Thank you very much for being here.

When I started my mandate, I said that “the EU needs to learn to speak the language of power”. And some years later, when presenting the Strategic Compass, I said another sentence which will be part of my heritage: “Europe is in danger”.

At that time people smiled, saying that I was trying to sell my product. But now, everybody agrees that Europe is in danger and everybody talks about security and defence. It has become THE European issue.

There are a couple of wars in our vicinity and everybody is talking about the next steps to build European defence, which, by the way, I am in charge of because my job is to be High Representative of the Union for Foreign affairs and security policy. And security and defence go together.

When I came in Brussels, everybody was looking at the first part of my job because war and security were not in, at that stage. Now, more and more of my time is being devoted to security and defence.

Security is something more than defence. We talk now also about economic security. Everything has a security dimension because everything is being weaponised. But defence owns the hard meaning of the word. Defense, which means having military capabilities, will be at the heart of EU policies. Maybe it will be the third act of the EU project.

We need to avoid the development of an international dynamic of “the West against the rest” or “the rest against the West”. What is happening in Gaza has portrayed Europe in a way that the rest of the world does not understand. And also when it comes to the war against Ukraine, many people around the world have had some difficulties to understand what is going on.

We have to prove that when we say that something is a war crime somewhere, it is a war crime everywhere. We have to try to avoid double standards and to avoid that the rest of the world does not understand what we do, or what the others try to do to us, and present a Union based on values. Which in the end is what the EU has to be: a Union based on values.

And the most important values are peace and solidarity, because our union was based on that: building peace among the Europeans and solidarity and cohesion among us. We have to be a force that pushes for peace and solidarity around the world.

And for that, we imagined that trade was a good tool. There is a German expression: transformation through trade, “Wandel durch Handel”. My German is very poor. It was based on the assumption that trade of goods and dialogue will induce political and social change. It was proved to be wrong when dealing with a dictator.

Rather than achieving the effect of making Russia more liberal and democratic, this policy became a threat for us because we have become more dependent on Russia’s energy. We learned that interdependency goes both sides and at the end, dependencies can become a challenge or a weakness.

But at the same time, interdependency is at the heart of the European Union project. We started with coal and steel to make peace among us. We have done a lot and we should be proud of what the European Union represents in the world today. But once again, I want to stress the fact that we are a union based on principles that we consider universal and have to defend everywhere.

And today Europe is really feeling a sense of the challenge. We are being challenged. And that's why I am saying that, in the next step, the European project will be very much related with building a common security and defence. It does not mean saying that the war is imminent and is going to start tomorrow. But we need to make EU citizens to understand that the US umbrella that has protected us during the Cold War and after, may not stay open all the time.

That, maybe, depending on who is ruling in Washington, we cannot rely on the American support and on the American capacity to protect us. We have to build our common defence capacity. We have to take our own responsibility. Maybe strategic responsibility is a better wording that strategic autonomy, but that means basically the same: the capacity to act, the capacity to defend ourselves, the capacity to face the challenges which for us are the most important. NATO will remain absolutely irreplaceable. But inside NATO we have to build a strong European pillar. A war is not going to start tomorrow against us. But, we cannot deny the reality: a rising competition among big powers, high intensity conflicts between states, weaponisation of economic interdependency, cyber warfare and disinformation are part of our reality.

A couple of days ago, the Defence Minister of Germany [Boris Pistorius] has said that he has to prepare the Bundeswehr to be able to fight a war. They have created another branch of the army - not only the air, navy and the land forces - but a new branch for cyber security and disinformation. They have created this new branch of the army in order to face a new dimension of the war, a new dimension of ensuring security.

And at the same time we see that the traditional sources of dispute - territoriality, sovereignty, national identity - are coming back with violent conflicts. What's happening in Ukraine, what's happened in Gaza is the very old conflict for land, with people who claim: ‘This is my land, it belongs to me”.

We were told that geography doesn't matter because globalisation has erased borders and cancelled geography. Well, this is not true. Geography is here and people are still fighting for land.

