Responses in Northern Europe to the New Silk Road

Transcription

1 Responses in Northern Europe to the New Silk Road By Ulf Sandmark Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Now you have heard about the potentials in the U.S. for a positive response to the New Silk Road inititatives. I want to present which responses there are in Northern Europe. If you look at a map of the New Silk Road (NSR) project like this one (Picture 1), you see Northern Europe disappear in the fog a bit north of Hamburg, which is one of the end stations for the regular cargo trains that every week go from China into Europe and back. Picture 1: Scandinavia so far is "in the fog" outside the direct influence of the New Silk Road. This is to be changed.

2 Picture 2: Denmark connects Scandinavia with its gigantic bridges at the Great Belt and between Copenhagen and Malmö, as well as through the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, with New Silk Road end station Hamburg [above] Picture 3: The North East West Cargo Corridor connects China and Central Asia with Hudson Bay, East Coast and Great Lakes Area of North America as well as with the Northern Sea Route. Northern Europe at St Petersburg is connected to both the New Silk Road from China and the International North South Transport Corridor from India. [below]

3 Picture 4: The Belkomur-Projekt connects the harbour of Archangelsk at the White Sea/Atlantic Ocean with the city of Perm on the Trans Siberian Railway shortening the New Silk Road to Scandinavia and the East Coast and Great Lakes Area of North America. Picture 5: The North South Transport Corridor shorten transports to India considerably.

4 Picture 6: The gas pipeline North Stream connects the Russian pipe line network through the Baltic Sea directly with Germany. Other Baltic Sea nations could conneect to it. Picture 7: The "Sun Train" connects Chungqing in China with the Lithuanian Baltic Sea harbour Klaipeda. Actually, Denmark is building the giant fixed connections to Germany and Hamburg, linking up Denmark, Sweden and Norway to the NSR. The giant bridge projects at the Great Belt and between Copenhagen and Malmö, initiated by Denmark, have already established this fixed connection. Now Denmark is building the Fehmarn Belt connection, which is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Europe. (Picture 2) In the Arctic development of the Northern Sea Route to the Pacific Ocean both Iceland and Norway are very active. Iceland is cooperating closely with China in the Arctic development, but also for oil and gas exploration in the High Seas in the economic zone of Iceland. The Northern Sea Route is much more than a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean. Along the whole coastline of Northern Russia there are river transports connecting to railways reaching deep into Siberia and all its potentials for raw materials. The Norwegian consultant company Transportutvikling has developed the North East West Cargo Corridor to bring cargo, from China and Central Asia, to the West coast and Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada. It is an intermodal corridor using both railways and ships. It was intended to go through also Northern Finland, Sweden

5 and Norway to the harbor of Narvik. However the Swedish rail system was too busy with the iron ore transports and the Narvik harbor was too small for the TEU (containers) the Chinese wanted to ship this way. Therefore now Murmansk will be the transshipment point for this corridor. (Picture 3) The giant Russian Belkomur project is building the railway from Perm at the Trans Siberian Railway up to Archangelsk. (Picture 4) It will make the shipments to Murmansk much shorter, but also to Scandinavia as there is now a link from the Russian rail system into approximately the middle of Finland at Kostamus and Oulu. Via Haparanda this NSR route could reach into Sweden and then on to Norway. Russia is the main partner with China to develop the NSR, which means that the NSR is brought right up to the border of Finland at St Petersburg. This city is also the end point of another transport corridor, that could become very important for Northern Europe. It is the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) via Iran in India. (Pictures 3 and 5) This intermodal corridor goes on the Caspian Sea to Iran and then on Iranian railways to the harbor of Bandar Abbas, and from there by ship Mumbai in India. Now the missing rail links along the Caspian Sea are being built between Azerbaijan and Iran. In Iran also the port city Chabahar is being brought into the INSTC. This means that Northern Europe will have a harbor connection at the Indian Ocean at a much shorter distance than the current sea route. In Chabahar a big industrial center is to be built in cooperation between Iran and China. Actually the NSR is very beneficial for Northern Europe as it puts Northern Europe on the main road between East and West. It would not any more be a dead end corner in a divided world. The shortcut over the shoulder of the world so to say, is much shorter, than going all the way around the belly of the planet Earth. The NSR is the biggest peace project ever, building the links between the 70 nations participating. This is very much like the policy of the French-German economic cooperation to overcome the two world wars. The NSR corridors have a railway as the spine, but in parallel all kinds of other infrastructure like a huge pipe line networks. In Northern Europe this NSR peace policy is bridging the Eastern front of the world wars with the North Stream Pipe line directly between Russia and Germany at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. (Picture 6) Actually this is a peace project also with Sweden, even though Sweden officially protests the North Stream pipe line. The Russian gas going through the North Stream pipe line comes into Sweden via the Danish pipeline into Southern Sweden up to Gothenburg. This is because the Danish gas fields in the North Sea are emptied and the Danish gas is replaced with the Russian gas. Besides Russia, the Northern European country most active to pursue the opportunities of the NSR, is Lithuania. The "Sun Train" connects Chungqing in China with the Lithuanian harbor city Klaipeda at the Baltic Sea. (Picture 7) The regular ferry boats bring the cargo to Karlshamn and to Malmö/ Copenhagen. Another Lithuanian train line, the "Viking Train", from Istanbul to Klaipeda connects the Black Sea region with the Baltic Sea region. After encircling Northern Europe in this way, what do we find in the middle? Unfortunately we just find a black hole where nothing happens. It is the territory of the "Balanced budget" according to the EU rules of the Maastricht Treaty. Here in especially Sweden and Finland the dominating priority is the profitability of the banks, which orients the whole financial system to the bubbles of housing and derivatives away from the real economy. This is the background to the war policy of Sweden, as the banks are hysterically against any investment in the NSR, or any other infrastructure project, as any such investment would pull finance away from their bubbles. The hostility towards Russia supports that financial policy. The real industrial businesses are looted by the banks through their hedge funds, and even by the managements of the companies themselves chopping up and selling off their product divisions. The devastation of the real economy has become a depopulation policy, where you now can see in Sweden how the countryside is emptied and the farms closing. This austerity policy now has a major opposition in Sweden, which is demanding more real investments in infrastructure and especially housing. It comes from both the leading organizations of the trade unions and the entrepreneurs. Also regional administrations are screaming for new roads, railways, bridges etc. from the government, putting forward every year very detailed regional development plans, many of which fit into the NSR project.

