by Giles Merritt*
The lopsided transatlantic trade deal imposed by US President Donald Trump was bad enough. Worse has been the way the EU is being pushed to the sidelines on Ukraine and Gaza. Paris, Berlin and London have roles vis-à-vis Washington and Moscow, but not Brussels.
It is far from clear where the EU stands on resolving today’s conflicts and preventing future ones. In spite of growing geopolitical upheaval, the EU hasn’t defined a common stance on its security for two decades. The longer it fails to do so, the less authority it will wield.
Europe wasn’t always so rudderless. The beginning of this century saw the Union’s newly minted ‘foreign minister’, Spanish politician and former NATO chief Javier Solana, unveil the EU’s first – but last – security strategy.
Those were comparatively halcyon times; Solana prefaced his paper with a declaration that “Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure or so free”. Hardly the mood of today.
That’s what makes a follow-up to the Solana doctrine urgent. Ukraine’s future, along with uncertainties over relations with America, must at some point force EU member states to set out a collective approach to security and defence. That means resolving national rivalries and tackling their particular vulnerabilities.
It also means acknowledging that EU members have never overcome their fragmentation. Solana’s ambitious doctrine in fact responded to the humiliating truth that conflict in the Balkans had not been ended by EU diplomacy – the ‘Hour of Europe’ claimed by some – but was down to American persistence.
The EU must not only define the military and economic components of its own security but also its responsibility for stability in its neighbourhood and further afield. It should replace its ineffective neighbourhood policy with a realistic combination of security and development policies for eastern Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
The EU’s default position of reacting to external events and pressures has to be turned into a more proactive political process. That requires a framework within which Brussels can liaise with member governments to establish joint positions, either ahead of crises or at an early stage
Some EU officials argue that this is already the case. Far from failing to follow up on Solana’s security strategy, they say Brussels has produced a spate of six mini-strategies focused on cyber, terrorism, defence industries and so on. This in itself is the problem; too many, too wordy and ill-defined, they confuse, rather than clarify, the EU’s security commitments.
Is it a pipe dream to imagine the EU member states thrashing out a common security doctrine when there’s so much disarray over support for Ukraine and for rearmament and security in general? Surely the more powerful argument is that Europe has reached an inflexion point at which its geopolitical impotence will only increase if it fails to assert its security policies.
Europeans have been disappointingly limited militarily in relation to Ukraine, but their defence outreach is set to be surprisingly daunting. Whether wearing NATO or EU hats, their armed forces have been constrained more by politics than by operational weaknesses. A ‘no-fly’ policy to prevent Russian air attacks or ‘tripwire forces’ on Ukraine’s eastern borders of ‘tripwire forces’ have been deadlocked by political wrangling rather than practical barriers.
The speed, and indeed the nature, of Europe’s defence rebirth remains to be seen. In any case, it’s the EU’s economic muscle that is its strongest security weapon. Member governments haven’t yet allowed it to be wielded in any decisive manner, yet it should be at the core of any security strategy. The flouting of long-established international rules would, under the new EU doctrine, automatically be met by potentially crippling trade and financial services sanctions.
The impasse within Europe and the US over the fate of some $300bn in frozen Russian assets illustrates the EU’s uncertain use of economic instruments. The uneven application of sanctions and the way major companies have sidestepped them is seen as a weakness. A toughened security doctrine would commit EU governments to overcoming these divisions.
A broadly-based security doctrine would demand difficult intra-EU negotiations at a time when the Union is already under stress. But a determined message to the Kremlin, the White House and Beijing is overdue. It should tell them unambiguously that Europe can no longer be dismissed as supine in the face of nationalist and extremist pressures.
*Founder of Friends of Europe
**first published in friendsofeurope.org
By: N. Peter Kramer