Eduardo González
Brussels hosts from today until tomorrow the long-awaited Summit between the European Union (EU) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), one of the main bets of the Spanish Government during the current Presidency of the Council of the EU and the last major international appointment of the President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, before the early legislative elections on July 23.
“From Spain we believe that Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean are called to maintain a strategic relationship in which both regions can be mutually reinforced” and, therefore, the EU-CELAC Summit “will be a turning point for the better in the relations between both regions”, said Pedro Sánchez last Friday during a joint press conference at the Moncloa Palace with one of the participants in the summit, the Chilean President Gabriel Boric.
The holding of this Summit had become one of the major objectives of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU (with the support of Portugal) for nearly a year, and as such was already included in the work program for the Spanish semester presented last September by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, to the Council of Ministers.
The Summit will be co-chaired by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, in his capacity as President pro tempore of CELAC, and will be attended by the Heads of State and Government of the EU Member States and CELAC States. The summit will also be attended by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell. According to forecasts, the vast majority of the leaders of both regions will participate in the Summit, with the exception of Mexico (whose President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, never attends international events), Venezuela and Nicaragua, which will send their foreign ministers.
The first in eight years
CELAC, created in 2010, brings together 33 Latin American and Caribbean states with the express aim of strengthening political dialogue and social and cultural integration in the region, improving its quality of life, stimulating economic growth and promoting the well-being of all its citizens. To date, the organization has only held two summits with the EU: the first was held in Santiago de Chile in 2013 and the second took place in Brussels in 2015.
In the eight years following this second Summit, cooperation actions and trade negotiations were maintained, but since then it had not been possible to hold a meeting of heads of state and government. The 2017 Summit was suspended mainly because of the crisis in Venezuela; the 2020 Summit was reduced to a virtual ministerial conference because of the pandemic and, for the same reason, the 2021 Summit remained a modest virtual meeting of pro tempore presidencies of regional organizations.
The Summit agenda includes issues such as global peace and stability, trade and investment, economic recovery (including reform of the international financial system), combating climate change, research and innovation, and justice and security for citizens.
However, despite the prevailing optimism of the Spanish Presidency, both the results and the practical consequences of this Summit will be highly conditioned. One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, is the asymmetry between the two regional blocs. Despite the wishes of the EU (especially the Spanish government) to provide this relationship with a permanent structure, the fact is – as recently recalled by the president of the Euroamerica Foundation and former MEP Ramón Jáuregui – that CELAC does not have anywhere near the level of institutionality of the EU, nor does it have common positions on any really important issue.
These differences have already begun to be seen in some details, such as the attitudes shown by some CELAC countries, like Cuba, whose Bruno Rodriguez recently criticized the EU’s “lack of transparency and manipulative behavior” in convening the Summit, or Venezuela, which has criticized “the EU’s decision to impose its own format” on the meeting.
On the other hand, and as happened last March during the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, held in Santo Domingo, everything points to the fact that the attempts of the European countries to make some reference to the war in Ukraine in the final declaration of the EU-CELAC Summit will come to nothing due to the lack of consensus among the Latin American countries on this issue.
“Although the 33 CELAC countries do not have, like the 27 EU countries, a homogeneous and bloc position on the conflict in Ukraine, the European negotiators are determined that the issue be at least mentioned in the conclusions of the summit”, but to do so they will have to overcome the stumbling block of some Latin American and Caribbean countries that “seek to be seen by the EU countries as equal partners”, recently highlighted the prestigious Argentine international analyst Pedro Brieger through the news portal NODAL.
This lack of consensus on Ukraine, in any case, does not prevent the realization that the conflict is clearly affecting Latin American countries, especially due to the increase in inflation and its food effects, and that the EU needs Latin America and other regions of the world more than ever to promote its longed-for strategic autonomy and diversify its food and energy sources.
One obvious case is lithium, a fundamental component of Europe’s strategy to decarbonize its economy and industrial production, which is produced especially in the so-called South American Lithium Triangle, formed by Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which together account for approximately half of the world’s reserves, not to mention three other producers of this mineral, Mexico, Peru and Brazil. For this reason, this mineral, as well as Chile’s green hydrogen, has become one of the major attractions for Europe in a Summit that includes, among its objectives, the protection of the planet and the ecological transition.
In any case, governments and experts hope that the Summit will serve to concretize some progress regarding the ratification processes of the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay), which has been complicated above all because of the environmental chapter, and the modernized EU agreements with Chile and Mexico. Spanish diplomatic sources have already warned that the Brussels meeting will be, above all, “a political summit, not a negotiation summit”.
