Embracing Europe’s Power
Europeans must deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. And that means relearning the language of power and combining the European Union's resources in a way that maximizes their geopolitical impact.
Europe Must Avoid Self-Fulfilling Pessimism
Despite the pessimism that has pervaded Europe in recent years, the fact is that the EU remains an economic and regulatory superpower, with massive diplomatic potential. If Europeans recognize this, regain their collective self-confidence, and take constructive action, their future can be bright.
MADRID – Over the last decade, the requisite year-end reflections and predictions have become increasingly bleak. This pessimism is understandable: inequality has been rising sharply in much of the world; democratic values and norms of governance have been steadily eroded; and technology has transformed our societies and economies so rapidly that many have been left feeling overwhelmed and insecure. But we must take care not to allow grim predictions to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Consider the European Union. As their international clout has declined, Europeans have been made to feel increasingly powerless, as individuals, as nations, and as a bloc. Without a unifying vision for the future, the EU has lost its élan and fallen victim to passivity and fear under the guise of nostalgia.
But the past for which many Europeans long never actually existed, and the present that they eschew isn’t nearly as bad as it seems: Europe remains an economic and regulatory superpower, with massive diplomatic potential. If Europeans recognize this and regain their collective self-confidence, their future can be bright.
The call for Europeans to “believe in themselves” may sound naive and simplistic. But it is a prerequisite for effective action. This does not mean pursuing some grand federalist platform or making unrealistic promises, such as to form a European military. On the contrary, the last thing the EU needs is more soaring rhetoric and impossible pledges. Its failure to deliver in the past on such promises has contributed to today’s overwhelming sense of helplessness and cynicism.
Instead, the EU needs to make concrete, incremental progress to boost its credibility. Here, there is reason for hope – beginning with the newly confirmed European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen. Although the new Commission has indulged in familiar-sounding grandiloquence, it also embodies an unusual degree of realism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the selection of a German president for the first time since the 1960s. The EU has abandoned the pretense that there are no standout powers within the bloc, in favor of recognizing that the only way to get things done is to secure the buy-in of its most influential members.
Moreover, the EU has indicated a willingness to explore the potential of different cooperative configurations to propel the policy agenda. For example, there is growing momentum for a European Security Council, a proposal introduced by France and Germany, to strengthen European foreign policy and underpin security cooperation with a post-Brexit United Kingdom.
Such a UK will emerge very soon, given the overwhelming victory of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in the recent election. Johnson campaigned on a promise to get the UK out of the EU by January 31, and meeting that deadline would be a good outcome. As undesirable as Brexit may be, dragging out the process hasn’t done anyone much good. Finally ending the three-and-a-half-year saga will allow for greater strategic clarity.
Another major source of uncertainty may also be removed next year: US President Donald Trump. Perhaps no development has done more to fuel insecurity among Europeans than Trump’s capricious attacks on the transatlantic relationship over the last three years. If he is defeated in the November presidential election, the relationship won’t simply return to its pre-Trump state, but predictability will be restored, and Europeans will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.
Even a victory for Trump, however, will provide some measure of clarity. It will be apparent that the United States can no longer be counted on as a strategic partner. Rather than try to wait out Trump, let alone count on him, Europe would move forward on its own.
A final reason for hope about Europe’s prospects in 2020 is its growing recognition of the threat that a rising China poses to the liberal international order. In March, the EU labeled China a “systemic rival.” Early this month, at the NATO leaders’ meeting in London, the EU went further, acknowledging that China’s rise poses “challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance.” This raises hopes that Europe will not be so blinded by the promise of Chinese finance and investment that it fails to uphold its values and protect its long-term interests.
The challenges Europe faces – including managing migration and developing a new Africa strategy – may be formidable, but they are hardly insurmountable. Progress will require strategic vision, political will, and effective execution. But first, it will require far more self-confidence.
Finding Europe’s Way in the World
For historical reasons, Europe has long resided in the strategic shadow of the United States, which itself has underwritten decades of globalization and rapidly expanding prosperity. But the global balance of power is rapidly shifting, leaving Europe increasingly exposed.