We imagined to be surrounded by a ring of friends after the fall of Berlin Wall. This world is being replaced by a ring of fire around us. From instability from the Sahel to the Middle East to the Caucasus, to the Baltics. Not to look elsewhere in Africa. There is really a ring of fire around us.

And I think that we are living a very important moment in the European construction process, because war is certainly looming on the horizon. And that's not a small matter. That's not a small thing. 1956, the last colonial adventure around the Suez Canal, was the last moment in which European armies tried to make war outside their borders. Since then, we have expelled war from our mindset. We were very busy in building peace among European nations. But, today war comes back to us. And we have to look at this, while continuing to build peace in the rest of the world because this remains our purpose too.

But to achieve it, we need something more than nice words. We need more than that to shield ourselves from the turbulence of the world. We have to engage with the rest of the world to try to reduce these turbulences. And this means to build a stronger foreign policy and a stronger defence capacity.

Trade is not enough. When we look at the institutional architecture of the European Union, foreign policy and defence remain a national competence. It will be a battlefield between institutions during the next legislature. You will see that the intergovernmental branch and the communitarian branch will be fighting each other in order to occupy this political space.

But today, foreign affairs and defence are in the hands of the Member States. They wanted to keep this instrument of sovereignty in their hands because they collectively believed that NATO should be the guarantor of the European collective security.

Europe was built on a dichotomy. Economic integration was left to the European Union institutions and security in the hands of NATO. And the end of the Cold War increased this dichotomy. Some European countries made this division of labor very evident. I've been visiting some of them. On their public buildings they put three flags: the national flag, the European flag and the NATO flag. It is not the case for all members of the European Union: in France, Spain or Italy, you don't find these three flags. They use only two. But if you go to the East of the continent, the three flags are behind the desk of the government officials.

The fundamental question that we have to answer today is if we can continue to rely on this division of labor. And my answer is no. The war in Ukraine has brutally revealed the world as it is and not as we wanted it to be. It is a world marked by the Russian threat to the European Union as a whole.

Even though Ukraine is not yet a member of the European Union, the war against Ukraine is a threat to the Union as a whole. We cannot dissociate the fate of the Ukrainian people from the fate of the European Union people, especially since Putin is determined to extend its destabilising activities to the whole Union. To destabilise societies is not only made by bombing. You will see in the next European elections how Russian destabilisation will be threatening our democracy. But the prospect, the possibility of a high intensity conventional war in Europe is no longer fantasy.

And we have obviously to do everything to avoid it. But you know that to deter that threat, we need to have the means to do so. It is nothing new. I was reading Robert Schumann Declaration, and this declaration started by saying, and I quote “World peace cannot be safeguarded without making creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which we are threatened”. Did you hear Robert Schumann? Peace in the world cannot be safeguarded without putting our efforts in a proportionate manner to the dangers that threaten us. It is nothing new, but it seems something new because we were used to a different world.

And I think that the European Union is entering today in a third moment of its construction: the third moment, the third stage. The first was in 1957: common market with a limited number of European public policies. The second was the acceleration of economic integration through the single market and the single currency. And the third has started with the war in Ukraine, which will lead to the birth of a strong European security and defence pillar.

The issue is: what should we do in order to achieve this new and ambitious goal? Until now, when speaking about wars, one would have said: “Ask NATO”. Now, it is not enough anymore. First, we have to fulfil our obligations, our moral and political obligations, towards Ukraine. And there the situation is extremely difficult. The Russian military machine is running at full speed. At a considerable cost, but at full speed. There is a complete asymmetry between Russia and Ukraine.

Russia can maintain a prolonged war of attrition and given the impression of having won it, when in fact it has been losing it. They arrived at eight kilometres from the Ukrainian parliament - the Russian tanks were at eight kilometres of the Ukrainian Parliament, the Rada - and they have been pushed back. It is enough for Russia not to lose in order to show that they are winning. Ukraine, on the contrary, needs to win in order not to lose.

