The lesson that can be drawn from this, he underlines, «is that we must never, ever compromise on our fundamental values. And these fundamental values ​​are the same ones on which the European Union was built: peace, democracy, freedom, national sovereignty.” Compromising on them means “questioning the very assumptions of the Union”.

The danger is that of inaction, according to the former tenant of the Eurotower. «What we cannot do is sit still, without reacting. We discovered that what we had taken for granted for many years was not at all, and we must fight to defend it.” It is for this reason, he warns, that “I have no doubts about the final success”. Then the reasoning broadens: «In the world we are witnessing the rise of autocracies and illiberal democracies, denials of civil rights and violations of human rights. We must fight, each in our own personal sphere but also collectively, to ensure that the denial of our values ​​does not prevail.”

The context, he concedes, is complicated. “The geopolitical model on which Europe has been based since the end of the Second World War – support from the United States for defense, exports directed mainly to China, cheap energy supplies from Russia – no longer exists,” she explains. Therefore, in order to express a unique and powerful political vision in today’s world, “Europe needs much, much more integration.” Not only that: «We need much higher productivity, also to support an aging society: we can only achieve this through investments with high added value and a high level of technology». At the same time, much more must also be done in terms of competitiveness with other economic areas: «We must act to increase Europe’s weight in the technological sector. To achieve this, we can only start from human capital, skills, education, to reach areas such as digitalisation and artificial intelligence.”

From an economic point of view, in the Eurozone “there is a risk of recession but I would not say it is profound or destabilising”, because “the starting point is very high, with the lowest unemployment ever and a robust job market”. Draghi explained that in fighting inflation «monetary policy may have been a little too slow, but there is a reason: the shock on the supply side was entirely due to the price of gas, an increase which is the result of a deliberate policy of Russia.” In any case, now “inflation is falling”, and the first two quarters of next year will tell whether we will have a recession which in any case “will not be destabilizing”.

There was no lack of reference to what happened in the first phase of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. «We need to rationalize defense spending, becoming a true union in this field too rather than a group of countries competing with each other», he remarks. Furthermore, “we need to act together in the energy field: starting from infrastructures and networks, to arrive at a storage and perhaps joint purchasing policy, while at the same time accelerating on the front of renewables and other forms of energy”. A message that can also be read with a view to the next European elections in 2024. And again in view of the electoral round, Draghi comes with an exhortation that cannot be left to fall on deaf ears: “Either Europe acts together by becoming a Union deeper, capable of expressing a foreign – as well as economic – policy and a common defense policy, or it will not survive except as a single market”. And it would be a failure for those who dreamed of a full European Union.

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