Borrell calls for a “coordinated rearmament” of the EU and to integrate war into its “existential horizon”.


The EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, has defended this Saturday the need for a “coordinated rearmament” of the European Union to prepare the community bloc for a possible war.

“We need a rearmament process that is done in a coordinated way (…). My task is to plan this military development”, explained Borrell during his speech at the La Toja Forum, in Galicia.

For Borrell “every cloud has a silver lining” in reference to the war in Ukraine: the EU must “integrate the war in its existential horizon and integrate the armed forces”.

European armies now have “duplicities and redundancies”. “We spend four times what Russia spends and the same as China spends and certainly less efficiently,” he has argued.

Borrell has stressed that the EU has been built on the basis of trade and law, but “wanted to obviate the concept of power” by entrusting it to interdependence in trade relations and has given as an example the purchase of Russian gas.

“Today we realize that interdependence alone does not guarantee peace (…). Much Kant and little Hobbes,” he has argued in reference to the two political philosophers. “We now realize that unity built with convoluted agreements is not enough,” he reiterated.

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“We live in a dangerous world. We live in a garden surrounded by jungle. It is not enough to erect protective worlds. We have to engage more with the jungle,” he said. In this sense, “military instruments are not a whim”. “They are necessary, indispensable for survival,” he stressed.

That is why in the specific case of Ukraine the EU “has to do more of the same: more military aid, more sanctions on Russia and more diplomatic work to convince the world.”

Regarding the injection of funds to Ukraine, Borrell recalled that 2.5 billion have been allocated in war aid, “something that could not be done according to the treaties”, and assured that each State on its own has provided more funding until reaching “half of what the United States gives”.

Borrell, moreover, has criticized the “invalid” referendums on annexation to the Russian Federation in the eastern regions of Ukraine. They are votes “held overnight, in the middle of a country at war, without censuses or guarantees.” They are a “pantomime”, according to Borrell.

The head of European diplomacy has pointed out that “to trade it takes two, but to make war one is enough and that one is willing to do it and has done it.” However, for Borrell “Russia has already lost the war in moral and political terms, but Ukraine has not yet won it”.

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“The war has to end well in order to build peace. The war has to end with Ukraine being able to defend its territorial integrity and regain it and Russia recognizing its moral guilt. We cannot ask for less, we cannot waver because what is at stake is not the territorial integrity of Ukraine. What is at stake is our way of life,” he warned.

Borrell has compared Russia to the Italian economy in global terms, although the GDP per capita is four times smaller. “Russia is an economic dwarf, a big gas station where the owner has nuclear weapons.”

The High Representative has put the spotlight on Russia’s “resentment” of the West and compared it to China. However, “China knows very well that first it has to have the weapons of economy and technology. They are doing it and very well.”

“Russia has failed to get it and is now trying to get it by armed violence. When military failure follows economic failure, what will happen to Russia?” he has posed before recalling that it has nuclear weapons.


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