On Tuesday 27 June, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, said that the EU needed to carry out a security transition.
“We’re talking about the green transition, we’re talking about the digital transition. We should be talking about the security transition. This is the third transition for the European Union, which is moving from a world view based on trade and the rule of law to a world view based on security”, he explained during a speech at the 2023 annual conference of the European Union Institute for Security Studies.
Mr Borrell pointed out that security is multi-dimensional: military, economic, technological, climatic and information-based. Security must not come at the expense of freedom, the High Representative warned.
In his view, the EU, “as an international player”, can cover the whole spectrum of threats with a full range of tools. “We have almost everything we need”, said the EU’s head of diplomacy, citing diplomatic, civil and military crisis management capabilities, financial capacity, restrictive measures and strong regulatory powers. According to Mr Borrell, while the EU has many tools at its disposal, it needs to integrate its capabilities more and take decisions more quickly.
For the High Representative, the world is becoming increasingly polar. “And these poles interact with each other, covering each other from one side or the other. It’s like a constellation, two great poles [the United States and China, ed.], and then someone circling around and sometimes changing orbit to go into another orbit and circle around another pole”, he summarised, adding that this geopolitical competition is weakening multilateralism as never before.
“We live in a competitive world of giants, where size is essential for survival”, added Mr Borrell, who welcomed the fact that the EU provided “scale and size” for its members, unlike each European country on its own. “We must aim to become a multi-polar hub. The EU must have the ambition to be a pole and the capacity to act as such”, he warned. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)