Former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said Europe and China have never been enemies and must pursue pragmatic dialogue to ease current geopolitical strains.
Speaking to China Media Group on the sidelines of the "Understanding China" conference in south China's Guangzhou last December, Prodi reflected on his first visit in 1984 and decades of engagement with China.
"I always repeated that we have never been enemies, but the tensions, they were merely on economic issues, (including) balance of payment, balance of trade. Now in this new situation, there are problems of security, problems of political tensions and misunderstanding. And when you mix up this, you have to take a period of calm, of dialogue and of concrete cooperation in the fields that are out of the tensions, just to buy time. And this is what we can concretely do," said Prodi.
"We have to go back to the moment in which I don't say that we are ready to write treaties or relations, but in the moment in which we can think to some long-range idea of how can we put together the issues in which we can agree or cooperate. This is our duty," he said.
Prodi's remarks underscore a call for strategic patience and cooperative engagement as China-EU relations evolve amid a shifting global landscape.
China-EU ties need stability through pragmatic dialogue amid shifting global landscape: former Italian PM
Romano Prodi, former prime minister of Italy and former president of the European Commission, has warned against the resurgence of a Cold War mentality in an exclusive interview with the China Central Television that aired on Friday, emphasizing that global peace and cooperation depend on the ability of nations to accept their differences and engage in meaningful dialogue.
Reflecting on the shifting global landscape, Prodi said that political issues have become increasingly entangled with economic, human rights, and trade concerns.
He warned that this "mixture of tension" is often used as a pretext to further escalate conflicts rather than resolve them.
"I have insisted my life to a decrease of tension step by step. You know, with, as I told you, the political problem which are mixing with problems of economy, of human rights, of regulation, of trade, and now we have a mixture of tension, in which everything is taken as an excuse to increase that. My political idea is that, you have to talk with everybody. From this point of view, it's a Western mistake that to have, let's say, agreement, you need to have the same political system. This is completely wrong," he said. Prodi challenged the prevailing Western notion that international agreements require identical political systems, arguing that such a mindset ignores the unique historical trajectories of different nations. He stressed that countries must move beyond mere respect to a deeper level of understanding and acceptance of their inherent differences.
"We understand that we were born different. You know, but we have to live as different. And this is the idea that because you are different, I fight against you. And this is everywhere in the world. It's an heritage of the Cold War.We are going back to the old Cold War. If you go on in this situation, we cannot have any type of relaxing our tension," he said.
To break the current deadlock in international cooperation, Prodi called for initiatives in specific fields to restart engagement.
"Somebody must take some initiative in some specific field, you know, in order to start back to cooperate. When people talk, the agreement, or the compromise, is easy to reach. When we are so divided as we are now, it's impossible, because the enemy is the enemy. When you have a dialogue and you have a compromise, we understand that you can live together," said the Italian politician.
Former Italian PM calls for dialogue, acceptance of differences in global cooperation
