With elections to the European Parliament scheduled for 2024, the EU leadership is entering its last lap, which means it is a good time to reflect on the bloc’s role in the world and learn from the wars and crises of the past four years, POLITICO reports.
At the very beginning of her term, Commission Chair Ursula von der Leyen announced the creation of a “geopolitical commission”. However, how are things really going in global Europe?
One of the significant events that rocked Europe’s fragile geopolitical situation was the outbreak of war in Ukraine. In this situation, Europe showed all the elements of a successful foreign policy.
Of course, this does not mean that Europe will necessarily succeed in achieving its goals or that Ukraine will win its existential struggle for survival. Europe is the most important player in this game, but it is not the only one: Ukraine, Russia, the United States and, to some extent, China play key roles in this equation. However, Europe is an important player, and therefore an effective European policy, although insufficient overall, is certainly a prerequisite for Ukraine’s success, according to POLITICO.
The effectiveness of European policy is ensured by three conditions. First, a clear vision: When it comes to Ukraine, Europe knows what it wants. It wants a free, independent and democratic Ukraine that has its place in the European security order, where the fundamental principles of international law – sovereignty and territorial integrity – are respected. Not an easy task, in the current geopolitical conditions of Europe, but it is a clear, principled and consistent vision.
Moreover, the EU has remained united in pursuit of its goal. Given Russia’s traditional divisiveness in intra-European discussions, the uneven effects of the war on the EU, and the persistent differences in threat perceptions and public discourse in European countries, this was not a foregone conclusion.
However, a split is always around the corner, and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s unity on this issue with Hungary’s Viktor Orban is worrisome. However, Donald Tusk’s return to power in Poland far outweighs this bad news and inspires confidence, POLITICO reports.
Finally, Europe is deploying an increasingly impressive array of policy tools on this front, from increasing its share of military and economic aid to Kyiv, to disengaging from Russia on energy, to accepting millions of Ukrainian refugees and resuming enlargement. On Ukraine, the EU is united in its vision and has a clear strategy to achieve it.
However, not all is as good as it seems. The geopolitical Europe that was once the poster child of the EU’s “integrated approach to conflict and crisis” has for the first time begun to falter in the Sahel. A series of coups sweeping through the region has undermined the bloc’s position, and with France literally thrown out of the country, the EU is at a loss as to what to do.
After the coup in Niger, Europe backed the Economic Community of West African States, claiming that by doing so it had finally gone along for the ride, justifying its talk of “African solutions to African problems”. But as attractive as this slogan sounds, it hides the fact that when it comes to the Sahel, the EU no longer has a clear understanding of what it wants.
Next came the conflict in the Caucasus, where, in principle, Europe knew from the beginning what it wanted. No one disputed Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, including Nagorno-Karabakh, but everyone opposed its realisation of it through a 10-month siege and subsequent military action, and disapproved of the ethnic cleansing of almost all of the 120,000 Armenians living in the enclave. Europe also opposes the idea of Baku militarily creating a corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave, which is a violation of Armenian sovereignty.
Here too, the EU has put some of its chips on the table: the EU has deployed a civilian monitoring mission to Armenia and European Council President Charles Michel has spent considerable political capital on mediation between Yerevan and Baku. Nevertheless, European foreign policy instruments in the Caucasus have not shown sufficient strength to contribute to Europe’s objectives, according to POLITICO.
In the case of the Caucasus, the EU has a vision, but does not yet have the means to realise it. Unlike Ukraine, EU economic assistance in the region is limited, military assistance is virtually non-existent (except for France), Azerbaijan’s energy leverage over some member states is quite significant, and EU enlargement is not yet being considered.
And finally, the critical situation in the Middle East. The European consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been carefully shaped over decades and in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in a reasoned, balanced and relatively detailed formulation of a two-state solution on the 1967 borders – a formulation that ensures Israel’s security, Palestinian self-determination, respect and rights for all.
This consensus has long since broken down, with a number of EU member states increasingly tilting towards Israel, which in turn has increasingly explicitly rejected the two-state solution.
For years, the EU avoided confronting the crumbling consensus by tacitly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s idea that the Palestinian issue could be bypassed – an idea first supported by former US President Donald Trump as part of the Abrahamic Accords and then by current US President Joe Biden as part of attempts to normalise Israel-Saudi relations.
However, the catastrophe that unfolded in the Middle East following the 7 October Hamas attack and the Israeli response has exposed an obvious truth: the issue of a Palestinian state cannot be bypassed or ignored. It has also exposed the painful truth of how divided Europe has become, POLITICO reports.
Europe once had a vision for the Middle East – the only vision that could ensure a sustainable peace. And it still has the economic (vis-à-vis the Palestinians) and commercial (vis-à-vis Israel) leverage to promote that vision, although it has always lacked the courage to use it. And we now seem to prefer to bicker among ourselves while Gaza is destroyed and thousands of civilians are killed. The pathetic three-way split at the UN General Assembly hours after the European Council produced a weak but unified approach to the conflict showed Europe at its worst.
Europe’s approach to Ukraine was supposed to be a demonstration of what geopolitical Europe can mean. Now the Middle East is demonstrating its demise.