BERLIN – The European Union, and particularly Germany, have yet to rise to the challenge posed by the United States’ retreat from global leadership. But, given the new competition from China, together with Russia’s renewed great-power aspirations, Western countries must find a way to cooperate more closely.
To that end, five issues seem vital. The first is Germany’s relationship with the US, which is now under severe stress. The elephant in the room is Germany’s failure to increase its annual defense spending to 2% of GDP, as agreed at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales. For obvious historical reasons, Germany is hesitant to become Europe’s de facto military power. Were it to meet its spending commitment, it would be allocating €80 billion ($89 billion) per year to the Bundeswehr, which is €46 billion more than what France spends.
Still, to do its part within the alliance without raising fears in Eastern Europe, Germany could spend 1.5% of its GDP on materiel and personnel, while committing an additional 0.5% to fund NATO’s operations in the Baltics and in Poland. That would both bolster the eastern member states’ ability to defend themselves against Russian aggression and demonstrate Germany’s willingness to shoulder more responsibility.
The second big issue is US-EU relations. The immediate challenges facing America and Europe have changed over the past seven decades. Most recently, Russia has expanded its sphere of influence into Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and the Sea of Azov, and China has begun to assert economic and technological dominance in Eurasia.
At the same time, Western democracies are struggling to deal with disruptions caused by globalization, migration, technology, and climate change. Amid deteriorating economic security and social cohesion, populist and nationalist movements have exploited voters’ anxieties by promising to defend the homeland against cosmopolitan elites and the multilateral institutions that have underpinned politics and economics since World War II.
Notwithstanding populist rhetoric, economic globalization has in fact created prosperity and reduced poverty, and opened up new development opportunities around the world. But without the West’s support, this system cannot be sustained. What we need now to open up new possibilities for the world order is a globalization of civil society, and to remind people and communities that the state is still capable of acting effectively. That starts with investing more in education, research, and infrastructure, while striking a balance between cross-border cooperation and respect for cultural idiosyncrasies.
This brings us to the third issue: Russia. Here, the EU’s pursuit of a balanced policy has created friction within the transatlantic alliance, as exemplified by the tensions over Nord Stream 2, a joint Russian-German pipeline project. In the German government’s view, Nord Stream 2 is fundamentally an economic issue. After all, German, French, and other European companies have invested heavily in the project; in any case, it would be a grave political mistake to intervene in the private European gas market.
The liberalization of the gas market has indeed allowed for a tremendous expansion of Europe’s energy supply. Ultimately, companies, following market signals, should decide from whom they buy their gas. But nor can Europeans ignore threats to the political independence of neighboring countries such as Ukraine – which Nord Stream 2 bypasses. On balance, a better way to secure Europe’s energy supply would be to expand and further integrate Europe’s natural-gas infrastructure, while building more terminals for liquefied natural gas. That way, no country – be it a member state or close partner – could be held hostage as a result of its dependence on Russian energy.
The fourth issue is China, which has made clear that it seeks a revision of the international balance of power. For its part, the Trump administration rightly challenged China on trade. There can be no “fair trade” when a country that does not play by the same rules as everyone else organizes two-fifths of the global economy. China lavishes subsidies on its industries, limits access to its markets, and routinely violates intellectual-property rights. Moreover, China’s model of authoritarian state capitalism poses a double challenge, because it represents both economic competition and an alternative political model. As such, the EU and America urgently need to devise clear, mutually agreed rules for dealing with China.
The fifth major issue is Europe’s role in the wider world. If Europe does not wake up to the realities of the new Sino-American rivalry, it could find itself in a position of geopolitical irrelevance. In fact, there are already signs of Europe’s declining global significance. Wars and conflicts along the European periphery are increasingly being decided by other powers, with Europe playing no discernible role in their resolution.
