Europe and Latin America, Borrell claims colonization and conquest

“The world is experiencing a perfect storm that requires a recalibration of the strategic compass with full awareness historic. In this storm the maps and routes of the past are not needed; like the conquerors we must invent a new world.

These are the words of Joseph Borrell, high representative of the European Union for foreign and security policy, who, speaking at the recent meeting of Eurolat, a multilateral body made up of 150 parliamentarians from Europe and Latin America, openly claimed the colonization and conquest .

The Eurolat meeting is not the only one in which he launched into Eurocentric and neocolonialist declarations: last October he defined Europe as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle”. Claiming genocide as the ideology of the new world awards Borrell the Palme d’Or for political idiocy and the Oscar for arrogance, and also confirms the lack of prudence on the part of someone who has been minister of all things from 1975 to today. but leader of nothing. Showing up 530 years later claiming one of the greatest looting and genocides in history and doing it in front of the heirs of peoples and lands that were victims of it, shows how the nostalgia of Francoism has also embraced that of colonialism and that it cuts across the Spanish political forces plus only VOX exclusive.

But such arrogance is really out of place. By dint of feeling nostalgic for the fifteenth century, one ends up believing that one is still a colonial power while instead Europe has been reduced to a US protectorate. A complete conversion that led to the colonizers being colonized. According to Borrell, Latin America and the European Union are “mutually necessary”, but it is not clear why, given the insignificant volume of economic exchanges and the political void of the relationship. Trade relations between the EU and Latin America are filtered by Mercosur which the EU uses to prevent or in any case limit the presence of global trading powers that can already modify – but above all in perspective – Latin American trade strategies.

European policies towards the region have always attempted, on the one hand, to expand its commercial presence, guaranteeing access – preferably without barriers – to global markets, especially emerging ones; on the other they have focused on the protection of the EU internal market, especially in agricultural products. The EU has also attempted to pose a European interference by presenting it as political cooperation or regional integration, but no one has opened the doors to it.

The EU has no time to waste: since October 2021, the trade balance of the Euro area has returned to negative territory, after more than 10 consecutive years of surplus. The data on international trade shows the negative impact of the sanctions against Moscow and the distortions that the Russian-Ukrainian war is having on international trade. Europe is looking for markets to buy energy and redistribute exports blocked by sanctions against Russia. Having lost Russian resources and, with them, the only possibility of growth with cheap energy and having been supplanted by Russia and China in Africa, Latin America is in fact the place where everything one needs is finds, but vice versa Europe is only one of the various markets on which the American subcontinent can direct its trade.

What the EU does not understand is that on the political as well as on the commercial level, the Latin American countries do not suffer from the relative European weight on their markets. China has adopted a strategy of promoting aid and investment programs based on partnerships and free trade agreements, 20 Latin American governments have joined the Belt and Road Initiative launched by Xi Jinping in October 2013 and, in all likelihood, many others will in the coming years.

Europe is today the least important part of the planet, because in the face of a still sustained but rapidly declining financial strength, it has neither political nor military unity. It is no coincidence that Macron, who a few months ago had declared the “brain death of NATO”, a few days ago, on a visit to Washington, invited the United States to be “brothers in arms” and, to echo him, the premier arrived Finn, Sanna Marin, reminding everyone that “Europe cannot do without the United States for its defence”.

Borrell covers himself with ridicule when he thinks of drawing the line of the conquistadors 4.0, because Europe is unable to cajole, advise, warn or threaten, to determine or even influence the choices of any country in the world and, at the same time, not is able to proceed alone towards none of the challenges that on the commercial, strategic and technological level look to 2050 and not to 1900.