Ventotene: Speech by the High Representative Josep Borrell at the Seminar on Federalism in Europe and the world

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Ventotene: Speech by the High Representative Josep Borrell at the Seminar on Federalism in Europe and the world

01.09.2024 EEAS Press Team

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I will do a mix of English and Italian and begin to say that I am very happy to be here on this magical island, at the forty-third seminar in Ventotene.

It's my third time in the island. The first time was in 2014. And now I am here again in a very complicated moment for Europe and the world. Europe is facing two wars and the American elections are pending.

So, yes, we are in a difficult moment and we are in August 2024 and 110 years ago the first world war begun and the soldiers were going to the frontline singing. In Berlin saying: "tomorrow in Paris". In Paris saying: "tomorrow in Berlin". They did not go to Paris or Berlin.

They have been five years in the biggest bullshit of the history, killing each other. In a single day the French army lost 25.000 soldiers. Can you imagine? In a single day, 25,000 soldiers died. Today if ten soldiers die it is a national drama, but a hundred years ago millions of soldiers died. And then came another war.

In the First World War, I remember, soldiers still went to war in red trousers, in the Napoleonic uniform, they didn't have helmets. Because war was done in another way. Today it's different: nobody goes to war in red trousers, because they can be seen from afar. But then the uniforms were beautiful, the War was beautiful, but uncomfortable. Then the Second World War was even more deadly, especially here in Italy. I was in the Dolomites and I saw the trenches: the Italians on one side and the Austrians on the other, the winter, the cold, the death.

All these things are history to us, because we Europeans do not wage war against each other. This is great news and a great thing, to which we do not give enough value. Because peace seems to be the natural state of things. I'm sorry to say, is not true, it is not the natural state of things. And I am very well placed to know it, as High Representative of the European Union. I've been traveling around the world and seeing wars. Wars, wars and wars everywhere. Not for us. For the others. But still today hundreds of thousands of people are being killed every day at war. And we Europeans, we have made peace. Peace among us. And everything started here in Ventotene, when the Germans tanks were driven to Moscow.

Here in Ventotene some people in prison and confinement had the vision to think of a Europe at peace through the creation of a federation to make war impossible. And none of the young people here think it is possible, imaginable, to wage war against each other, against their fellow Erasmus students. It is impossible, isn't it? Nobody imagines it. And this is great news. Ventotene was where it all began: someone said 'after the war, states must make it so that war is not possible'. A union was made for coal and steel . Why to coal and steel? Because coal and steel were the way to make war. At that time, coal and steel were the way to make war. Without coal and steel, you don't make tanks, you don't make weapons. So, the they started by that, then they follow with the Common Market and the single currency, the euro.

I'm sure that, Spinelli didn't think about it. In fact, reality has overcome what Spinelli thought, in some cases, not in all. And then the states, little by little, renounced to some elements of their sovereignty. No borders, no national currency, no tariffs among us. You can go from Serbia to Helsinki without crossing a border. The borders are still there. But you don't see them. You don't see them. You go through the borders, you cross the borders. Nobody is asking you, where are you going? Who are you open to? Open the luggage. When it was like you, young people, and I wanted to go from Spain to France, at the border someone was asking me: Who are you? Why are you going? Open the luggage. Show me the passport. And then I went to the other side of the border. And the same story. Who are you? Show the passport. Open the luggage. Why are you going? This doesn't happen anymore. And it looks normal. It's not normal. It's extraordinary. So yes, we have abolished borders to make them invisible. We have a single currency. You don't have to change money when you go to Rome from France to Italy. And we built the euro. The euro came with a big crisis.

This project was already in the document written by Spinelli, Rossi and Colorni. And that is why it is so important to be here today, so that we can evaluate what was achieved since the manifesto in 1941. But more importantly, more than being happy, because some of the things that Spinelli thought about has been done, more important is to think what is still to be done. What are the task that we have not been able to do, because the vision of Spinelli has not been fully realized. And certainly, we need a more united Europe and more resources for Europe. The European budget is 1% 1% of the European GNP 1%.

The Italian budget must be about 40% or 45% of the Italian GNP. The Europeans, we manage 1% and we want to touch everything around the world. And I am traveling around the world. Yes, we do everything, but in small doses, homeopathic doses that most of the time don't change reality. If Europe wants to survive, it will have to be more united. It will need to be more integrated. It will have to have more common resources and it will have to build a new European identity. Identity: a dangerous word. In the name of identity many people have died. My identity is against the suit, so you or I must die. I think the important thing about being human is to have several identities.

I am Catalan, I am Spanish and I am European, and the three things go together, they are not contradictory. The richness of the human being is to be able to have multiple identities, because we are complex beings, life is complex, history is complex, culture is different, languages are different. But having a European identity means integrating the different identities without annulling them. The states remain, Italy does not disappear, neither does Spain. They are too strong, they were formed in history. The United States, the states of the federation, do not have such a different history from each other, because they are young. But from the Middle Ages to today, our history is too strong for nations to disappear, but they must be compatible with each other. We have been following the steps of the Founding Fathers, and now it's time to pass the torch to the young Europeans, who feel the idea of Europe as more than just having benefits.

