José Luis García Delgado, full-time university professor of Applied Economics, National Research Award in Law and Social and Economic Sciences, and King Juan Carlos Price, has warned about the "real risk of war" that is present in Europe during his keynote speech "Europe 2024, a compromised future" with which he has opened the debate series of the Universitat de València Desembre Europeu 2024.
The opening ceremony of the programme of conferences, debates, panel discussions and cultural activities about the European Union, that this year the University of Valencia celebrates regarding the 45 anniversary of the twinning between València and Bologna, has been starred by the expert economist of the University of Nebrija, which has been accompanied this Tuesday in the Faculty of Economics of the Universitat de València by the autonomic secretary of Representation in the EU and Autonomic Communities, Pablo Broseta; the Dean of the Faculty, Paco Muñoz; and the director of the European Documentation Centre UV, Cecilio Tamarit.
García Delgado, has reflected on the reality surrounding the 27 countries of the EU, and how this reality “compromises” our future even before 2030. The academic has justified, first of all, the “opportunism” of his intervention from the first “working” week of the new team at the forefront of the European Commission, the “fall” of the French Government and the “temporariness” of the German Government, that will be soon celebrating new elections.
Next, he has argued about the reason of choosing the word “compromised” in the title of his conference, defining the EU as a “project” that settles on three robust backbones: peace, liberty and progress, backbones that, he has state “born strong, grew up and combined perfectly, but today are being questioned”. But, why?
A “threatened” peace
The reference to the conflict that worries the European Union the most was inevitable, since on February 24 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. “There is an important war of territory expansion whose military development reminds us of the World War II: open field, destruction of entire towns and human lives...”, plus a “hostile neighbourhood” between “Russia and its underlings”, and the South of the Mediterranean (Maghreb, the Near and Middle East), where the occidental democracy where Western democracy managed to “jump” in the Arab Spring of 2010 and which now presents the Syrian war or dictatorships even more crude than the previous ones.
In this sense, García Delgado stated: “Peace is threatened and the best proof of this is the return to compulsory military service in 11 European countries, in addition to others that are already thinking about it, such as Germany”. Therefore, “there is a real risk of war in Europe”. We need to believe it so that we do everything possible to avoid the perpetration of the threat, even when the EU “is not defensively prepared because of the diversion of actives to United States and the for usage of funds for social wellbeing politics”.
Three challenges for liberty
The economist has asserted that the backbone of liberty in Europe is also “compromised” as it faces three “really difficult” challenges that are: enlarge States, with the aim of adding nine countries in 2030, of which Ukraine and Georgia are already candidates, although last weeks altercates have made that the new Commission reconsiders the entry of the latter.
“We would move from 27 to 36, in a EU that originated with 15 countries, which constitutes a challenge for democracy in Europe, even though we need to trust in the transformation power of this form of government as a product of integration and hope that it works, that the dominance of European democracy continues to spread to the East and South,” he revealed.
The second challenge is “to integrate people”, that clearly refers to “immigration”, a fundamental topic in the EU because of its social, politic and economic influence. García Delgado has admitted that “in Europe we need immigration because we need labour– in 2050 African population will have increased by 150% and the European will have decreased a 15%–, but the challenge is to integrate people who come from outside in the positive sense of assuming a culture of freedom and coexistence”.
Economic prosperity
José Luis García Delgado has associated the concept of “progress” with “economic prosperity” to an extent that “without her there will be neither peace nor liberty” because they will be “more questioned” and he has used the Draghi Report, which states that “if Europe cannot offer a bigger economic development, it will lose its purpose”.
With regard to this term, the full-time university professor of Applied Economics has underlined Europe's loss of position against two major world economic powers: The United States and China and, on the other hand, he has insisted in the “enormous potential” that Europe can develop through “collaboration and union”. “This is the receipt, collaboration and union, but it is a receipt that demands important inversions of public and private capital”, he has concluded.
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