“Europe risks becoming subordinated, divided, and deindustrialised”, if it does not turn itself into a “genuine federation”, former Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi said in a speech at the Belgian KU Leuven University on Monday.
According to Draghi, “power requires Europe to move from confederation to federation” because the global order is “now defunct”.
In his speech, delivered as he received an honorary degree from the university, Draghi painted a picture of a failed global order, tracing its decline to China’s joining the World Trade Organisation and Western countries beginning to trade with a state “with ambitions to become a separate pole itself”.
This, he said, set the stage for “the political backlash we now face” and ultimately produced “a world with less trade and weaker rules” – painful, but not a threat in itself.