EU Can't Be Too Dependent on Foreign Powers: Commissioner Gentiloni

Let's start with the China issues. I think David DeYanke was just talking about how the EU maybe does not want to necessarily get drawn into the conflict that is sort of brewing behind the scenes between China and the United States. Janet Yellen yesterday, the Treasury Secretary, addressed these issues. How much, if I want to call it pressure, is the U.S. exerting on its fellow G7 members behind the scenes to come on board with exerting essentially more pressure on China because of what is being alleged is economic coercion? Well, I don't think it's so much a pressure coming from U.S.

I think it's less unlearned by the European Union, less unlearned on the fact that we can't be too much dependent from foreign powers in our economy. This is also something that came very clearly from the Russian war in Ukraine in the energy sector. So we discovered that we were wrong and we discovered that we were too dependent from Russian gas. We were able to, I think, to solve this situation at least last winter in a very effective way, but we have to avoid to repeat this mistake in the future. So we need our autonomy. How would you define then de-risking versus decoupling? And what kind of economic shock are we talking about here? Because it seems as though there's a European shift, as you've just been alluding to. Olaf Scholz talked about, you know, essentially China has viewed more now as a rival and a competitor.

We have Italy signaling to the United States reportedly that they might opt out of the Belt and Road Initiative by the end of this year. It seems like these are pretty strong words and strong moves. Well, I think decoupling would be a very dangerous risk for the global economy. So I think especially for the European Union, which is definitely an open economy based on trade, it would be a big, big danger. What we are talking about is not closing our trade and our economic relation with China. What we are talking about is making our supply chains more secure and especially in some strategic sectors, so rare minerals, the clean technologies of the future. We can't be too much dependent from outside and too much dependent from a single country like China.

But the supply chains with China are so intertwined, it is very difficult to unwind those. I think you have to build your own capacity in some of these sectors. This is absolutely needed and we have to do this, for example, on rare materials working inside Europe. We have a lot of potentiality inside Europe for rare minerals and we have to work in partnership, for example, with Africa, partnership, not going there exploiting their own resources. But at the same time, this doesn't mean that we will not have economic and trade relations with China. This would be a danger for the global economy.

Bloomberg