When China’s president Xi Jinping visited Rome and Brussels
last year, many European leaders expressed to him Europe's concerns about China’s
investments in ‘strategic’ sectors, such as ports. Italy’s president, Sergio
Mattarella was crystal clear in voicing these concerns: «we are deeply Europeans», he said, «we have our own plans» (NB: apparently referring to Trans European Transport Networks- TEN-T), «to which we fully adhere, and we are nations living under the rule of law. These said and out of the way, we are open to discuss with you anything you like».
President Xi’s answer came the following day in Brussels:
«It is not China’s intention to cause problems and disrupt your infrastructure plans; on the contrary, we wish to work “with” you and dovetail those plans with our Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), so as win-win outcomes are achieved in the end
With Paolo and Roberto we thus decided to write this paper, meant
as a ‘roadmap’ towards a revision of our European transport network, dovetailing
two extremely complex systems: Our Trans European Transport Network (TEN-T) and
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The reasons that made us believe such
an undertaking would be worth its salt were: a) TEN-T will be revised in three
years (2023) anyway; b) Europe’s economic center of gravity moves towards its
eastern end; c) it is Europe’s eastern end too that attracts China’s interest,
as evidenced by its investments in the port of Piraeus, as well as in Serbia,
Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Baltic States.
I am not sure if we achieved our objective. It would be rather
naïve anyway to believe that issues of such complexity could be addressed
comprehensively through a short paper. At any rate, though, we believe that a
step in the right direction has been taken, even in the form of ‘advice’ to
policy makers in Europe and China.-
ΗΗ
P.S. Paper under review, to be uploaded soon as a preprint in ResearchGate.
No comments:
Post a Comment