Minister of Foreign Affairs, George Gerapetritis’ speech at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (Boston, 25.09.2023)

MODERATOR: Thank you, everyone, for coming to this very special event. I'm Grzegorz Ekiert. I'm a professor of government and the Director of the Center for European Studies here. And it's my really great honor and pleasure to introduce George Gerapetritis, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic.

I would also like to welcome Stratos Efthymiou, the great friend of the Center, and the current Consul General of Greece, Symeon Tegos. And of course, I would like to welcome the Harvard Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vice-Provost Marc Elliott.

Mr. Gerapetritis in the best European tradition is a diplomat and a scholar. He holds PhD from Oxford University from the Faculty of Law. He is Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law at University of Athens. He was Visiting Professor in the best places in the world, London School of Economics, University of Oxford, University of London, Harvard Law School.

I have just received as a gift his latest book on new economic constitutionalism in Europe. So, as you see, our guest is a very accomplished academic and scholar. But he is also a public servant. He was the Minister of State in the previous government, from July 2019 to May 2023.

And after the latest election, he was named the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic. We are delighted to have you here and thank you so much for coming. And the floor is yours please.

“It's an outstanding honor for me to be here with you. It's been a life-long dream to give a talk to Harvard. When I was here 10 years ago as a visiting fellow over a summer at the Institute of Global Law and Policy, I thought I might come back, but not under these circumstances, obviously.

But at least there is one good thing because when I came, there were some high security grounds. And we were very difficult to go through the campus. Whereas now I have solved this problem with my own security coming here. So, it's excellent to be here just across Athens of America and at this Center, which is of paramount importance for us, Europeans, because it makes a bridge with Europe.

And thanks to Professor Eckert and Professor Papoulias and the whole academic and administrative staff of the Center and most importantly the students who are here, this bridge is very solid and compact and we expect to further enhance it. And we will do our best as Greek administration, first of all, and then as European administration, to try and promote those links and make them really permanent.

As I was discussing with Professor Eckert a few minutes ago, the truth is that European studies are not exactly in fashion in those days because they are considered to be something like a political given. The transatlantic relations which are at a very high level of cooperation and coordination and good faith have switched, I think, the interest towards other more exotic places to study about, like Asian studies and especially China and India, or African Studies, or Latin American studies. But the truth is that without European studies nobody can exactly understand the historical sequence of phenomena, which have resulted in what is today the links between Europe and the United States.

Thank you, Professor Eckert and Professor Papoulias, for the excellent invitation. I come here today after a very tough week in New York. And this is the absolutely most enjoyable part of my trip in the United States because New York was, as you can imagine, a very hectic week. It was the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations. And the high-level week was really very packed with meetings and with events, trilateral and bilateral meetings.

We met with a lot of people. The truth is that apart from the ritual of the General Assembly, because there is always a ritual when it comes to UN, the truth is that this is a unique opportunity to actually meet delegations from all over the world, which under normal circumstances is not easy to travel. And they always have to contribute to the world status quo.

And I really urge you, if you have some time, to go through the minutes of the General Assembly and to watch the speeches of the world's leaders because you will then understand how different perceptions exist around the globe. I think it's probably one of the most extraordinary opportunities to identify that we're not alone in the world, which is a knowledge that we all have to acquire and maintain in order to have a rational based decision making. So please have a look at it.

I will try to split my small presentation in two parts. The first part is going to be about the global challenges that we encounter in the current era. And then I will speak about Greece and how my country envisages the global political scenery.

In my eyes today-- and I think I reflect the conclusions drawn over the General Assembly of the United Nations-- there are five major challenges:

The first challenge is climate change, climate crisis as we say, which has now become, I think, an existentialist issue. It clearly threatens our well-being, our lives, our existence. We have encountered in this summer some really adverse phenomena.

Only in Greece and in the Mediterranean we had consecutively extreme wildfires, both on the continent and on the islands. We had to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the islands while being there as tourists. And there was a huge operation in order to provide them with travel documents that they had left behind and to make some special air carriers in order to get them home safe.

