Struggling to contain resurgent virus infections, European leaders on Friday decried a collective failure to vanquish the COVID-19 pandemic and told the UN General Assembly that the time has come for countries to reinvent international cooperation.
This year’s unusual work-from-home General Assembly — with leaders communicating only in prerecorded speeches — comes as COVID-19 cases escalate in many regions, but especially in Europe, where some of the world’s most advanced hospitals in some of the world’s richest countries are again under strain.
“This emergency has, more than a thousand treaties or speeches, made us suddenly realize that we are part of one single world,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said.
Photo: Reuters
The pandemic “has also revealed the fragility of countries that thought they were strong. It has thrown us all into the same sudden battle, against the same common enemy,” EU Council President Charles Michel said.
It has exposed weaknesses within the EU, which, like the UN, was founded on the ashes of World War II to avert new conflict and encourage cooperation — cooperation that was in short supply this year.
The EU has fought internally about access to equipment and vaccines, erected barriers among neighbors to keep out virus infections, and struggled to agree on collective solutions to fight COVID-19.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, whose country became a global symbol of the crisis as the first in the West to face a vast wave of infections, said that the pandemic should offer world governments “the opportunity for collective renewal.”
“This tragedy has changed us, but has also offered us the opportunity for a new beginning that is up to us to seize,” Conte said.
Worldwide, the COVID-19 death toll is nearing 1 million, although experts believe the real toll is likely higher.
In times of global crises, Europe’s rich governments are often looked to for financial and material aid for poorer ones.
However, this time, they are preoccupied with troubles of their own.
As infections tick up, EU countries are again imposing quarantines on visitors from neighboring nations. The UK and Spain are imposing local lockdowns, the French Open is curtailing access, and COVID-19 intensive care units in the Mediterranean city of Marseille are reaching saturation.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has wrecked livelihoods and darkened the world’s economic outlook, and damaged the whole concept of multilateralism that European leaders have long embraced.
“In every corner of the world today, there is a young man, a young woman, looking at their cell phone screen. In the most secluded streets of Naples, in a fish market in Istanbul, in the Zocalo in Mexico City, in the Ecuadorian Amazon or in a market in India. These young people have seen their fathers, their mothers, work ceaselessly,” Sanchez said. “And maybe these young people wonder why their fathers, their mothers, work ceaselessly if nothing changes around them.”
“Exactly when did we decide that the expression ‘to change the world’ had lost all sense and meaning? I wonder if any of those millions of young people are watching us right now, on their mobile phones. I wonder what they’re thinking of us, if so,” Sanchez added.
He also lamented the extra toll the virus has taken on women, “who have taken on the greatest burden of care and attention.”
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said it is time for Europe to “redefine its role in the world,” and took aim at the WHO’s management of the virus.
Other leaders called for boosting the WHO’s powers and its funding.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis appealed for more international help for its migrant crisis after feeling abandoned by fellow EU countries that closed their doors to refugees landing on Greek shores.
EU Council President Charles Michel used the virtual UN pulpit to lash out at the UK for its threats to renege on parts of the Brexit treaty it signed with the bloc.
Such treaties are seen as a cornerstone of the international system that the UN represents, and the UK’s threats are seen as a further unraveling of that structure in a time of growing nationalism worldwide.
In his speech yesterday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was to call for countries to share more data on disease outbreaks and to stop slapping export controls on essential goods to help prevent pandemics, his office said.
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