The Diplomat
The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, stated yesterday in Madrid that the EU must increase its military spending because Russia and China “have increased their defense budgets” and Europe will not “always have” US support. However, he warned that this increase must be “organized” to avoid the “waste” of having “27 larger armies.”
“It is very difficult to win elections by talking about increasing military spending,” but China and Russia “have greatly increased their defense budgets while the EU has been disarming,” Borrell declared during the closing of the seminar A Spanish Vision of the future of Europe, held at the Ortega-Marañón Cultural Space, in Madrid, and which was inaugurated by the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
According to the vice president of the European Commission, the United States “continues to be the great military power in the world” and its military power “is overwhelming,” but “it will not always be like this.” For this reason, he warned, the EU must create “coordinated military capabilities” and increase defense spending “in an organized manner” because “if everyone spends more, we will have 27 larger armies, but it will be a gigantic waste.” However, it is not about forming a single European army but about “making existing armies work more and better together,” he added.
Borrell also warned that the UN is not the appropriate body to avoid conflicts like the one in Ukraine. “We are going to be dominated by the war in Ukraine and the UN cannot be the platform to stop it, because the Security Council cannot act because Russia exercises its right to veto, even though it has served to show the majority rejection of the war,” he recalled.
According to the High Representative, the military and civil aid provided by the EU to Ukraine is “at the same level” as the United States. “We must ensure that Ukraine wins” because “a lot of resources have been spent on the war and Ukraine is being destroyed,” he said. Likewise, he assured that Ukraine’s accession to the EU “is decided” and that, when it occurs, it will be “the only member country that receives a positive jump, that receives funds”, since the rest of the countries are “net contributors of money”. Therefore, the entry of Ukraine would represent an “immense change” that will consume “great political and economic energies” and “the Europe that emerges from this enlargement process will be completely different from the one we have now.”
For his part, Albares also referred to the enlargement of the EU during the opening of the event. According to the acting minister, Spain will “always” support “the progress in the accession process of the candidate countries” because European enlargement is key to “renewing the European project” at a time when “the future of our continent depends more than ever of the decisions we make in this moment of change, so complex and so convulsive.”
“The Union represents above all the project of expanding rights for citizens, only if we understand Europe in this way can we really contribute to the construction of a future project for the Spanish people,” continued Albares, who reviewed the main files of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU – the last presidency, he recalled, before the end of the current European legislature and the elections in May 2024 -, such as the green pact, the migration and asylum pact, the updating of the fiscal rules, the reform of the electricity market and progress in the accession processes of candidate countries.
