Earlier this year, Carnegie Europe's excellent EU-oriented online platform, Strategic Europe, published a detailed series gauging the foreign policy ambitions of each of the European Union's 28 member states. Summing up the lot, Editor in Chief Judy Dempsey found that Europe, both in its supranational whole and in its constituent parts, falls far short of its promise.
This week her colleague at Carnegie, Jan Techau, found reason for disgust and despair in the matter. In a blistering editorial, Techau describes a Europe that is all noise and no signal, incapable of projecting its power. That doesn't stand to change, Techau believes, even after the scale of the threats facing the Continent became alarmingly clear in Paris last weekend.
"To sum it up, contrary to the strong words of politicians after the Paris attacks, nothing much is going to change in Europe's foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. Nobody has the actual or the political capital and the strategic savvy to pull off a more activist role for Europe. The post-Paris noise makers will look silly. The Islamic State will rejoice. Local potentates will continue to wage war against their own populations. The next terrorist attack will come. And then the discussion will start all over again."
We have covered in some detail here in the Europe Memo how European nations, along with the Union as an entity, have struggled to define a foreign policy. In the best of times, it is a question of outlining a coherent national interest. Britain, France, and Germany are able to define that interest in a transactional context -- so Britain extends its hand to China, and Germany seals energy deals with Russia -- but it does not go much further. Now that the contours of interest are being defined, as is often the case in international affairs, by vivid external threats, European capitals find themselves lacking not only the means to project that interest, but even the ability to define it coherently in the domestic context.
Minding History's Gap
To paraphrase Stefan Auer in a piece in a recent issue of International Affairs, we of course know now that history did not end with the passing of the Cold War -- but it did go to sleep for a spell. No one fell into that slumber quite so deeply as Europe, and what complicates the problems facing its nations now is that Europe's cornerstone supranational policies -- from enlargement, to the eurozone, to the Schengen open-border area -- were either ideated or formalized in that gap. They were incomplete constructs aimed at capitalizing on a period of prosperity and enhancing liberties. They were not meant to address crisis. They were enacted before clear, trenchant, understandable rules were laid out. Take as a simple instance the unwillingness to cross-reference data collected by databases such as the Schengen Information System and Eurodac. The liberty to cross borders freely was not balanced by cautious, common-sense curtailment of liberties to privacy. These constructs were presented, nevertheless, as irreversible. Europe is like a bicycle, after all, Jacques Delors is credited as saying. You either pedal or you fall.
This has created a gap of its own. EU policy exists in a space between domestic politics and projection of national interest that, left unmanaged and unchanged, undermines the credibility of mainstream politicians and limits the room of those politicians to act on the national interest.
Now we have reached a moment of clarity. French President Francois Hollande has indeed spoken cogently about the threats facing his country, and he could be speaking for all of Europe. For now, Techau is right that it is mere rhetoric. But if Europe is to wake from its slumber and take any kind of initiative -- in foreign policy, in defense, in defining what it means to be European -- it can only start as such. Hollande's invocation of the EU treaties -- rather than calling on NATO for a collective response -- is helpful. The president matched a call for greater security spending at home and a more proactive military stance against a clear and ensconced threat, with a call to his European partners for support -- a call with an unprecedented grounding in EU legislation. If France is finally awakening to the need for a 21st century foreign and defense policy, Hollande is seeking to match that ambition to Brussels.
It's a small step. It's only rhetoric, and indeed, the power of rhetoric will fade until tragedy strikes again. But for now, it's a start.
More on this:
Europe's foreign policy reaction to the Paris attacks: noise - Jan Techau
Europe's pathetic lack of foreign policy ambition - Judy Dempsey
European defense a la francaise - Christian Molling
The Ukraine crisis and the return of geopolitics - Stefan Auer
Around the Continent
France will continue to take in refugees: Despite calls by populist leaders across Europe -- including France's own Marine Le Pen, who is running as a candidate in northern France during December regional elections -- to immediately stop accepting refugees, Hollande has said France will hold to its commitments. EUObserver:
"France will receive 30,000 refugees in the next two years, president Francois Hollande confirmed Wednesday (18 November).
"The figure had first been announced by prime minister Manuel Valls in September.
"But what had been interpreted as French reluctance to play its part in relieving other countries facing massive arrivals can now, in the wake of Friday's Paris terror attacks, be seen as a political gesture.
"'Some want to establish a link between the influx of refugees coming from the Middle-East and the terrorist threat,' Hollande noted in a speech to the congress of French mayors.
"'The truth is that this link exists, because inhabitants of areas in Iraq and Syria are fleeing because they are being murdered by those who are attacking us today.'"
Balkan Confusion: In the wake of November 13, the Balkan countries serving as transit routes for asylum seekers headed for the heart of Europe are cracking down. The Guardian has the report:
"Countries along the Balkan migration trail have begun refusing to admit people of certain nationalities, amid a backlash against refugees in the aftermath of the Paris attacks last Friday.
"Humanitarian workers active along the borders of Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia reported that refugees and migrants from countries other than Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq were now being stopped, raising the spectre of a migrant logjam in Greece.
"The move comes after Slovenia, the most northerly country along the trail, suddenly tried to return 168 Moroccan migrants to Croatia on Thursday, in the first major development along the Balkan migration route since Hungary shut its border in September."
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