On 28 June, the EU-LAC Foundation’s Executive Director Jorge Valdez participated in a Schumpeter Roundtable on Foreign Policy Strategy organised by the German Institute of Global and Area studies (GIGA). The Schumpeter Roundtables are a seminar series for which the GIGA research team regularly meets with international scholars to discuss their current research in a public forum.
In this edition the central topic was “Changes in EU-LAC Foreign Policy Strategies: The End of Interregionalism?”, presented by Professor Dr. José António Sanahuja (Complutense University of Madrid). The EU-LAC Foundation’s Executive Director Jorge Valdez and Professor Dr. Klaus Bodemer (GIGA) participated as discussants, highlighting important factors such as the lack of media coverage of the bi-regional relationship. They also showed how the trade flows between the European Union and Latin America are higher than with other regions and stressed the stability of the share of the total trade volume of each region in the last years. The session was moderated by Dr. Daniel Flemes (Schumpeter Fellow, GIGA) and counted with the presence of several students, members of the GIGA research team and other international scholars.
Among the different subjects discussed in this session, key questions raised included the increased importance of the Chinese market for Latin America, technology transfer between the EU and Latin America, and the issue of immigration. Executive Director Jorge Valdez emphasized the importance of including these issues in the EU-LAC agenda and showed that the mutual interest of those two regions makes it necessary to build a new strategic framework in which the European Union and Latin America and Caribbean countries work together.