{"id":1215,"date":"2025-09-29T08:08:34","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T08:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/europe-last-chance\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T11:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T11:54:09","slug":"europe-last-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/europe-last-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe, last chance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jos\u00e9 Luis Garc\u00eda Clavero,Member of the Board of Trustees of the Paradigma C\u00f3rdoba Foundation for Convivence<\/em><\/p>\n\n

A wake-up call to the European Union from former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta in a book of the same title. Letta was commissioned by the European Commission to draft a report in response to the complexity of the current geopolitical situation; a preliminary study that provides the theoretical framework for the book.<\/p>\n\n

For Enrico Letta, as for Mario Draghi, Nick Clegg and Josep Borrell, almost all of them present at the debates held within the framework of the Hay Festival Segovia 2025, at the initiative of Instituto de Empresa (IE University), the situation of the European Union is critical.<\/p>\n\n

For them, among the brightest minds of their generation, with outstanding political and academic careers, as well as experience leading major economic institutions and large corporations, \u201cnow is the time to act\u201d (in Letta\u2019s own words). We are now facing our last opportunity. Today more than ever, inertia means decline. And that decline may ultimately lead us, as European countries, to ask ourselves whether we want to become a colony of the United States or of China.<\/p>\n\n

According to the author, this has become evident in the war in Ukraine, which has revealed a triple dependency for the European Union: energy dependence on Russia, military dependence on the United States, and industrial dependence on China, a giant that accounts for around 30% of global production.<\/p>\n\n

For Letta, as the song goes, times have changed: we are no longer living in the world of the 1950s, of a founding European Union shaped by the Treaty of Rome and its four freedoms (goods, services, people and capital), nor in the world of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and some theorists proclaimed the \u201cend of history\u201d. To those four freedoms, four more should now be added\u2014and time is pressing: in knowledge and research in digital technologies, in finance, in defence and in energy.<\/p>\n\n

For the former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, much greater investment in innovation is needed. In his book, he asks what has become of Nokia and Ericsson, and stresses that, in innovation and telecommunications, the market cannot remain purely national and fragmented, as economies of scale are decisive. A failed revolution has taken place before our very eyes, and European companies are not leading the way in 5G. While in Europe around 100 telecom operators have an average of 4 to 5 million users (with 17 operators in Germany alone), in the United States there are only three serving nearly 107 million people, and in China similarly around 467 million. Can Europe compete? Can it innovate in a cutting-edge field, in the face of such technological giants, with this level of fragmentation?<\/p>\n\n

A similar situation can be observed in the financial sector, as these activities have effectively been excluded from the single market. Moreover, Brexit deprived the European Union of London, which had been its main financial centre. It is therefore urgent to act in this area to ensure that, as a result of outdated legislation, some \u20ac300 billion in European savings do not leave the continent due to the inefficiency of our financial market. The same applies in the field of credit cards (e.g. Visa, MasterCard, American Express), most of them American and controlling vast amounts of data. Are we really unable to develop a European credit card? Is it so difficult for 450 million Europeans, who represent 17% of global GDP?<\/p>\n\n

The author and the participants in the Segovia meetings also consider it urgent, indeed, immediate, to promote a European defence industry that is not dependent on other countries. One revealing point made in Letta\u2019s book is that the European Union has spent around \u20ac150 billion on Ukraine, a figure comparable to that of the United States, although according to Josep Borrell it is in fact double; however, around 80% of this expenditure has gone to the American defence industry, as the European one remains underdeveloped. This military dependence has repercussions for political sovereignty and economic decision-making, as has been shown in the context of tariff disputes. Another equally telling point highlighted by Borrell during the Segovia meetings is that the European Union spends four times more than Russia on defence, yet it has 27 armies, compared to just one in Russia.<\/p>\n\n

Finally, for the former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, change is needed in the European decision-making system, and this requires genuine political will: China and the United States speak with a single voice on behalf of all. Europe, by contrast, faces greater complexity in decision-making; the constraint of unanimity should be replaced by qualified majority voting. Likewise, excessive legislative and regulatory activity, together with the fragmentation it entails, should be replaced by a supranational regulatory framework (\u201cthe 28\u201d), above national systems, in order to give businesses greater flexibility rather than imposing an unnecessary constraint. The aim should be to legislate in order to create the conditions for innovation, not bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles.<\/p>\n\n

In conclusion, these are the ideas, reforms, notably those put forward by Mario Draghi, and alternatives currently on the table regarding the future of the European Union, on which political leaders and European citizens will have to decide. Let us repeat: this is a warning from an essential book, which we hope will not fall on deaf ears. Time is pressing, and history does not wait.<\/p>\n\n

Cordoba, 18 September 2025<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An urgent reflection on the future of the European Union, based on the analysis of Enrico Letta and other leading figures. The text warns of a critical situation shaped by strategic dependencies and a lack of integration, and calls for far-reaching reforms in innovation, defence and governance. Europe faces a decisive choice: act now or accept its decline. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chronicles"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":32,"label":"Chronicles"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/intricate-stonework-entrance-of-a-roman-catholic-cathedral-in-cordoba-spain.-12030352-683x1024.jpg",683,1024,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"administrador","author_link":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/author\/administrador\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":32,"name":"Chronicles","slug":"chronicles","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":32,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":10,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":32,"category_count":10,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Chronicles","category_nicename":"chronicles","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2905,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions\/2905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.foroconvivenciacordoba.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}