You benefit from Europe. You benefit from Europe a lot, much more than the generation of my fathers. Now it's time for you to do something for Europe, to take the responsibility in an increasingly difficult and hostile world. And my experience of these five years has taught me that the Europeans are not ready to cope with this world. It's too hard. It's too difficult. It's cruel. Maybe we are very much in our peace, in our prosperity and our political freedom, because at the end, Europe is the better combination that humankind has been able to build of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion. It is not perfect, but you will not find anywhere in the world the best combination of political freedom of economic prosperity and social cohesion.

Yes, some countries have political freedom and economic prosperity. They don't have the social cohesion because they don't care about the health of the neighbor. They don't consider health to be a public good. We consider health and education to be a public good, and have to care about the health of my neighbor by paying taxes and Social Security. It doesn't happen. Not even in a communist country like China or a capitalist country like the US. So, my experience is that the world is difficult, is a hard world, and we are not ready to face these difficulties because we are enjoying peace at home, we are enjoying political freedom at home and we are enjoying economic prosperity and social cohesion at home. But there are other parts of the world where they don't enjoy political freedom or not enjoy economic progress, or they don't enjoy social cohesion. So, we have to understand that we have to engage with the rest of the world. We cannot raise walls in order to protect ourselves from the rest of the world. Walls can never be high enough.

How many times have you seen in the newspapers or on the news about Sudan? What happens in Sudan? In Sudan there is a war that made hundreds of thousands of people leaving. Where do you think they are going to go? There are tens of thousands of people being killed every day. It doesn't deserve a single news on the front page of the newspapers. But yes, it is in Sudan. Oh, what a pity. Yes, there is a war in Sudan and another in Ukraine, and there is a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which is not a natural catastrophe, is not an earthquake, is not a flood, is a human made catastrophe by killing people every day, by bombing them without paying a lot of attention.

Yes, yes. Today six of the hostages has been discovered dead. And certainly, Hamas has to be condemned because of the taking of hostages. I was in the kibbutz where Hamas was attacking the seven of October. Nothing justifies what is happening in this kibbutz. But one horror doesn't justify another horror. One horror doesn't justify another. So, we repeat, we have a certain responsibility on that. Because what's happening in Palestine to a certain part is our responsibility. Because we promised the same land to two different people, and these people are fighting for the same land.

And we have a responsibility for the people fighting in Ukraine to defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity. And we have a responsibility with people facing climate change. You know why I'm going to Africa? I'm talking about climate change. You know what they told me? Look, we African people, we have sent to the atmosphere 3%, only 3% of the CO2 gases cumulated emissions. We are responsible for 3% of the problem. And you send 25%. So, if there is a problem, someone created the problem. It was not us. If you go to Latin America, you will tell exactly the same thing. We created 3% of the emissions. If there is a problem, certainly we didn't create it. But we are paying the consequences more than you. Because who is paying the biggest consequences of climate change? Climate change is not for tomorrow. It's already here.

Look at the temperature of the sea. You don't believe it? But who's paying the consequences? sub-Saharan Africa. It's impossible to live there if it is too hot. 38 degrees here, imagine in sub-Saharan Africa. And in sub-Saharan Africa, every woman has eight children in average. So, there is no solution to the problems of these people without the strong empowerment of the woman. When we talk about gender equality, is the problem here for us? Yes. But you cannot imagine how big is this problem in Mali, or in Chad or in Niger, where young girls at 14 years start reproducing? One day I was talking with the president of Niger. He told me, please help me to take the young ladies, the young girls and to put them apart from their family in a school, because if they stay in their family, they will get married at 14 years old and they will start having one son after the other and doing nothing else than that. Help me to keep them apart from the cultural tradition. You know where this guy is? In jail. One year ago, there was a coup d'état. The military took power and he's in jail because he wanted to change the cultural behavior of the society. And it's not so easy.

There is African full of refugee camps in Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Southeast Asia. Yes. The war has come back. Not here, but it's in our borders, is close. And that's why we need to think more about the future, not only in terms of economics and trade and defending human rights. It's good. It's necessary. But we Europeans, we have to understand that if we want to survive, we have to, for example, unite more our defense capacity. It continues to be ridiculous to have 27 different armies, some of them so small that they don't they don't have any kind of fighting capacity. We spend in defense four times Russia, four times Russia.

