BERLIN, January 24. /TASS/. Ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder (held the post in 1998-2005) believes that as a result of Europe’s current foreign policies, the European Union will lose its international importance and stop being a strategic force.
"Because of its current policies, the European Union is losing its international importance, and not only because Washington and Moscow are discussing Ukraine’s future behind the EU’s back, while we are also expected to pay the costs of the war," he wrote in an article for Berliner Zeitung.
Another reason, he said, was that "BRICS+ countries, along with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) make up more than half of the world’s population, while the European Union and its 450 million inhabitants account only for 5%."
"The global development, its technological and economical dynamics are shifting from the West to the East. All the more so, Europe has enough reasons to start viewing itself as a single entity, from Lisbon to the Urals," the former chancellor continued.
He emphasized that under US President Donald Trump Europe will eventually become a minor player in the global politics and will thus have to "suffer catastrophic consequences."
In his opinion, Washington’s new national security strategy sets the goal of establishing a new model of the Western world, in which the United States is the dominant force, while Europe is a peripheral entity that should settle for the role of a secondary player.
"The world is going through changes, but the European Union is only reacting to them, because even with the famous free trade agreement with MERCOSUR concluded, we are apparently no longer a strategically important entity. Today, the missed opportunity of creating the common European home in 1990 has come back to haunt us. It would have had huge global political importance for Europe," Schroder wrote.