Then immediately after this, we suffered with very extensive floods. And one of the most productive regions in Greece, Thessaly, has been the epicenter of this flooding. And until now, it is in a state of emergency. Unfortunately, today there is going to be another wave which will exactly hit the same region.

So, we lost lives, people's lives. We lost almost 700,000 animals. The agricultural production was influenced immensely. And there is going to be, obviously, a problem in the forthcoming period. We lost infrastructures and houses. There is a true problem of social cohesion, but also of economy. This is apparently a devastating situation when it comes to climate crisis.

The second global challenge is aggression, aggression in many forms. It's not only Russia's invasion to Ukraine. Around the globe you can just see a number of examples of aggression, might that be conflicts and coups, civil wars, terrorists, emergence of non-state actors, cybercrimes all over the place.

The latest and I think the most important and difficult is what is happening now in middle Africa in the Sahel region, where a number of states are suffering either from coups or from civil wars. The latest being the situation in Niger, where the elected government was essentially displaced by an authoritarian regime, which has taken over.

I think the whole Africa is now suffering from Chad to Sudan to Libya with the standing problems they have. So, in many parts of the world, obviously including the Middle East and the Gulf, there are symptoms and pathologies of wide aggression.

The third global challenge is migration. Migration is caused by a lot of reasons that I mentioned. Aggression is the one. But also, there are other reasons why migration is becoming a huge problem, such as the increase of poverty and other grounds. But there is a wide displacement of population essentially from Asia and Africa going primarily towards Europe, with all the adverse consequences we encounter: loss of lives, especially in the Mediterranean, and other problems caused especially in Europe.
The fourth global challenge is food crisis, food insecurity. As you probably know, there was a deal between Russia and Ukraine and the West alliance according to which there could be a corridor for grain transfer from the Black Sea towards Europe and then to Africa. This grain initiative has collapsed at the moment. So what is now happening is that there is an emerging shortage of specific foods. And this is going by all means to augment in the near future. And we expect to have some serious dangers there.

And last but not least, the global challenge of public health. We all encountered the situation with the pandemic, the COVID-19. And we saw how all these phenomena just interact and do produce further social inequalities, further problems. What happened exactly with all the medical equipment is an indication of how a pandemic could raise inequalities around the world.

If I had to draw three conclusions from those five global challenges, that would be first, that we have a full frustration of certainties around the world. We had last 70 years of more or less some certainties around, especially in our neighborhood in Europe this doesn't exist anymore. There is a broader tendency towards revisionism.

I think Russia's invasion has completely changed the existing mode in Europe. Since I'm here at the heart of the European Studies in Harvard, obviously everybody understands that we had this paradoxical illusion of everlasting stability in Europe, which is not the case apparently.

The second result would be the absolute extraterritoriality of all challenges nowadays. There is not a single challenge which could be condensed into a single country or even a single continent. It's amazing how all these phenomena may begin from a certain place. But the spillover effect is so rapid, immediate, imminent, and threatening that one might say that one minor local event more often than not causes a huge spillover for the globe.

And the third result is that-- and this is one of my small results in the three months that I have taken on the job-- is that we do lack deliberative institutions, deliberative minds. More and more we can see manichaeistic type of decision making, a much more obsessed approach to things, where negotiations in good faith is essentially out of reach.

I recall what General Secretary of the United Nations Guterres mentioned just a couple of days ago addressing the General Assembly. He said something that I value a lot. He said, the problem of our era is that compromise has become a dirty word. And I think this absolutely reflects what is happening now.

We do not possess any sort of deliberative mind in order to be able to discuss in good faith and reach some constructive and meaningful results.

Now, how do we treat those phenomena? Obviously, the first and most important would be to further enhance democracy, rule of law, and global governance. However, global governance that would be based on principles. It's important that we have global governance because problems are global. So, one country alone or an alliance of countries cannot rid any of those problems that I mentioned, like climate crisis or aggression.

