Opinion

EU-Latin America Inconvenient Truths

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Admittedly, until Spain's accession to the then European Economic Community, Latin America was never a priority for Europe, which came to implicitly accept the pejorative status of the United States' 'backyard'. And indeed, Spain not only put Latin America on the European map with great tenacity, but also Spain itself was able to re-establish itself as an influential international power in Brussels as the member of the European club with the best knowledge of a continent that has Spanish as its mother tongue.

The reality today is quite different, and not exactly for the better, as the 12th International European Union-Latin America Seminar, held at the Casa de América in Madrid, showed. This was made clear by Ramón Jáuregui, President of the Euroamerica Foundation, who subscribes to Josep Borrell's stark analysis: "Europe is at a critical moment in its existence", endorsing the diagnosis of the Strategic Compass, with which the operational guide can be found for making decisions in which the EU no longer has room for error. 

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In the specific area of Europe and Latin America there is a more than evident risk of "peripheralisation", in other words, that both regions will be unable to avoid sliding towards the periphery of the new centre of the world, that Asia-Pacific area in which the major disputes and events of the 21st century are already taking shape, and whose consequences we will undoubtedly suffer, but which, if we continue in this way, we will have little or no influence on in the immediate future.

It is true that the crisis caused by COVID-19 has affected the whole world, but it has been in some areas of the planet where the health, social and economic consequences have been particularly dramatic. The major structural and inequality problems that Latin America already had before the pandemic have been greatly aggravated. As for the EU, suffice it to say that 30 years ago it accounted for 25% of world GDP, and in a few more years we will not even reach 10%, a decline that will be accompanied by another transcendental decline: the decrease in population, which will barely reach 5% of the total number of human beings on the planet.

Earning with regulations what you lose in the factory

The combined Euro-Latin American strength has also declined markedly with respect to the unstoppable transformation of the world. Of the 50 largest companies or conglomerates that prevail today, Europe includes only four and Latin America only one. We are therefore clearly at risk of losing even regulatory capacity. To use the footballing simile of a big football club sometimes trying to win in the office what it cannot win on the pitch, the EU has been accused of trying to win with its excessive regulatory zeal against opponents with whom it is unable to compete. The big American tech companies have no rival in Europe other than regulatory dams, because this EU has also been unable to create its own Google, for example.

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It is distressing to note that the same EU has still not managed to renew important agreements with Mexico and Chile, while the ambitious EU-Mercosur alliance project has yet to be crowned. Meanwhile, China has multiplied its trade with Latin America by 28! in the last ten years, and rising... 

China's conquest of strategic positions around the world has set off alarm bells, given that it is already clear that its values are not ours, and that it is on the way to imposing its own values and paradigms. The old assumption that economic prosperity will always lead to democratic development has been refuted by China, which, among many other actions, is preparing to set up the first vaccine factory - Sinovac, of course - in Latin America, on Chilean soil. 

Summits of heads of state and government between the EU and Latin America are disappearing from the calendar, and sub-regional meetings at this highest level end up being held with large absences in person or merely videotaped speeches, which are merely a dressing-up exercise that does not translate into real action plans. This is also the same scenario that occurs with regard to the Ibero-American summits, Spain's great effort to keep alive both the bilateral relationship between the two hemispheres and to increase its role as a bridge, increasingly less travelled, between Europe and America.

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As pointed out by panellists such as the Portuguese Secretary of State Francisco André, the Lithuanian Jolita Butkeviciene, the MEP Pilar del Castillo and the former Colombian minister Diego Molano, it is urgent to accelerate the implementation of the digital society as much as possible, for which the necessary training is essential. It is striking that between the two sides of the Atlantic there is a supply of three million jobs specialised in digital technologies that do not find qualified applicants.

As Borrell himself says, Europe is in danger and Europeans are not aware of it. And we need to get out of what he calls the EU's "strategic shrinkage" as soon as possible. A shrinking, due in large part to the fact that our liberal values are increasingly questioned. There are the examples of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other candidates to follow the Castro-Chavist path, where the European narrative and model of democracy and prosperity is losing the battle against impoverishing and crushing totalitarianism, but which can now hold up the Chinese model as an example of the realised promise of a supposedly triumphant socialist paradise. Without, of course, human rights, starting with freedom, mattering. Marginal concerns of a Europe that has less and less strength to demand and impose them.