Alphen, Netherlands. 28
July. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail
the somewhat weak-kneed and weak of will Sir Robin confronted by the Three-Headed Knight says to
King Arthur, “Would it help to confuse him if we ran away more?” I was reminded of this scene when doing a TV
interview yesterday to discuss the debacle of the EU’s pathetic non-response to
MH17 and Russia’s continuing proxy and not-so proxy aggression in Eastern
Ukraine. Unless Moscow changes tack something
even bigger and nastier is about to happen. Russia is now locked onto a course that
somehow or another will see it take another part of Ukraine. And yet in the face of such aggression EU
member-states seem more interested in fighting each other than blunting Russian
ambitions. Yet again EU foreign policy has
been proved not to work. Why?
Yesterday Sir Tony
Brenton the former British ambassador to Moscow discussed the crisis. He told a story that explains all too
graphically why the EU routinely fails in a crisis. While serving in Moscow he received the text
for the May 2003 “EU-Russia Common Spaces” agreement. This long-term plan suggested four grand
spaces: a Common Economic Space; a Common Space for Freedom, Security and
Justice; a Common Space of External Security; and a Common Space of Research
and Education. So meaninglessly lofty
was the document and so lacking in diplomatic substance that Sir Tony read it
out to his appalled staff. This EU
fantasy was about as far as one could get from applied statecraft.
It highlighted the three
essential dilemmas of the EU and its so-called external relations. First, EU external relations only work so
long as no-one really tests it. That is
why Brussels loves the long-term and the meaningless language of unstrategic ‘strategic
partnerships’. Second, the only crisis
the EU really focuses on is the eternal internal crisis that the EU has
become. One only has to look at the
ridiculously labyrinthine structure of the European External Action Service to
recognise it is just about the worst possible instrument to conduct real time
crisis management. Third, as soon a
crisis breaks the member-states are far more concerned about using the EU to
shift the burdens and costs of crisis management onto other member-states than
actually confronting the challenge.
That is precisely what
happened this week. On Tuesday EU
foreign ministers met to discuss tougher sanctions on Russia in the wake of MH
17. They could not agree. Britain wanted to protect its financial
services sector, France wanted to protect its warships deal, Germany wanted to
protect the 25,000 German jobs dependent on the oil and gas sector it shares
with Russia, and Italy did not want anything that would reveal the Faustian
energy pact it has struck with Moscow. Only
those Central and Eastern European members in the firing line of Putinism were
really willing to confront the wider strategic implications of Moscow’s actions
which had been re-iterated by President Putin as recently as his 1 July speech
to Russian diplomats.
As usual when there is
an impasse the European Commission was sent away to consider more sanctions. The draft document that emerged yesterday and
which will be discussed by ministers today was archetypal of all that is
wrong with EU foreign and security policy.
It was little more than a blatant Franco-German attempt to shift almost
all the cost of any further sanctions onto Britain and the City of London. So much for the impartiality of the European
Commission. And, far from deterring
Russia this absurdly unbalanced document if enforced would probably do more to
push Britain closer to an EU exit than damage Russia.
The consequence is not
just an expensive foreign policy white elephant, and the EU is certainly
that. So much political energy is
expended by EU member-states trying to out-manoeuvre each other for narrow,
short-term gain within the EU (in EU parlance the search for common positions
and joint action) that their own national foreign policies are gravely weakened. Britain is a classic example of this. For that reason the EU foreign and security
policy whole is far smaller than the parts of its sum resulting in a Europe
that punches way below its weight not just in the world but also in Europe.
In the long-term either
Europeans move towards a genuine EU foreign policy or they renationalise their
efforts to enable the construction of coalitions of like-minded states. The problem with the former idea is that it
would require an EU Foreign Ministry which would in turn need a country called ‘Europe’. The problem with the latter idea is that it
would mean an end to the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.
The bottom-line is
this; until Russia sees that Europeans are prepared to face economic pain to
blunt Moscow’s ambitions they will continue to regard the EU as somewhat of a
foreign policy joke; an institution long on grand declaratory rhetoric and very
short on power and substance. And, until
all Europeans are prepared to share such pain equitably then any and all such
efforts will do more damage to each other than the intended miscreant.
If Europeans continue
to hide a no man’s land of foreign policy irrelevance and incompetence they
will be victims of the twenty-first century rather than shapers of it. So, what
will the EU and its member-states do to blunt President Putin’s ambitions? Run away more.
That should confuse the blighter!
Julian Lindley-French
