Stronger economic cooperation with China would help the European Union, which has lost strength in recent years due to its decisions, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday.

The Hungarian foreign minister said at a panel debate at the Bled Strategic Forum that the European Union fares poorly at the global level because, due to its decisions, it has significantly lost strength, especially in three major areas – security, the economy and energy.

Szijjarto said that, as nine years of cooperation with other European ministers have shown him, in global, more distant conflicts the EU always invites the two sides to sit down at the table and reach a peaceful solution, but that in the case of Russian aggression against Ukraine, it is not doing so.

On the economic front, in 2010 the EU had a 22 percent share in global GDP compared to China’s 9 percent, but today the Asian country is at 18 percent, and the European Union is at 18 percent, Szijjarto said.

The conservative Hungarian politician believes that the EU has not found the “right way” for the relationship with China’s growing economy, and that this is bad for the European economy.

Stronger cooperation with China is something that would help the growth of the European economy, he said.

In a comment on European Council President Charles Michel’s statement of Monday that the EU and candidate countries must be ready for enlargement by 2030, Szijjarto advocated faster enlargement, notably in the context of the importance of the Western Balkans for the transit of energy products.

French Secretary of State for European Affairs Laurence Boone said that without enlargement there will be no security in the European Union.

Boone believes that enlargement should be worked on before the European elections, because the European Parliament is currently inclined towards enlargement, and this may not be the case in June next year.

Croatian Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Gordan Grlic-Radman reiterated that Croatia, a great supporter of enlargement, stands for an individual approach to candidate countries, based on their merits.