The EU must become a “federation” to avoid being “picked off one by one” by China and the US, Mario Draghi has warned, in a plea to the bloc’s member states to rapidly deepen integration in areas such as defence, industrial policy and foreign relations.
The former European Central Bank president, who has previously called for the bloc to embrace “pragmatic federalism”, said it was time for the EU to give up long-held resistance to pooling power because Washington and Beijing could abuse the dependencies created by globalisation.
“Power requires Europe to move from confederation to federation,” said Draghi, a former Italian prime minister, in a speech in Belgium. He added that the EU’s current model of a 27-state confederation with individual veto rights on key issues “does not produce power” but “a group of states . . . each vulnerable to being picked off one by one”.