But the global governance needs to be principled, based on principles. And when I mean principles, I essentially refer not only to standard international rules existing, but the fact that we need to have some sort of a compact, a coherent and a consistent policy when it comes to global decision making.

As you probably know, at the moment there is a wide discussion concerning the type of governance and the changes possibly to occur in the context of the United Nations. The discussion is raised because of the inefficiency to take some meaningful decisions exactly because of the structure of the United Nations.

As you know, there is a hybrid system of checks and balances between the Security Council, where the member states carry a veto right, and the General Assembly, which is obviously more representative. But it's a bit more chaotic. The decisions to be taken concerning especially accountability stemming from the Russian invasion to Ukraine has raised again the issue of structural reforms of the United Nations because of Russia being part of the Security Council, with a veto right.

There is a vibrant discussion that we have to follow if the United Nations are to remain the key actor. The same type of discussion is now happening also within the context of the European Union. As you probably know, there is a rule, for example, that when it comes to foreign policy, foreign and defense policy of the European Union, also vis-a-vis third countries, there is a need for unanimity in order to get to a decision.

There is a wide discussion now that it might be switched to a qualified majority in order to overcome problems coming from specific countries having a very negative stance to specific issues of external policy, such as, for example, sending military operations to third countries, which is of paramount importance for the European Union.

The same type of discussion, concerning exactly the equilibrium of powers within the international organizations, is now happening simultaneously at the United Nations and the European Union. Obviously, we need to reflect on this issue.

But apart from the structural reforms, the truth is that there is a psychological factor that I mentioned before, which is equally important. And this is the lack of deliberative processes. This is mostly a psychological factor, which also relates with the relative power of each state, but it completely hinders any sort of rational decision making.

We need deliberative processes. Unfortunately, we encounter every day how the country policies essentially overcome global concerns and global decision making. However, when we are in the context of global decision making, we have to think globally and not think mostly as nationals or representatives of a government.

And that's what our great philosopher, Habermas, has mentioned on his deliberative democracy theory, that rational discourse is central to human social interaction. It's not an easy thing. It's not an easy thing to achieve, deliberative processes.

If you can just check the way humanity goes, it goes exactly towards reaching the edges of a polar system. For example, just check out how the cookies operate, the cookies. You all know the cookies. The cookies operate in order to fraction people because they just create pots of people with common interests, presumably common interests out of the searches or whatever links you enhance.

But what really happens is that it just tends to polarize and make groups out of the social activity of someone that essentially mitigates the psychological aspect of people instead of making them feel part of a much more global community. This polarization obviously threatens our democracy, threatens any effort to have effective governance, and of course, undermines any deliberative culture that we might have.

We need to think about the global issues more. And we have to be ready to change our minds if we're convinced that this is the right thing to do on the basis of reason and rationality. And we have to take into account two specific parameters, which are of paramount importance:

The first is the rights of future generations. We keep on ignoring the future generations. What was happening in the last few decades was that we had a very relative idea of what future indicates. We were thinking like yes, climate crisis, for example. But nothing will essentially happen in 10 or 20 or 30 years.

There is a question, which seems to be a luxury nowadays. What is going to happen in 100 years? Yet the truth is that it's not that far away. The prospect of 100 years now is the prospect of 20 years. And it's getting closer and closer. So there is relativity when it comes to foresight, when drafting policy.

It is absolutely important to think of future generations when we take any decision because any decision is a decision which affects the globe. And this is extremely important. Secondly, we need to also take into account people who have not a very strong saying. And this is why the discussion about re-engineering of the international organization could be meaningful.

We see how it happens with the rise of the Global South and the BRICS, the enlargement of that type of alliances in order to get a stronger voice. For many decades, the truth is that those countries were underrepresented. And they were not in the forefront of decision making.

We need to reconceive, revisit the idea of global solidarity, as well as the intergenerational sustainability. And the truth is that we need to think better and deeper about problems. Why? Because we have to deal with the root causes of the problem.

