Josep Borrel already knows that he will leave office, with his replacement already chosen, the head of European Union diplomacy warned this Sunday in Dubrovnik that the world is becoming increasingly “multipolar, but less multilateral”, and called for greater global cooperation in the face of challenges.
“We see more hubs, more actors, fewer rules, or at least less compliance with existing rules, and more disorder,” said Borrell at the 17th Dubrovnik Forum, in Croatia, dedicated to global crises and conflicts.
During an intervention in a panel on the relations between the North and the South, the West and the East, the Spaniard indicated that the consequences of this scenario are the “distribution of power, the change in the balance of forces” and warned of the fact that competitions could cause confrontations and conflicts.
He explicitly referred to the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, which could become a high-intensity confrontation, the conflicts in Asia and Africa, but also the “narrative wars and memories”, with their own interpretations and justifications from the parties involved in the events.
Borrell criticized some countries in the so-called “global south” who, according to him, prefer “flexible agreements to alliances and do not respect international norms”, while at the same time “blaming the West for not doing so or for doing so selectively”.
Borrell described it as “dangerous” that the world is divided into two different spheres, both technologically, economically and in terms of values, and called for greater cooperation in order to avoid the “danger of a divided world in two different spheres”.
“There is not a single global problem that can be solved without a strong commitment from all of us and, in particular, from China”, said the EU High Representative for Security and Foreign Policy.
Among these problems, he highlighted climate change, demography, biodiversity, health, migration and technology.
Borrell also called for greater solidarity to curb the consequences of major crises, citing the covid-19 pandemic as an example.
At the time, vaccination was massive in the West, unlike other regions where the level of vaccination was very low, which created a “great inequality” between the different regions of the world.
