H.E. Mr. Vincent Gu?rend:

I thank the Deputy for those important and difficult questions. When we prepared for the Presidency in my previous job - until summer 2020 I was chief of staff of the French Minister for European affairs so was part of the preparation - we were heading towards Covid and so on. It was the French Presidency's agenda that we had to reconcile Europe even more with its citizens. In Ireland, you do very well; in France, we do less well, hence the agenda of belonging and connecting with citizens. That was one challenge and the other one was to assert Europe more at international level and beef up European tools against a more and more challenging, not to say hostile, environment, including the close environment. As the Deputy said, events in the Ukraine have made this much worse than we anticipated.

On dependency, I believe there are two kinds of dependency. The dependency of some European countries is not really a choice but is inherited from the past. I think particularly of all the eastern EU member states, which inherited gas, oil and coal supplies from their old connection with the former Soviet Union and which have been slow in transforming this, even though the climate change agenda was a driver of change. This was not really their choice and now they face an extremely difficult timeline in which to transform this. We see that some for political reasons have been very swift, like Poland and the Baltic states. Others, like Hungary, consider it is too quick and difficult.

The other category of countries, in particular Germany and Italy, for political reasons which are perfectly legitimate but are now showing their limitations, believe that engagement with Russia was the right way to ultimately find a shared prosperity agenda on the European Continent. Speaking about Germany, it dates back to the early 1970s. For Italy, it is probably an even older agenda if you look at all the industrial joint ventures between Italy and Russia in the 1960s in the automotive and other sectors.

This agenda has blatantly shown its strong limitation and it is extremely painful for all European countries, and those in particular, to be faced with this limitation. It is difficult to blame them because the whole EU and the whole world had the same agenda with regard to China. In the 1990s and 2000s - and it continues to a lesser extent - we engaged heavily with China, considering that shared prosperity and globalisation was, as our Chinese friends would say, a win-win and would create a de facto solidarity which would prevent war, etc.

When considering what we have done with Russia, mainly on energy but also in the context of other kinds of commodities, we should not forget that we do the same with China on a broader range of products. Against this background, we will have to respond rapidly and strongly to the challenges of climate transition and the transition in our energy supply. There is, therefore, the double challenge of accelerating peace. It is also an opportunity, even though we know there are bottlenecks in terms of being able to equip ourselves with wind turbines, solar panels and this and that. In a way, it strongly reinforces the call for renewable energy sources and energy autonomy in Europe. We in France believe this has strongly reinforced our agenda of energy autonomy with nuclear energy. It has more generally reinforced our agenda for the so-called strategic autonomy of the EU.

I will say clearly that this is not about building a fortress Europe or an autocratic Single Market cut off from the rest of the world. It is not at all about that. France is a big exporter of goods and services. We need trade on goods and services and there is no intention whatsoever to close this exchange with the rest of the world. There is, however, an intention to say that on certain critical commodities and products, we can no longer just believe that our trade partners will respect their contracts. Remember the kind of extremely dramatic scenes we saw relating to the supply of masks two years ago. It became a terrible race to get a supply of masks, etc. It does not mean necessarily that we need enormous production of masks but we must think more strategically about what is critical for business continuity in Europe and where we have to act more strategically without being overly dependent on supplies from overseas.

The war in Ukraine is far from over. It has taught us that we can be united and should remain so. European strength is based on values. We have the financial and legal tools to remain united. Economically and in terms of defence, we want to beef up capacity. We have a roadmap now and it is important to roll it out. There are 72 measures included in the strategic compass, 48 of which are to be rolled out in 2022 and 2023. It is now about implementation based on a shared analysis and the best analysis of the need of the day. It is now about implementation.