European Council: don't drop the important for the urgent
Ahead of the European Council on Thursday, Renew Europe urges leaders not to lose sight of the economic reform agenda.
Valérie Hayer, Renew Europe President, says: “When a crisis occurs it is tempting to drop the important for the urgent. Iran will be high on the agenda of the European Council. And rightly so. This is an urgent topic. But it should not make us forget about the efforts we have to make to reform our economy. Because these efforts are crucially important for the long term. In fact, both the urgent and the important here are linked. The geopolitical crisis we witness exposes our economic witnesses”
Valérie HayerRenew Europe MEP, France, Renaissance
Today, Renew Europe adopted a position paper arguing that our best geopolitical asset is our single market.
João Cotrim de Figueiredo, Renew Europe, Vice-President in charge of economic matters explains: “Geopolitical clout ultimately depends on economic strength. If you decline economically, you’re no longer a player on the world stage. The heydays of the rule-based international order corresponds to the decades of growth of Western liberal economies.”
He continues: “There are three sources of growth for Europe. First: our single market, growth within our reach waiting to be unlocked. Second: innovation, the growth of tomorrow. Third, our trade assertiveness, the growth we will be able to leverage if we stop being pushed around. Our paper focuses on those three pillars”.
Here are the most salient points of the paper:
A call for national leaders to come to the European Council with a list of national barriers to internal EU trade in their own country and commit to remove them and a single market task force to take down the most egregious barriers to inner-EU trade.
A European Research Area where researchers are given common standards and common goals and a European Innovation Act to help research turn into business opportunities.
The creation of a Geoeconomic Deterrence Pact with Japan, Canada, and South Korea with a NATO-style mutual response clauses at its heart: If one country is attacked by aggressive tariffs, all countries should react.