Europe’s reluctance to assert itself has a historical dimension. For good reasons, the EU has long resided beneath the US security umbrella, with the Union effectively remaining on the sidelines. But that geopolitical conception of Europe is an American artifact, based on the Marshall Plan. As NATO’s first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, famously put it, the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Much has changed since the 1950s. Today, we Europeans are only gradually beginning to understand that we must adapt to the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century. The Atlantic era is giving way to the Pacific era. Europeans must harbor no illusions that all will turn out well on its own. Now is the time to muster the courage and the will to take responsibility for our strategic interests.
Europe Must Recognize China for What It Is
Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet the heads of state and government of the 27 EU member states at the EU-China summit in Leipzig in September. Europeans need to understand that they will hand him a much-needed political victory unless he is held accountable for his failure to uphold human rights, particularly in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.
MUNICH – Neither the European public nor European political and business leaders fully understand the threat presented by Xi Jinping’s China. Although Xi is a dictator who is using cutting-edge technology in an effort to impose total control on Chinese society, Europeans regard China primarily as an important business partner. They fail to appreciate that since Xi became president and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), he has established a regime whose guiding principles are diametrically opposed to the values on which the European Union was founded.
The rush to embrace Xi is greater in Britain, which is in the process of separating itself from the EU, than in the EU itself. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to distance the United Kingdom from the EU as much as possible and to build a free-market economy that is unconstrained by EU regulations. He is unlikely to succeed, because the EU is prepared to take countermeasures against the type of deregulation that Johnson’s government seems to have in mind. But in the meantime, Britain is eyeing China as a potential partner, in the hope of reestablishing the partnership that former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was building between 2010 and 2016.
The Trump administration, as distinct from US President Donald Trump personally, has done much better in managing its ties with China. It developed a bipartisan policy that declared China to be a strategic rival and put tech giant Huawei and several other Chinese companies on the so-called Entity List, which forbids US companies to trade with them without government permission.
Only one person can violate this rule with impunity: Trump himself. Unfortunately, he appears to be doing just that by putting Huawei on the bargaining table with Xi. Since May 2019, when the United States placed it on the Entity List, the Department of Commerce has granted Huawei several three-month exemptions in order to prevent undue hardship for the company’s US components suppliers.
Huawei is a very unusual – and in some ways unique – company. Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, received his technical education in part as a member of the People’s Liberation Army engineering corps, and the PLA became one of his first major customers. At the time of Huawei’s founding in 1987, all of China’s technology was imported from abroad, and Ren’s goal was to reverse engineer foreign technologies with local researchers. He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
By 1993, Huawei launched the most powerful telephone switch available in China. Subsequently, it received a key contract from the PLA to build the first national telecommunications network. It then benefited from the government’s policy, adopted in 1996, for nurturing domestic telecommunications manufacturers, which also meant keeping foreign competitors out. By 2005 Huawei’s exports exceeded its domestic sales. In 2010, Huawei was included in Fortune magazine’s global list of the 500 largest companies.
After Xi came to power, Huawei lost whatever autonomy it may have enjoyed. Like every other Chinese company, it must follow the CPC’s orders. Until 2017, this remained an implicit understanding; with the adoption of the National Intelligence Law that year, it became a formal obligation.
Soon after that, a Huawei employee was involved in a spying scandal in Poland, and the company has also been accused of other cases of espionage. But spying is not the greatest danger for Europe. Making Europe’s most critical infrastructure dependent on Chinese technology means opening the door to blackmail and sabotage.
It is clear to me that under Xi, China poses a threat to the values on which the EU was founded. Apparently, this is not clear to the leaders of EU member states, nor to the leaders of industry, particularly in Germany.
The EU faces a tremendous challenge: the silent pro-European majority has spoken, saying that their primary concern is climate change, but the member states are fighting with one another over the budget and are more focused on appeasing Xi than with maintaining the transatlantic relationship.
Instead of fighting a losing battle against Huawei’s dominance in the 5G market, the US and the EU, or the EU alone, ought to cooperate in building up Ericsson and Nokia as viable competitors.
Xi will meet the heads of state and government of the 27 EU member states at the EU-China summit in Leipzig in September. Europeans need to understand that this will hand him a much-needed political victory unless he is held accountable for, and questioned about, his failure to uphold human rights, particularly in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.
