Chronic. “We are convinced that Europe needs a stronger common energy policy (…) that guarantees access to energy at a stable and reasonable price, which maintains our industrial competitiveness, which promotes sustainable development and the Switching to a poor carbon society, which mobilizes the investment to stimulate the industrial prospects of tomorrow and ensures security of supply to all Europeans. “
These sentences could have been pronounced in response to the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the energy shock it caused. In fact, they date from May 2010 and are extracted from a Joint Declaration of the Polish Jerzy Buzek, then President of the European Parliament, and Jacques Delors, the former President of the European Commission. Nearly sixty years after the launch of the European coal and steel community, their idea was to start a return to the sources by returing meaning to the European project thanks to the energy.
The question arises today to understand why, despite some progress, the beautiful intentions of the time did not materialize and why it was not until the aggression triggered by Vladimir Putin to realize the extent of the Energy vulnerability of the EU.
“The Russian aggression war in Ukraine shows us dramatically how close security and supply is closely related. We can not afford to ignore this,” recognizes Patrick Grayen, the secretary of German state to climate. It was time. If the blindness has been collective, Berlin has played a central role in the naivety of which the EU has shown. Neither the vehement of Putin against Western unilateralism pronounced in 2007 at the conference on the safety of Munich, nor the coup against Georgia in 2008 were enough to convince that our oil and gas supplies with the Russia could sooner or later pose problem.
The key role of Poland
You have to wait until 2009 and a breach of supplies east of Europe provoked by a Russian-Ukrainian blossom on the gas pension to attend the EU awakening, in which Poland plays a key role. “Warsaw can be criticizable on other aspects of European construction, but if we listened to the Poles at the time, we would certainly not be there,” says Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, Director of the Energy Center at the Jacques-Delors Institute. But Poland will remain isolated until the European Commission, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, in 2014, finally decides to accelerate the establishment of a union of energy.
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