EU increasingly “Rogue State”: do they think they can solve their vaccine failures with anti-market bullying?
Here we go again. With a nasty frustration, once it noticed the flaws in its contracts for anti- Covid vaccines, Brussels had already tried, just over a month ago, to block the doses destined for other countries. As we reported in those days , the Commission had in fact decided to block the supplies of vaccines to Northern Ireland, without even informing the Dublin government and unilaterally breaking the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) signed on the sidelines of the Brexit agreement. – a violation that he had complained a few months earlier to the Johnson government which, on the contrary, wanted to ensure that food and medicines arrived in Belfast.
Yesterday it turned out that the Italian government blocked the shipment to Australia of 250,000 doses of AstraZeneca produced in Italy, in the plant of the American company Catalent in Anagni, near Rome. First European government to make use of the ad hoc mechanism studied by the European Commission – which in fact gave its green light – to "punish" companies that do not respect, according to what they say in Brussels, their contractual obligations with the EU.
Let's say right away that if there are contractual violations by pharmaceutical companies, these should be challenged by legal means, not sanctioned unilaterally with embargo measures. If, on the other hand, a contractor has been careless and superficial, and has realized that he has not been able to protect his interests, he should take full responsibility for it.
In any case, getting to the blocking of exports of a private company destined for another country, especially in such a delicate area as the pharmaceutical one and in full pandemic, represents a hostile act both towards that country and towards the free market. An act of piracy, albeit committed by a state with the backing of a wannabe Superstate . State power is abused to interfere, to the point of blocking it, in a private sale. Which – and who better than Draghi should in theory realize it – certainly does not sound like an incentive to invest in Italy. It is a huge red alert for companies that plan to open factories in our country, and in the EU in general, employing thousands of people: your contracts with third parties could in fact be arbitrarily canceled.
Among other things, before thinking of blocking the vaccine doses destined for other countries, decency would like to be able to administer the millions of doses still in their refrigerators. In particular, Italy cannot evoke the "state of necessity", having still to administer almost 1.2 million AstraZeneca doses out of the 1.5 received, and having the Italian health authorities irresponsibly decided to exclude the over 65 (and initially even those over 55). In short, at the moment the Italian government cannot justify its decision with the lack of doses, neither in general nor in particular of AstraZeneca , managing to administer only a small part of its stocks.
And try to imagine the reactions if this blockade had been decided by a Salvini government, or even the previous Conte 2 government: they would have been caught in rattles, there would have been talk of nationalism to the clams, the "Competent" Bocconians would have immediately taken the chair … But Draghi, the high priest of the Eurofederalist cult, he can. A country that fails to exercise sovereignty over its borders, allowing NGOs, which respond to the interests of who knows who, to decide who enters its territory, all of a sudden, with a colander in the head, it begins to embargo vaccination …
There is talk of "vaccine sovereignty" again and the efforts to produce in our country the national need for vaccines and other drugs that we have and will need in the near future are certainly far-sighted. The pandemic has in fact brought to the fore the issue of national security in the health field.
But here the national interest and sovereignty, at least that which is exercised in a state of law, have nothing to do with it. We are in the field of the will of the absolute sovereign, who decides to give himself the full availability of a certain good only because it is produced in the territory over which he rules. In our case, arbitrariness serves the "sovereigns" of Brussels and Rome to cover up their failures, it is the typical arrogance of the impotent, to raise one's voice to hide the lack of arguments. But as mentioned, the Italian decision is part of a "punitive" mechanism set up in Brussels and this tells us a lot about the European Union itself, which is becoming more and more a "Rogue State" .
We remember perfectly when Eurolyrics explained to us that Brexit would fuel national selfishness, trigger trade wars, aggressive and even authoritarian behavior. As Daniele Capezzone observed, the forecast was correct, "only" the side of the English Channel where this would happen was wrong. The "sovereign" bullying does not come from London, but from Brussels.
At least on this, on Altantico Quotidiano we had seen it right. Bullying has been practiced by Brussels since the start of the Brexit negotiations with London. As the claims of European negotiators have shown (even dynamic alignment with future EU regulations), the attempt was to sabotage the economy of the reprobate country. Not the mutual benefit of free trade was the goal, but the economy and trade as weapons to assert the political power of the EU.
If in the case of vaccines, as in the case of Brexit , the EU resorts to anti-market bullying it is because, as Italians4Brexit admirably explained , the EU is fundamentally an illiberal project. "It is far from being a creature of economic liberalism, as an over-represented Italian euro-liberal minority claims to convince us, and it is far from being an engine of 'Smithian growth'". The European institutions are instead the "geopolitical weapons" of Berlin and Paris, "the product of a profoundly illiberal and paranoid vision of the world", "irremediably zero-sum", and are governed by "a nomenklatura too devoted to its own secular ideology to accept the requests of others, if not opportunistically, for their own purposes ".
"Our priority is to protect the single market and reaffirm the political power of the European continent," French finance minister Le Maire openly declared in 2019 at the presentation of his rather eloquently titled book, "The New Empire: Europe in the twenty-first century " . "Peaceful empire", he assures (and on the other hand, all the empires in history proclaimed to act to ensure peace), necessary to resist the "vassalization attempts" of China and the United States (put on the same level).
The emphasis on the " political power of the European continent" is however "a claim of the power that the EU can exercise in the economic sphere, which makes the EU hostile not only to free trade, but to the free market itself".
This applies to attempts to attack member countries that adopt competitive tax systems; it applies to attacks on American multinationals and the defense of Franco-German public champions; it applies to the expansion of the EU budget and taxation, to protectionist measures, to investment planning and to ideologically motivated "transitions"; it applies, as mentioned, to Brexit and now to vaccines. More Europe means less free market.
Recent history, concluded Italians4Brexit (I highly recommend reading it in full ), tells us how the EU has become a "geopolitical project particularly uninhibited in ignoring economic rationality (but also democracy, political legitimacy, security of the Atlantic bloc, international agreement …) in order to perpetuate itself ".
The post EU increasingly “Rogue State”: do they think they can solve their vaccine failures with anti-market bullying? appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/ue-sempre-piu-rogue-state-pensano-di-risolvere-con-bullismo-anti-mercato-i-loro-fallimenti-sui-vaccini/ on Fri, 05 Mar 2021 05:05:00 +0000.