Only the Chinese political leadership can decide Xi’s future. The harm caused by his mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has become so visible that the Chinese public, and even the Politburo, must recognize it. The EU should not knowingly facilitate his political survival.
Which Way for Europe on China?
Under its new leadership, the European Union has promised to step up its engagement on the world stage to ensure that it does not become a pawn in an escalating Sino-American great-power rivalry. To succeed, it will have to strike a careful balance between economic priorities and its own security.
STOCKHOLM – Recognizing that the European Union is facing a number of vexing challenges on the world stage, Ursula von der Leyen, the new European Commission president, has promised to lead a “geopolitical Commission.” Echoing this sentiment, Josep Borrell, the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has challenged the EU to decide whether it wants to be a global “player,” or just a “playground” for other powers. So, which way will Europe go?
Of all the challenges Europe faces, few are as important as forging a strategic policy for managing its relationship with China. The stakes are enormous. The EU is China’s largest trade partner, and China is the EU’s top trade partner after the United States, with bilateral trade exceeding $1.1 billion per day.
Over the past few years, the US has adopted an increasingly aggressive approach to China. In fact, “confronting” China seems to be one of the few things that unite Americans politically nowadays, even though no single factor is driving US policy. President Donald Trump seems primarily concerned with the bilateral trade deficit, whereas the US security establishment worries about China’s ongoing military and technological development, which could eventually position it to challenge US strategic supremacy.
No one doubts that China’s rise poses a challenge to individual countries and the global balance of power. A world in which the Chinese economy has grown to twice the size of the US economy will be a very different place indeed, even without accounting for rising Chinese military spending. It is understandable that Americans are worried about no longer being the major global power – a position they have enjoyed since supplanting the British Empire over a century ago.
Nonetheless, how the US intends to confront this emerging new reality remains unclear. Some seem to believe decoupling with China, and pressuring other countries to do the same, can frustrate the growth of the Chinese economy, potentially creating the conditions for political or even regime change. Others are skeptical of this strategy, and would prefer more narrowly defined policies geared toward changing specific aspects of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. This approach is less glamorous, but it is also more traditional.
In any case, gut reactions have so far been winning out over careful deliberation, and this will probably remain true for some time to come. The US wants the EU to fall into line with its position; but, other than making that demand clear, it has pursued almost no strategic dialogue with Europe on the issue.
Meanwhile, the debate over China within the EU has been heating up. China may no longer have a Marxist economy, but it certainly still has a Leninist political system. For good reason, many Europeans are sensitive to issues of human rights in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and elsewhere. Europeans are also rightly worried about economic issues. As the European Commission warned earlier this year (under its previous leadership), China is “an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.” This language represents a sharp departure from that of previous official EU communiqués.
The next year will be critical. In addition to a regular EU-China summit in Beijing in April, Chinese and European heads of state will hold a special meeting in Leipzig, Germany, next September. An important test for the relationship will be whether the two powers can conclude a comprehensive investment agreement more than six years after starting negotiations. Given these looming opportunities for dialogue, the EU could pursue strategic engagement, rather than broad confrontation, with China. But it takes two to tango, and much will depend on how Chinese policies develop in the meantime.
Putting aside trade and investment questions, the EU must be less complacent with respect to the security challenges that China poses. EU member states should step up their freedom-of-navigation tours in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. And there clearly needs to be more scrutiny of Europe’s growing technological dependence on China in critical areas like 5G infrastructure.
That said, Europe’s best response to China’s growing technological might is to become more competitive in its own right. Should the EU fail at that, no barrier will be high enough to shield it from China’s growing influence. That applies not just to Europe, but also to the US over the long run.
Few observers expected China to transform suddenly into a full-fledged democracy following its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. But the country’s repressive turn over the past decade has nonetheless been disappointing to witness. State-owned enterprises are still favored, books are burned, and the Communist Party of China continues to assert its primacy in every domain of Chinese life. How long this will last is anyone’s guess. Dynasties come and go, but in 2021 the CPC will mark the centenary of its founding. Under its rule, China has swung between starkly different models of development.