Aggression is obviously a very strong and powerful phenomenon. But in order to get to aggression, there are other issues which are causing potentially this aggression. And it's not always nationalistic roots or economic, financial roots. There are other roots as well.

And I think the most important root cause of many of those phenomena, for example of migration, is the rise of inequalities around the world. And I have the feeling that nobody is really discussing meaningfully about lifting or mitigating inequalities in the globe, which is absolutely essential. If you do not treat this pathology on the root, then it will come up in some other way.

And you see how poverty may operate both in terms of arising some authoritarian regimes. Or energy shortage could be a tremendous problem. Or food insecurity, which is increasing, could be of importance.

Now, it is not a very optimistic type of picture that I present. There must be some optimism. The truth is that during my stay in New York last week, I felt that the world's leaders were now thinking under very pressing circumstances a bit differently.

They are more aware of the risks that the world will be undertaking in the very near future. And they seem to be much more ready to take some radical and occasionally painful decisions. I'm looking forward to a very important summit, the COP28 summit in the UAE, concerning the climate change.

And I think there is going to be some strong awareness there because indeed there is no time to waste. And I really mean this.

Now, going to where Greece stands now in this evolving world. We are privileged to be part of the strongest alliances of the West, and that is the European Union and the transatlantic union, NATO.

And we have a very strong predilection when it comes to our foreign policy. This is that we do have a principled foreign policy. And the basic principle is adherence to international law. This is for us the forefront of our foreign policy.

And I want to be very clear on this. We need to stick by the substance, the principle, the ethics of international law because any type of substantive revisionism concerning international law rules essentially is tantamount to an alibi for states and people to become more aggressive vis-a-vis others.

What we do is exactly on the basis of this principle. We condemn Russia. We were among the first countries to actually condemn Russia for the absolutely illegal invasion and the threat of the sovereign integrity of Ukraine. We provided all type of aid to Ukraine, including humanitarian and military aid. And we invited Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, last August in Athens alongside with leaders of the Western Balkans and Moldova in order exactly to make a huge symbol of the unity of our region towards Ukraine and to the prospect of the end of this very painful and awkward war and to signify that the future of Ukraine, as well as of all other states of the Western Balkans, lies with Europe, with the European Union and with the European family.

Now, two further points that I'm sure you would like to hear. The one is about Cyprus. Cyprus remains at the top of our foreign policy priority list. We will do everything in our power to promote the resolution of the Cyprus issue within the scope of the resolutions of the Security Council of the United Nations. That is a bizonal, bicommunal federation. And we have worked very hard in full cooperation with the Cypriot government. And we passed all the necessary messages to the United Nations in order for further discussions on the matter. We expect the Turkish side to just sit on the table and discuss about the solution exactly in view of a single sovereign state.

Now secondly, Turkey, which relates obviously to Cyprus as well. As you probably know, in the last few months, we have engaged ourselves in an effort to try and reset our relationship with Turkey. The last few years we encountered a lot of crisis and hostility, unfortunately. We had the good slot to have elections in both countries almost at the same time. And we have two new governments, new governments with strong mandates. And I think this is a good condition precedent in order to set up a good mode for dialogue.

And this is true what is happening. We have established a very good and quality dialogue with my Turkish counterpart. First, what we need to see is the calmness and tranquility in the Aegean Sea and in the Eastern Mediterranean to maintain for a longer time.
The truth is that after the catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey in last February, we got together in disasters. And that was a reset of our calendar. We need this period to be going as far as possible. Then we are going to launch a series of positive measures. That is measures which are mutually beneficial for the two countries. And it's really important to raise the awareness of common challenges that require joint forces. And this is what we're trying to do in many respects. For example, the two countries suffered almost of equal strength natural phenomena, catastrophic natural phenomena.
We need to coordinate forces when it comes to the prevention against those phenomena, but also to the civil protection mechanisms. And if we make it to establish a long-standing solid and comprehensive calmness, then we can proceed to our major problem, to our major dispute, which is the delimitation of maritime zones, and in particular the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone with a view potentially to refer the issue to international jurisdiction.

