French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday urged Europe to pursue balanced, mutual, and beneficial trade partnerships while reducing the bloc's dependencies.
"Europe must continue to pursue balanced and mutual, beneficial trade partnerships, but trade policy must now become a strategic tool to reduce dependencies and vulnerabilities," Macron said during his speech at the European Industry Summit in Belgium.
He particularly cited "critical roaming materials and strategic inputs," stressing that despite dozens of trade and mineral agreements, "Europe remains dangerously exposed."
"So, we must move from agreements on paper to concrete projects on the ground. This means supporting extraction, processing and refining capacity, investing in recycling and traceability and building strategic reserves, including a European stockpile of critical materials," Macron underscored.
He noted that if the bloc wants to deliver a holistic approach for a European industry, it needs to focus on mainly four pillars, including shared simplification and deepening of the single market, diversification of trade, protection and European preference and massive investment and innovation.
"We must deliver a genuine energy union capable of providing stable, predictable, and competitive energy to industry," Macron noted.
He reiterated the need for "massive investment in energy grids and interconnections, (and) long-term contracts," while stressing they need to build an integrated European grid.
"What we have to fix is the fragmentation of our market by building this infrastructure and the single regulation and integration of our national grid and regulation," he added.
Macron also underlined that in terms of diversification and de-risking, rare earths and critical minerals are "absolutely one of the key issues," where Europe have to diversify its partnerships and its circular solutions.
"Both China and the US, privately and publicly, are investing much more than we are doing. We are lagging behind," he further said.
He called on the bloc to be a "technological maker" and "not just a regulator."
"I don't believe in protectionism, but I don't believe in such a naive continent where we are the only one in this world not to protect the local producers," Macron added.
He added that it is "crazy" to invest in and finance non-European solutions.
"We have to fix our own national situation in terms of public finance, because it's how to deal with our social model. This is a national issue, but at the European level, we have to invest for our future and for our industry if we want to have the right level of investment," Macron stressed.
He further said that the only way to finance a common investment is to issue a common debt.