Whatever happens, China is not going away, and tackling issues from climate change to the unraveling of the global trade system will require its participation. Accordingly, a policy of critical and constructive strategic engagement seems like the most sensible way forward for the EU. Pursuing such a policy in dialogue with the US would redound to everyone’s benefit. But, at the end of the day, the EU must choose its own path.
What Kind of Great Power Can Europe Become?
While EU policymakers cavil over constitutional questions about desired levels of European integration, global forces are imposing a political transformation on Europe. The only real question facing Europeans is whether they will establish themselves as a global power, or become a mere pawn of others.
BERLIN – World War II, and the period of decolonization that followed it, brought to an end the centuries-long global domination of Europe’s great powers. After 1945, neither of the global powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – was European, and a plethora of newly independent nation-states bounded onto the world stage.
Having achieved victories both in the Pacific and in Europe, only the US was strong enough to provide the still-dominant West with a political and economic order. America provided military protection and support for political cooperation and free trade, while the rest of the Western world sought to overcome the forces of nationalism and protectionism.
America also created rules-based international institutions. In Europe, this multilateral framework eventually evolved into a new (Western) European system of states: today’s European Union. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day in 1991, the US became the world’s only superpower – and quickly overextended itself. The unipolar moment ended with the senseless US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a country from which the US has been trying to extricate itself for more than a decade.
But the global order cannot exist in a vacuum, because other powers will always step in to fill the void. Hence, the new emerging power, China, has been rushing to assert itself on the world stage, as has a militarily reinvigorated Russia, the world’s other major nuclear power after the US. The current order is no longer defined by one or two superpowers, but nor is it based on multilateralism – or on any other framework designed to balance competing interests and contain, prevent, or resolve conflicts.
The election of US President Donald Trump marked the beginning of America’s active renunciation of the global order that it helped build. Under Trump, the US has deliberately tried to destroy post-war institutions such as the World Trade Organization, while openly questioning time-tested international alliances such as NATO. The multilateral Pax Americana of the Cold War era has given way to the return of a world in which individual countries assert their national interests at the expense of other, weaker powers. Sometimes this involves economic or diplomatic pressure; and sometimes, as in the case of Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine, it involves the use of force.
Europe cannot simply dodge or ignore the effects of this broader sea change. While the European Union is powerful in economic, technological, and trade terms, it is not a great power in its own right. It lacks the homogenous political will and the military capabilities that underpin genuine geopolitical power, and it has come to take many of its own traditions for granted. As a supranational entity of 27 member states, it is the progeny of precisely the multilateral order that is now in decline.
The historic reversal from rules-based multilateralism to an unstable system of great-power rivalries is woefully inconsistent with the current mix of growing global challenges, not least climate change. Preventing catastrophic global warming requires collective action by an international community comprising the vast majority of countries, not a revival of a global order based on competition among states.
Fortunately, the EU already holds a leading position with respect to climate-change mitigation, both in technological and regulatory terms. Europe’s task now is to maintain and expand that lead, not just for the sake of the planet, but for its own economic interests as well. After all, America’s retreat is forcing Europe to become a power in its own right. Otherwise, it will become a dependent and mere instrument of other powers.
In geopolitical terms, Trumpism, the rise of China, and Russian revisionism – which takes the form of military aggression, owing to Russia’s weakening economic base – have left Europeans with no choice but to pursue great-power status. The current wave of technological innovation has further strengthened this imperative. Digitalization, artificial intelligence, big data, and (possibly) quantum computing will determine what the world of tomorrow looks like, including who leads it.
At its heart, the digital revolution is about politics, not technology. The liberty of individuals and entire societies is at stake. In the digital future, the political freedoms that underpin Western civilization will increasingly depend on questions of data ownership. Will European data belong to firms in Silicon Valley or China, or will it be subject to the sovereign control of Europeans themselves? To my mind, this question will be critical to establishing Europe’s great-power credentials in the years and decades ahead.