So I make a call here and will do the same call to the EU Foreign Affairs and Defence ministers in a couple of weeks, when we will meet all together, to increase the anti-air defence capacities so that Ukraine can stop the Russian missiles and their glide bombs that are destroying urban infrastructure.

We are talking about Ukraine reconstruction but we should talk more about avoiding destruction. The best way of spending less on reconstruction is to spend more on avoiding destruction. And Ukrainians do not have the capacity to avoid destruction because, to tell the truth, we should be doing more and quicker in order to allow them to have the capacities they need.

I spoke with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba some days ago and he is desperately asking for seven Patriot batteries to protect his country. It should be inconceivable that we were not able to provide them, given that the Western armies have about 100 batteries of Patriot. And still, we are not able to provide the seven they are asking desperately for.

The second thing for sure is to talk about ammunition, which means to talk about our industrial capacity to produce more. And then comes the big question: what kind of institutional setting do we need to reach the level of our ambitions on security and defence? I think that a Europe of defence will not emerge from a great top-down supranational plan. Europe has never been built like this.

We have to face the two problems that we have. One is a problem of expenditure, of money, of resources, of finance. And then we have a problem of collective action: how do we manage, how do we organise our collective action? We have a problem of expenditure because we have neglected defence and security issues since the euro crisis.

At the end of the Cold War the Bundeswehr, the army that the German Defence minister Boris Pistorius says has to be prepared for war, had 500,000 soldiers. Today they are about 150,000. Numbers do not explain everything, since the people that you needed during the Cold War had completely different skills from the kind of skills that you would need today. With conscription, you may have hundreds of thousands of infantrymen that are not qualified. This is not the solution because you need very specific skills, maybe less people but better prepared for the modern warfare.

But certainly, Europe has gone through a silent process of disarmament at least since 2008. And now we have to increase our financial capacity. I don't know how. Is there an issue of public debt when we have an existential threat in front of us? The pandemic was an existential threat and we managed to go around the treaties in order to have the possibility of doing something that was theoretically forbidden: go to the financial markets and ask for money, because it was a matter of life or death. And during the euro crisis we did the same thing. The European Stability Mechanism was created to go around the treaties - or creating new treaties - in order to circumvent the unanimity, because the euro crisis was an existential threat.

Is defence an existential threat today? Is the support to Ukrainian existential? If it is, then we should think wide. We should think deeper as we have done in the past, whenever something that we considered an existential threat happened.

But I'm not going to go deep on that because I am not the Minister of Finance. I'm only saying that we lack resources. The important thing is, and this is at the core of my job, how do we take seriously our defence ambitions and change the institutional setting of the European Union to reach them.

There are four different levels: the States, the cooperation among States, the community action and the strategic alliances, mainly NATO. And we have to play on these four fields.

The State is the first level. At the beginning and at the end there are the Member States. The States have armies. We don't have an army in Brussels and we will not have an European army tomorrow. The Member States are the master of the defence policy. I have heard Heads of State and Government saying to the Commission: “We don't want a transfer of competences on defence to the community side”.

Defence is a national sovereignty sign and they don't want more transfer of sovereignty in this field. But we have to make each Member State work and engage with the 2% GDP target for defence. We are far away from that. But this target doesn't say everything. You can spend more on defence tomorrow by increasing the pensions of the military staff. Indeed you spend more on defence, but this does not increase your defence capacity. You can also spend more in defence by doing more research and development or by building industrial capacities.

Let me give you just one figure. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, 80% of arms’ purchase, of investment in Europe has been done out of the European Union. 80% has been bought by people producing out of our borders and 80% of this 80% comes from the United States. Well. This is a strong dependency. We cannot afford this dependency if we want really to be responsible. On research and development we are very far below our expectations.