Do you think that we have the fighting capacity of the Russian army, which, by the way, is not so big as Putin was expecting? No. Certainly not. There is a certain parallelism between what's happening today and what happened in 1941. The return of the war to Europe and the worsening geopolitical landscape is certainly the first time since the end of the Second World War. We realize now that post-Cold War has evolved into a new era. A few years after the election of Putin, maybe without us realizing that the full invasion of Ukraine had started. Not two years ago, several years ago, and the lethal poisoning of the political opponents, the conflict with Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In any event, we live now. It is the most dangerous geopolitical moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Well, maybe the crisis of missiles in Cuba, but is very far away. Today, the concept of security and defense, which was not part of the initial narrative of building Europe is becoming more and more important, and it will be more in the coming years. My job is being called foreign and security policy. But when I came to Brussels, everybody was talking about foreign policy, not about security policy. And today, my successor will have to be engaging a lot in security, knowing that the European Union is not a military union. But building peace among the Europeans is not enough.

If we want to face a world of violence into many places, events force us to take actions in this field. As Monet said, Europe will be the result of the collective solutions to deal with the crisis, and allow me to remember or to remind a famous person: Hamilton. During the American Revolution, he created the federal debt. He created the Federation by pulling the debt of all the states of the Confederation. But to pull the debt was not enough. The debt has to be paid back. The genius of Hamilton was to create federal taxes to pay the debt back. That's why when you talk about federalism you have to think to federal taxes, that the US Internal Revenue Services collected federal taxes all over the US. Hamilton, which, by the way, was a migrant, was born in a Caribbean island. He came to the New York and it was a colored guy. He was not a white Anglo-Saxon. I don't know where, but he was born in an island in the Caribbean. Hamilton shows us the way.

We have to have federal taxes. And the European Parliament (I've been president of the European Parliament), this institution should be able to raise taxes. And, you know, the parliaments mainly vote taxes. No taxation without representation. That was the cry of the American independency. No taxation without representation. Well, today in Europe we can say no representation without taxation. In order for the representative of the European Union sitting in Strasbourg to be really representative, they should have the power to tax us. I know it's not very sympathetic to talk about taxes, but such a thing exists. And there is another person that they want to remind: Demosthenes. You know, Demosthenes was the Greek philosopher that many years before Christ was warning the Athenians, saying, look, Sparta is coming. Sparta is much stronger than us. The Spartans are preparing for war. We have to prepare to defend ourselves. And people in Athens said, well, come on, don't bother us with this. Well, finally it happened what happened. Demosthenes committed suicide and Athens was invaded by Sparta.

That's another example. Take care. Take care with people who can aggress you and be ready for that. Ukraine should not become another Belarus. When people criticize me because I am asking to continue supporting Ukraine military - and here in Italy there is quite a lot of criticism - my question is: okay, I stop supporting Ukraine: what do you think is going to happen? When President Trump says, I have the magic formula to end the war in a week. I also have a magic formula to end the war in a week. I stop supporting Ukraine and the war will end in a week. But how I will end. I tell you: Russian troops in Kiev, Zelensky in Siberia. Ukrainian people crushed, the Russian troops in the Polish border. And Russia controlling 40% of the world market of wheat. No, I don't think it's the solution. Which it doesn't mean that they don't want the war to finish. And you know who wants to the war to finish more than anyone else? Well, the Ukrainians. the Ukrainians want the war to finish more than anyone else. But in accordance with the defense of their rights and their democracy.

And then there is another war. Gaza. 40,000 civilian dead. Often, I listen to some European leaders and even Kamala Harris the other day saying that too many people have been killed. Right. How many is too many? 40,000 is too many. Next week it will be more than that. How many is too many? Which is the endpoint of this dramatic situation? If you believe that too many are too many. Well, maybe you should send arms. Because these people are being killed with the arms that you are sending to them. But I don't see the end of this war. Today there is a general strike in Israel asking to cease fire in order to stop the slaughter and to release the hostages. I've been paying a lot of attention to this war, this dramatic war. Two people fighting for the same land. And we have to engage more in this war. But unhappily, we are not united. We have a different view. Some member States are recognizing the Palestine state and other don't believe this is a good thing to do.

If we are not united, we are irrelevant. In order to be relevant, we have to be united. And on this problem, we are not. Certainly, we have made progress on building a common and foreign policy. Certainly. But in order to do more, we have to be more united, and we have to have different ways of taking decisions. I don't see how Europe can work with unanimity rule, 27 having to agree on everything and one single country blocking everything that he doesn't like. I have in my current account €6 billion. Well, not in my current account. I have €6 billion in the current account of the External Action service.

I cannot pay them to Ukraine because one single country refuses. One. So, I think that the treaties will have to be changed in order to make our decision-making process more agile, more federal, more communitarian. In order for not having to be everybody agreeing on everything, because sometimes agreeing in everything means agreeing on nothing. So yes, I know it's difficult. But the next generation of the Europeans will have to be more integrated, and more integrated means to be ready to accept decisions by qualified majority voting, not by unanimity, and is not a technicality, is at the core of what the European Union is, how it works and what it delivers. Well, I've been too long.

I thank you very much for your attention.

Link to the video: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-260307