Europeans have long been debating constitutional questions such as the desired level of integration or confederation (Staatenverbund) for the EU. But the time for these discussions is over, at least for now. The political transformation that is underway is being forced upon integrationists and inter-governmentalists alike. The challenge now is to transform Europe into a great power before it is ground down by larger technological and geopolitical forces.
Europe cannot afford to fall behind technologically or in terms of geopolitical power. It has a responsibility to lead the rest of the world on the issue of climate change, which will require technological as well as regulatory innovation. In a world quickly succumbing to zero-sum rivalries, becoming a climate-policy great power should be Europe’s top priority.
What Does Europe Have to Offer?
The world is facing powerful economic headwinds, including the Sino-American rivalry, rapid technological change, population aging, worsening income inequality and deteriorating social mobility, and environmental degradation. Europe can help the world to overcome them. But first, it must clarify which ones, and how.
NEW YORK – At last month’s annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proclaimed that Europe needed to be more assertive in the world. That means “stepping up” in some areas. But exactly which areas? To answer that question, the European Union needs to identify – and convincingly articulate – what it has to offer the rest of the world.
This is easier said than done, particularly at a time of rapidly shifting global power dynamics. The night of von der Leyen’s speech, I put the question to a European business leader and to a former senior public official. Neither had a ready answer.
Representatives of the world’s other major powers would not face the same struggle. The United States is a leader in innovation and technology, and boasts deep and broad financial markets. It also possesses the world’s strongest military, virtually guaranteeing America’s global primacy for the foreseeable future.
China, for its part, has established itself as a formidable economic and political counterweight to the US, largely by capturing a critical position in global value chains and, increasingly, as a major source of foreign direct investment. This soft-power offensive, which includes ambitious transnational infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, has won China many friends, though it has also raised fears of an inevitable military confrontation with the incumbent hegemon – a dynamic known as the Thucydides Trap.
Yet today’s Europe seems unsure of its global role. The United Kingdom has officially exited the EU. Rising populism is producing polarization, paralysis, and internal pressures so severe that the Union’s very survival no longer seems certain. And investors have noticed: the region’s stock markets have consistently underperformed for two decades, implying a lack of faith in the bloc’s long-term prospects.
But it is far too soon to write off Europe. In my view, there are four key areas where the EU could establish itself as a global player.
The first and most obvious is trade. According to the World Bank, the post-Brexit EU remains home to nearly 450 million people, and boasts an average per capita GDP of roughly $36,000. It thus remains a highly desirable trading partner.
The second area where Europe can lead is in regulation, particularly of Big Tech. In many ways, Europe has already established itself as a regulatory pioneer. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), implemented in 2018, gave EU residents unprecedented control over their personal data, setting a new standard for data-privacy rules. At the national level, France has strict defamation and privacy laws.
To be sure, there are questions about whether robust regulation constrains innovation and economic dynamism. The GDPR, for example, can be viewed as excessively burdensome, and thus as undermining investment and growth, particularly among small and medium-size companies. But, as public suspicion of Big Tech intensifies, European leadership in this area is both critical and warranted.
The third area where Europe can play a vital global role is in the competition between the US and China. The Thucydides Trap – already manifest in the US-China trade and technology war – need not lead to military conflict, particularly if the EU could act as a kind of referee, helping to determine whether and how the two heavyweights engage. To succeed, Europe would need to navigate not only economic matters, such as the ongoing trade war, but also the more fundamental ideological clash between America’s democratic capitalism and China’s state-led model.
In doing so, Europe would have to bring to bear its unique capacity in a fourth area: the defense of Western values, especially individual economic and political freedoms. Already, many countries view the Chinese model – which eschews competitive elections and grants the political class considerable control over the economy – as an alternative route to development. It is up to Europe to highlight the shortcomings of this approach and make the case for liberal-democratic values.
There is reason to hope that the EU will, as von der Leyen urges, “step up.” In fact, her Davos proclamation reflects a consensus that has been emerging among European political leaders – most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron – for a few years now. For example, Macron pledged to “rejuvenate” the EU in his 2017 inauguration speech, and has been emphasizing the need to recover the spirit of progress ever since.