6 Picture 8: The most important infrastructure corridors in Northern Europe are the "Nordic Triangle" and the "Rail Baltica", the "Bothnian Corridor" and the "Northern Arc". Without implementing it the EU has put forward the plan for the Trans European Networks (TEN). The most important of the TEN-plans for Northern Europe is the Nordic Triangle connecting, with highways and high speed trains, the Nordic capitals Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki linking on to St Petersburg. Also important is the Rail Baltica connecting Finland and the Baltic countries with Warsaw and Berlin. (Picture 8) As the banks are first at the table and only crumbs go to the actualization of these projects. Picture 9. Proposed maglev train network in Northern Europe

7 A most visionary plan was put forward by the Finnish Southern Eastern region and the administration of the island Åland. They proposed to build the longawaited tunnel between Finland and Sweden passing via Åland. A magnetically levitated train would then connect the whole Northern Triangle with the NSR. It was actually put forward at the Embassy of Finland in Stockholm last December, by a colleague of the audience, his Éxcellency Jarmo Viinanen. A Maglev plan for the Nordic Triangle (Picture 9) has been proposed by the Schiller Institute since years. This autumn a point of decision comes up in the Swedish government and parliament. Will the Sweden start building the costly much discussed High speed train on rail between Stockholm and Gothenburg, or will they build the cheaper Maglev system that moves at 500 km/h? To sum this up. What I want you to understand, is that what you are dealing with in Sweden, is a government and financial structure that is very oppressive to its people and its real economic industries. The best way to understand this oppressive Swedish structure is to think of a colonial control structure. There is no use wasting time with their buraucracy, as they only want to keep themselves and you busy doing nothing. However, what you could do, is to work with all the oppressed industries, who are desperate to cooperate with anyone. Actually, if you go into the middle of any Swedish forest, you will find small communities with small industries maybe employing 8 to 12 people. These Swedish SMEs normally export 90 percent of their production. They work with the whole world, without the help of the banks and without the government and its useless bureacracy. The model NSR cooperation is Volvo Cars, where the Chinese businessman Li Shufu bought up the famous Volvo car factories in Sweden. This is now the biggest NSR cooperation going on. It is not any infrastructure project, but it is an industrial cooperation which is the next step of NSR. The Volvo reorganization project is defined according to the Chinese win-win strategy. The inventive Swedish engineers are brought into the highest technological and scientific collaboration with China. The Chinese provide industrial leadership and organize the financing. After Volvo now this cooperation on the highest efficiency level extends itself down the line to the subcontractors of Volvo spread out in all Nordic countries which is deepening the NSR cooperation into more and branches of the auto industry. As you see, the industry is ready to work with the NSR - The government is not. Thank you! For more informaation and maps see: "Man in the Arctic but how?" A presentation in Berlin 2012: Contact details: Economist Ulf Sandmark Schiller Institute P.O. Box 6057 Hägersten, Stockholm ulf.sandmark@nysol.se Tel: Cellphone: