The prime minister said on Monday that the European Union, under the current institutional and budgetary circumstances, is unable to meet enlargement expectations and warned that the rebound effect of false promises could have dramatic consequences.
This warning was conveyed by António Costa at the opening of a CNN/Portugal conference at Parque das Nações in Lisbon.
After defending the reform of the United Nations, with the expansion of the Security Council and the end of the veto power of selfish nations, the leader of the executive made a sophisticated reference to the current war situation in Ukraine.
“This crisis has put the question of enlargement at the center of the debate – and it has dramatically placed it in relation to Ukraine, but by extension also in relation to the many promises made over the years. done by the European Union, raising expectations, especially in the countries of the Western Balkans. Now the European Union has very clear criteria for the accession of the new Member States, but unfortunately it has no criteria for its own capacity to Member States,” he stressed.
In this regard, the Prime Minister expressed his position of principle: “Let’s be clear, with the current institutional set-up, with the current budgetary architecture, the European Union is not able to live up to the expectations it is now creating”.
For António Costa, if the expectations created by some European officials are “just an occasional political gesture, then the European Union risks multiplying throughout Eastern Europe what has already happened with decades of lack of expectations regarding Turkey”.
“And the rebound effect of these expectations will be a huge drama in the short term if they are frustrated. On the other hand, if these expectations were not just a sympathetic political statement on the occasion, the European Union must restructure itself thoroughly. This , if you don’t want to be imploded by the new adhesions,” the prime minister stressed.
In this regard, António Costa insisted that “there are clearly no institutional or budgetary conditions” for this expansion.
“The creation of the European Political Community is an important gesture to be able to provide a common space for global issues, starting with energy issues, to a diverse set of countries on the European continent, countries that expect to join the European Union , countries that don’t know and the one who was and left the European Union, like the United Kingdom. Therefore, the European Political Community will not be a replacement for the European Union, it will not be an alternative to enlargement,” he pleaded.
In this sense, according to António Costa, “the pressure for expansion will remain on the table”.
Also in this chapter, the leader of the executive alluded to the existing bilateral difficulties between several candidate countries for enlargement, particularly in the Western Balkans, “meaning they must be imported into the European Union” with implications in terms of ” entropy of European institutions.
“Europe really needs to organize itself in variable geometries and already does to some extent, because not all Member States are in the Eurozone or in the Schengen area. To be successful, we need a Europe with variable geometries”, reinforced .
In his speech, the Prime Minister defended that the European Union should increase its strategic autonomy, bet on the reindustrialization and relocation of different production sectors, but here he noted a difference in the face of protectionist perspectives, which he rejected.
Incidentally, at that time he believed that the European Union will have to find new partners in the world, “new friends” and placed the conclusion of the Mercosur agreement as fundamental.
“The European Union needs to rethink its trade and agricultural policies. We know that the common agricultural policy is at the origin of the European Union, but it is also the most environmentally wrong, the policy that creates the most protectionism in Europe and that hinders the most development of countries where Europe faces huge migration challenges,” he noted.
“Development aid should not cyclically write a check to say that we support the development of others. We must understand that trade policy must be balanced and of mutual interest. The European Union cannot have blocked development for decades. Agreement with Mercosur, what would be the most important economic agreement on a global scale, especially knowing that the Mercosur countries are culturally, politically and civilized closest to Europe,” he added.
Journalistic warnings
In the same message, Costa defended that professional journalism should differentiate itself from the infodemic that characterizes social networks and avoid what happens to parties of the democratic right that are confused with the populist right.
In his first words to the public, the executive warned of the greatest risk arising from the deregulation of markets faced by professional journalism if, by the choice of competition, it is indifferent to the phenomenon of the infodemic that ” runs on social networks”. “.
“If journalism starts to imitate, it ends up legitimizing what is untrue [fake]🇧🇷 At that point, what should be the original becomes the fake of the fake [o fake do fake] and loses its distinctive element,” he explained.
But António Costa went further and later drew a parallel with the evolution of political currents in Western societies.
“What is happening in politics with many democratic right parties against the populist right is what cannot happen in journalism, under penalty of losing one of its most important resources, namely freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” he said. declared.
António Costa began by saying that “the world needs the rigor and deontology of professional journalism, the one that makes it possible to distinguish the truth from the lie; the one that allows contextualization without easy generalization; the one that makes it possible to to explain what is complex, that provides pluralism, the contradictory; and the one that makes it possible to preserve the memory, allowing the comparison to understand the path followed”.
“We need an informed citizenry as a vaccine against populism. And only informed journalism guarantees this informed citizenship. In the world we live in, as some call it in an infodemic situation, journalism is the real PCR test between what is truth and what is is lying,” the Prime Minister concluded.
Source: DN