On defence spending, the trend is positive, but we need to get to the second level, which is intergovernmental cooperation. We need more intergovernmental cooperation. We have done something, as the European Peace Facility for example, which has created a very positive dynamics in favour of Ukraine. There is a huge potential of increasing defence cooperation among Member States. But I have to say that is still there is a reluctance to share technology among States or a tendency to favour the national arms manufacturers – “I want to be able to build my own arms because you never know”. This is a fragmentation of capacity that the US do not have. Because the Pentagon is a big buyer and we don't have a Pentagon here. And the US States are not suspicious of each other when it comes to where the capacities are placed: Nevada, Ohio or Miami it doesn't matter.

Here, it is not the same thing. We have to create a new intergovernmental financing vehicle - let's call it European Defence Mechanism - comparable to the one we created during the financial crisis to support some Member States suffering from it. The Member States already created the European Defence Agency, but they did not fund it. They said: “Do it!”. But they have never been able to provide a budget to the European Defence Agency.

And then, there is the Commission, which has not the mandate on defence but has the budget. We have a certain duality. There is someone who has to the knowledge in terms of military and has produced for years reports that went unnoticed until the war in Ukraine, but has never had the budget to influence the industrial capacity’s development.

The Commission has a budget and now we are using it to boost the defence industry development. But the heads of the industrial sector tell me: “Send me orders, don't build long term strategies. Give me orders and I will produce. If I have the prospects of having a demand, I will increase my production capacity to fulfil this demand”.

And this is something that we have to learn when we talk about the third level, which is the community level. The community level may do a lot to create a new institutional ecosystem that promotes cooperation among different firms. It will take quite long, but we have to do it. Otherwise, we will never have the capacity to produce at home what we are buying outside today.

I am arriving finally to the fourth level of action: our alliances and NATO in the first place. NATO is at the heart of our collective security. But NATO too has to adapt to the new realities of a world that is changing. You know, for a long time some people have been fearing that the development of the European strategic responsibility – I say strategic responsibility and not autonomy – would come at the expenses of NATO. And that this would, directly or indirectly, encourage a decoupling between the United States and Europe. However, the risk of this decoupling is not coming from the development of the strategic responsibility on the European side: it is coming from the US. It was very much interesting to see, during my last visit to Washington, that the Americans themselves were applauding to the development of a strategic responsibility of the Europeans: ”Yes. Please do it. Do it. Advance. Create your own capacity. This European pillar of NATO is very much welcome”.

So the decoupling is no longer perceived as a risk, because this risk is not coming from us. The decision to increase our capacity is due to the lack of will from the other side of the Atlantic to keep the commitment to defend all the members of NATO, in all circumstances. I think that a European Strategic Responsibility is the best way to strengthen NATO, because NATO cannot remain credible unless its Members increase their military credibility, unless we increase our credibility. This is the main lesson that we can draw from the war against Ukraine.

And second, we must admit that in an alliance the priorities of its members may change over time. And in fact, they are changing. The US is turning to the Pacific. Now Americans have had to come back to Europe because of the war in Ukraine, but their main focus for them remains the Pacific. And a more balanced partnership between the United States and Europe is required in order for each side to strengthen the unity of the alliance. I think that the US are interested in that, because the European security is part of the US security.

Don't forget one thing: the ‘Pax Europea’ has been possible thanks to the ‘Pax Americana’. There would not be peace on the European continent without NATO preventing another war in Europe. And this combination is something that we should be very proud of. It has guaranteed a common defence capacity that has avoided war, thanks to a deterrence capacity that now has to be increased and adapted to the new challenges of the world.

My successor will have to work a lot on defence. I am sure that the institutional setting of the defence and security in Europe will be one of the most important political debates among the Member States and with the European Parliament, in order to decide who does what. And I think that everybody has to do a lot. Member States, each one of them, at home, cooperating among themselves and at intergovernmental level. Developing the community pillar, according to the competences of the treaty. And building a stronger partnership with our allies in the world in order to defend our values and to be recognised as someone who has real values. Real values mean valuable in any circumstances. Today, there is a strong criticism against the European because we are not being perceived like that. So we have a lot of work in front of us. The next High Representative for Foreign affairs and Security and Defence policy will have a lot of work.

Let us start today. Thank you

• Link to the video: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-255355