In a geopolitical context “characterized by almost daily uncertainties and novelties,” in which Mare Nostrum appears to be increasingly sensitive to changing security concerns “the European Union should abandon its very Northern European approach and begin to focus more on the Mediterranean.”
This is the message that the president of the Italian port association, Assoporti, Rodolfo Giampieri, delivered this morning to the panel of experts and institutional representatives at a conference dedicated to the port industry and coordinated by the North Tyrrhenian Port Network Authority as part of the Biennale del Mare e dell’Acqua, the four-day event promoted by Livorno Municipality focusing on the city’s maritime vocation and people with a passion for the sea in all its facets.
This is not the first time that the issue of dealing with the EU has been raised by qualified experts. One of the first to speak about it, in Port News, was the former president of the Port Authority of Trieste, Zeno D’Agostino, currently head of the Veneto-based engineering company Technital.
“In Brussels we are governed by bureaucrats who aseptically and sometimes illogically check compliance with our regulations. It’s all legitimate, but the era in which Brussels concentrated on developing strategic visions as well as regulations seems to be over,” D’Agostino said in an interview in our magazine a few years ago.
The former chairman of the European Sea Ports Organization (ESPO) had suggested Brussels should work harder and better to enhance the strategic positioning of the ports bordering the Mediterranean, bringing back that vision of Mediterranean Free Trade Zones cherished by former transport commissioner Loyola De Palacio.
Today Mr Giampieri addressed the issue again, calling on Europe to consider the special characteristics of the competitive Mediterranean context that our ports operate in and stop focusing only on Northern Range ones: “There is too much concentration on the Northern European hotshots,” he said with a subtle vein of controversy. “Italian ports are not only competing with Mediterranean EU ones, but also with their North African counterparts, above all Morocco, which operates under totally different rules from ours and which, if it wants to build an infrastructure, does so with a different timeframe from ours and in a manner which is unlike our own.
“This focus on the Mediterranean,” the head of Assoporti admits, “should, first and foremost, be guaranteed by politics.” Something that cannot be taken for granted these days, especially if we look at what has happened with the ETS, the European Union’s Emissions Trading System that has been extended to the shipping sector since the beginning of 2024, a measure – the one laid down by Brussels – which, according to Mr. Giampieri, is not only detrimental to shipowners but also to consumers, putting European ports at a competitive disadvantage.
In short, Europe’s strategies should not only concern managing what already exists. They should have a visionary impetus that takes its cue from an analysis of a world that is constantly changing, imposing not only new market models (with reshoring and nearshoring) but an entirely different way of seeing things.
The chief editor of Limes, Fabrizio Maronta, pointed this out in his introductory speech: “Globalization as we knew it is no longer appropriate, because the convenience of an American-centric system aimed at shaping the world on the basis of a model that coupled consumer economy with the liberal-democratic order has disappeared,” he explained.
This model has not stood up against Chinese state capitalism, “an efficient capitalism that has allowed the Dragon to drive many of its competitors out of business.”
He refers to the recent battle over batteries: “Beijing has not merely extracted/imported the minerals needed to make them from South America or Africa. They have refined them, re-exporting semi-manufactured products to the West, thus gaining a strategic advantage.”
It’s a trade war that has now spread to seabeds, with the extraction of polymetallic nodules and, above all, to shipbuilding where the gap between the two countries than can no longer be bridged.
A gap that is not only commercial but also military, not least because China produces ships three to four times faster than the US. By 2030 the Chinese will have a naval military power far superior than the American one.
This means that “the US will struggle to maintain their unchallenged control of the seas for the common good of globalization. Their maritime dominance had been a decisive factor in facilitating the transformation of international trade into a highly integrated ecosystem with increasingly longer logistics chains and naval gigantism.”
Mr. Maronta is certain about it: “We are moving towards a world where the United States is set to seriously question its position and future options over the next few years.”
This situation will also have enormous consequences from a shipping point of view, with direct repercussions on Italy, which is a transformation economy that “lives on the added value of what it does with what it doesn’t have.”
The Mediterranean, which is now indirectly involved in the Middle East crisis, is increasingly sensitive to the issue of changes in the security context. It offers the countries bordering it a strategic advantage that must be exploited with a far-reaching policy.
This brings us back to the need for Europe to strengthen its ties with North Africa and the Middle East not only through mega infrastructural initiatives and extending the corridor logic involving companies, infrastructures and institutions, but also through adopting virtuous environmental sustainability policies.
“With the ETS, we have seen how the EU’s decarbonization process has been aimed more at punishing polluters than rewarding the virtuous,” said Alessandro Panaro, head of the research sector at SRM(Intesa Sanpaolo Group) and moderator of the conference. “In this way we have ended up creating evasive mechanisms that have damaged us,” he added.
Translation by Giles Foster
