WEF 2025: European Commission chief Ursula says top team to visit India to boost ties

Davos, Jan 21 (IANS) European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday that the first trip of her new team will be to India to boost ties with the world’s largest democracy which has succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty.

“Together with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi we want to upgrade the strategic partnership with the largest country and democracy in the world,” von der Leyen told the Davos World Economic Forum.

“As supply chains went global, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty, especially in India,” she said in her address.

She also warned that a ‘sea-change in global affairs’ had taken place in the past 25 years.

The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality. Instead, we have entered a new era of harsh geostrategic competition.

The world’s major economies are vying for access to raw materials, new technologies and global trade routes.

From AI to clean tech, from quantum to space, from the Arctic to the South-China Sea – the race is on.

“As this competition intensifies, we will likely continue to see frequent use of economic tools – such as sanctions, export controls and tariffs – that are intended to safeguard economic and national security.

But it is important that we balance the imperative to safeguard our security against our opportunity to innovate and enhance our prosperity,” von der Leyen stated.

“In this spirit, we will need to work together to avoid a global race to the bottom. Because it is in no one’s interest, to break the bonds in the global economy. Rather we need to modernise the rules to sustain our ability to produce mutual gain for our citizens,” the European Commission President said.

She explained that, on the one hand, since the year 2000, the volume of global trade has doubled, although trade within regional blocs is now expanding faster than trade between them. It is common that a chip is designed in the United States, built in Taiwan with European machines, packaged in Southeast Asia, and assembled in China.

On the other hand, last year alone, global trade barriers have tripled in value. International trade institutions have often struggled to address the challenges posed by the rise of non-market economies that compete by a different set of rules.

Innovation continues to flourish, with advances in AI, quantum computing and clean energy poised to change our way of life and work, but technology controls have also quadrupled in recent decades.

“Our supply chain dependencies are at times weaponised, as shown by Russia’s energy blackmail, or exposed as brittle when global shocks, such as the pandemic, emerge without warning. And the very interconnectors that bring us together, like undersea data cables, have become targets – from the Baltic Sea to the Taiwan Strait,” she said.

–IANS

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