This is our major problem for decades. And we might think in the future to just tackle this. But by definition what I'm saying is that it is important to have open channels of communication at a higher level. Why? Because we need to establish the model that whenever there is a dispute, there is no need to create a crisis out of it because what was happening in the past was that any dispute would eventually result in a huge crisis. This is something that we have to prevent. We need to have systems of decompression of tension. And this is what we are actually doing now.

Now, again in the international environment, I have to tell you that Greece is a candidate member for the Security Council, as a non-permanent member of the Security Council for 2025-2026.

This is, I think, a unique opportunity for us to promote our ideals, to try and come with fresh ideas to treat the global challenges. And we're very excited with the prospect of becoming a member of the Security Council. Our motto comprises three Greek words, as we say the three D's, which is democracy, diplomacy, and dialogue.

This is our logo in our campaign to the UN. All three Greek origin, obviously, Greek origin words exactly reflect our basic attitude. We need to return to the basics of political ethics. Democracy is not a perfect polity. But it is the best polity we have. And we need to strengthen it with all the models that I mentioned, with new structures producing a new equilibrium, and with more deliberative process because the truth is that people are losing faith to democratic processes. And we need to absolutely infuse faith to people that democracy is the solution to the problems.

Then diplomacy, because we consider that we must rely on diplomacy in order to prevent aggression, conflicts, wars. There is no way that we can uphold any sort of aggression. We need to exhaust any possible diplomatic means in order to achieve peace, stability, to achieve prosperity for people. And this is why we rely heavily on diplomacy.

And then dialogue. I know it might be considered as a very naive type of logo. But to be honest, I think what is really missing nowadays is dialogue, meaningful dialogue. I really believe in people reaching decisions in an orderly manner, in a reasonable manner, justified decisions. And these justified decisions need to be the product of constructive dialogue.

We need to go back to the idea of meaningful, deliberative dialogue. We must be ready to change our minds for the benefit of our countries and of the globe. In this respect, we have set six priorities for our candidacy:  peaceful resolution of disputes, respect for international law, climate change and security, children in armed conflicts, peace and security, and maritime security, which is of obvious concern for Greece.

Just to mention that within the crisis in Ukraine, the Greek-owned fleets had a major contribution, essentially transferring most of the energy sources and alternative energy sources, such as LNG, and also food products. And this is something we praise a lot.

Trying to reach the end of my small talk, I would like to mention one thing, not because I want to brag about my country or about our diplomacy, but because I really need to say how hard we work in Greece. As you probably know, we suffered 10 years of austerity.

We lost almost 25% of our GDP. The salaries went down by an average of 35%. And we had a lot of other negative consequences. We got through this whole mess. And now we have fully recovered, fortunately. Now we have a booming economy. During the last month we had serious upgrades to the investment grade by all high-profile investment rating companies. And that allowed us to draw a new economic policy. We had a GDP growth of more than 6% in 2022, whereas the EU average was about 3%. We have an increase of almost 40% of direct foreign investments and the same for exports. We do have now a very strong economy. And we are doing our best to actually improve those ratings.

But when it comes to Greek foreign policy, we are very proactive in things. And I'm very proud to say that some of the most important European policies in the last few years were essentially the initiatives of the Hellenic government.
First and foremost, the most basic tool of financial recovery in Europe after the pandemic, which is the establishment of the European Recovery and Resilience Fund, the RRF, which is going to mobilize a significant amount of money. Almost 32 billion euros will come to Greece to actually be invested in green and digital economy almost exclusively. And this is very important.

The second initiative we take is the promotion of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation. As you know, we've taken the initiative to set up the EU Med cooperation. It's a new forum of the nine European Mediterranean countries with common challenges. And the most important challenge currently is obviously the climate crisis. I just reflect to the point that the Mediterranean basin is the epicenter of climate crisis. We suffered 1.7 degree rise of the sea temperature in the Mediterranean. That's why we had the wildfires and the floods all over the Mediterranean.