It is time to transform this rhetoric into action. The world is facing powerful economic headwinds, including the Sino-American rivalry, rapid technological change, population aging in the advanced economies, worsening income inequality and deteriorating social mobility, and environmental degradation. Europe can help the world to overcome them. But first, it must clarify which ones, and how.
BRUSSELS – The geopolitical upheavals we are witnessing today underline the urgency with which the European Union must find its way in a world increasingly characterized by raw power politics. We Europeans must adjust our mental maps to deal with the world as it is, not as we hoped it would be.
This is a world of geostrategic competition, in which some leaders have no scruples about using force, and economic and other instruments are weaponized. To avoid being the losers in today’s US-China competition, we must relearn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a top-tier geostrategic actor.
It may, at first, seem difficult to face this challenge. After all, the EU was established to abolish power politics. It built peace and the rule of law by separating hard power from economics, rule-making, and soft power. We assumed that multilateralism, openness, and reciprocity comprised the best model not only for our continent but also for the wider world.
Things turned out differently. Regrettably, we face a harsher reality, with many actors ready to use force to get their way. Every day, we see economic tools, data streams, technologies, and trade policies used for strategic ends.
How does Europe deal with this new world? Many say that EU foreign policy will never succeed, because Europe is too weak and too divided. It is, of course, true that if member states disagree on key lines of action, our collective credibility suffers. Sometimes, we agree only on expressing our concerns, but not on what we will do about it. With unanimity rules, it is difficult to reach agreements on divisive issues, and the risk of paralysis is always present. Member states must realize that using their vetoes weakens not just the Union, but also themselves. One cannot proclaim to want a stronger European role in the world without investing in it.
Europe needs to avoid both resignation and dispersion. Resignation means thinking that the world’s problems are too numerous or too distant for all Europeans to feel concerned. It is essential for a common strategic culture that all Europeans see security threats as indivisible. To believe that Libya and the Sahel concern only the Mediterranean countries is as absurd as to think that the security of the Baltic countries concerns only Eastern Europe.
Dispersion consists of wanting to get involved everywhere, expressing concerns or goodwill, combined with humanitarian funding or aid for reconstruction, as if great powers were entitled to break dishes while the EU is the natural provider of new plates. We have to be clear about our political goals and the full range of our capacities.
Capitalizing on Europe’s trade and investment policy, financial power, diplomatic presence, rule-making capacities, and growing security and defense instruments, we have plenty of levers of influence. Europe’s problem is not a lack of power. The problem is the lack of political will for the aggregation of its powers to ensure their coherence and maximize their impact.
Diplomacy cannot succeed unless it is backed by action. If we want the fragile truce in Libya to last, we need to support the arms embargo. If we want the Iran nuclear deal to survive, we need to ensure that Iran benefits if it returns to full compliance. If we want the Western Balkans to succeed on the path of reconciliation and reform, we need to offer a credible EU accession process delivering incremental benefits. If we want peace between Israelis and Palestinians, we need to stand up for a negotiated solution agreed by all sides, based on international law. If we don’t want Africa’s Sahel region to descend into lawlessness and insecurity, we need to expand our engagement. In these and other areas, member states need to fulfill their responsibilities.
Beyond addressing crises in Europe’s neighborhood, there are two other key priorities.
First, the EU must frame a new, integrated strategy for and with Africa, our sister continent. We need to think big and use our policies on trade, innovation, climate change, cyberspace, security, investment, and migration to give substance to our rhetoric about being equal partners.
Second, we must get serious about devising credible approaches to dealing with today’s global strategic actors: the United States, China, and Russia. While different in many ways, all three are practicing issue linkage and power politics. Our response should be differentiated and nuanced, but clear-eyed and ready to defend EU values, interests, and agreed international principles.
None of this will be easy, and not all of it will be achieved this year. But political battles are won or lost depending on how they are framed. This should be the year that Europe gets traction with a geopolitical approach, escaping the fate of being a player in search of its identity.