The third initiative we took was the design of European digital vaccination adopted and accredited by the World Health Organization. That was a very important initiative because it allowed the mobility within Europe. And it allowed the reset of the European economy. And that was our initiative. We first introduced it in Greece. And then we essentially exported it to the European Union.

And last but not least, an initiative that again, we're very proud of, the adoption of a gas price cap system. As you probably know, immediately after the Russian invasion to Ukraine, we had a tremendous increase in all types of energy sources and especially gas. Europe was heavily relying on Russian gas. More than 50% of all the supplies in Europe came from Russia. Given the fact that now there is an exclusion of Russian gas, we had to diversify very violently. We're doing this. But at the same time, we suffer huge increase in prices. We recommended the adoption of a gas price cap. And indeed, it was adopted by the European Union authorities. And hopefully, the prices went significantly down.

Now we suffer another type of price increase, which is especially food. The inflation is going up and up in the European Union. It's not uncontrollable. But it's getting up. So, we will need to deal with this.

And of course, two final words, one on migration and the second on energy. On migration, the truth is that this is a very serious problem, the mobility of population. There are essentially three pathways. It's the pathway from Turkey, from the Middle East, and from North Africa, essentially resulting in EU Med countries.

This problem essentially gets worse and worse whenever there is a conflict in Africa or in Asia. And exactly because of the fact that those conflicts are not going to end shortly, we believe that the problem will become worse in the medium term.

We're working very hard in order to adopt a new migration pact in a European level, so that we can treat the migration problem orderly as Europeans with established rules. At the same time, we have made some serious changes in the domestic law.

We have set up, we have constructed new installations for refugees and immigrants coming from all parts of Asia and Africa under humane conditions because the truth is that in the past we had some very serious problems with degrading and inhumane settlements for refugees and migrants.

At the same time, we provide asylum to almost 50% of people coming to Greece, those in need of humanitarian aid. And we're trying to make an inclusion policy for those people within Greece. Obviously, the illegal migration needs to be treated because it produces deaths. That's the truth.

We need to be very cautious and systematic on this issue. First, we need to come up with a coherent policy of legal pathways for migration, which is now lacking as a European policy, then to try and combat the smugglers network, which operates in many regions. And they just exploit human pain in order to get money. So, we need to take immediate action for this problem.

And finally, when it comes to energy, Greece is working on a two-pillar strategy. First of all, we are becoming a hub for energy sources transport through expanded pipeline infrastructure, power grid interconnectivity, alternative means of storing energy sources. Now, apart from the traditional networks, we're drafting our strategy concerning the connection with Egypt and Middle East, the European solution to the need for diversification of the energy mix. Whereas on the other hand, what we're doing is we're trying to develop a strategy of energy sufficiency by enhancing policies to further embrace renewable energy sources.

As you all know, Greece is full of sun and wind. So, it's the obvious solution to the problem. Last May, for the first time, we managed to exceed 50% of the energy mix coming from renewable energy sources. And this is absolutely essential for our self-sufficiency in energy. And we need to further enhance it.

Further, we're trying some innovative techniques, especially for vulnerable regions. We have developed a strategy concerning eco energy on islands. We now have one island, which is fully energy sufficient. And we also have another island. It is Tilos and Astypalaia respectively, which has exclusively electric means of transport. And the idea is that by 2030, 80% of the energy mix will come from renewables, plus that we will have a wide part of Greek regions, insular and continental, essentially self-sufficient energy wise.

In this respect concerning the environment, Greece is hosting next year a very important summit, which is the “Our Ocean Conference”. It's going to be the ninth such summit. It concerns exactly the preservation of seas from overfishing, from pollution, from overexploitation, from maritime piracy, from all types of degradation of the oceans.

So, it was a great pleasure to be here with you. I really want to reassure you that Greece will remain a very strong partner, both academic and politically, with the United States and with Harvard University. For us, the idea of peace and prosperity is of fundamental significance.

And we will do anything in our power to establish those principles, not only in our country, but in the globe. Thank you so much for this”.