INTERNATIONAL

Summer 2009

by David Howell

The communications revolution is robbing governments of their age-old monopoly of foreign policymaking, says David Howell, who believe it will also challenge the CFSP’s aspirations of the EU. He warns that Europe's common policies will need to be very flexible to adapt to the new conditions

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Does the European Union have anything close to a world view? Because the architecture of international relations has changed almost beyond recognition since Rome Treaty days, it’s incontestable that today’s EU has to address a world pattern of influences, trends, challenges and priorities that are totally different from those that faced the founding fathers, or even the much-enlarged EU a year or two ago.

The most visible evidence of this is the emergence of G20 as forum for the world’s hopes and fears, reflecting the rise of Asia and the decline of Western hegemony. But the trends have been there for well over a decade and go far deeper than headlines or the tensions of worldwide economic turmoil.

From the mid-1970s on, a succession of events made the old international agenda obsolete. The Cold War is now a memory even if its traumatic scars linger, and a mosaic of ethnic and nationalistic quarrels has long since replaced its old ideological divide. Power has shifted between capitals but has also been dispersed into internet linkages which have empowered almost half the human race, with still more communications innovations just ahead.

These developments have shaken the international institutions of the 20th century to their foundations. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organisation, NATO and the nuclear non-proliferation regime, to name only the most prominent, have all come under intense scrutiny as to their purpose, structure and relevance. Neither the EU nor the political structures within its member states, have escaped the waves of questioning now reaching into almost every corner of human affairs and governance.

This massive fluidity in international affairs confronts policymakers and those who would build more secure global structures with a set of entirely new complexities.

For the EU, searching for a more focussed global and better co-ordinated role while at the same time trying to settle its own future, the situation presents challenges that are particularly acute. In the first place, the transatlantic perspective has changed fundamentally. America has surrendered its unipolar moment and even its super-power status is now severely diluted. There used to be the view that a unified Europe could be a counterweight to U.S. dominance, but American influence is now at its nadir throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, as well as in its own backyard of Mexico and Latin America.

Obamamania may for the time being be obscuring all this, and there is no doubt that the U.S. presidency is now held by a highly personable and able individual. But Pax Americana is today as much of history as Pax Britannica. The concept of a world shaped by the ‘transformational diplomacy of American values’, as President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice liked to put it, now has zero validity.

How can this be, it may be asked, when the U.S. military spend is vastly greater than the rest of the world put together, when the country boasts 13 carrier fleets and 2,000 missiles and when the U.S. economy still accounts for 20% of global GNP?

The answer lies in one word – the microchip. Size no longer equates with power. On the contrary, size means vulnerability, slowness to adapt and inflexibility. The miniaturisation of weaponry, combined with the communications revolution, has given birth to an irreversible asymmetry of warfare and violence. The power to organise, to coerce and to strike has been placed in the hands of a horde of non-state players and activists, both good and bad, as well as lobbies and pressure groups of every political hue. This power is in the reach of the smallest extremist group and the most rogue-inclined rulers.

Afghanistan becomes a running sore; the Middle East a maelstrom of religious factions and terrorist networks instead of a democratic paradise – the ‘drained swamp’ which the last administration’s neo-cons so naively dreamed of.

The counter-argument used to be that even if America could no longer get its way through military might it at least remained the master of the financial and economic universe. But that claim, too, has been vaporised in Wall Street’s furnace of bankruptcies, debt and collapse.

Suddenly, it is no longer a question of Western dominance and who between Europe and America calls the shots. The answer is neither. The European powers now have to look elsewhere, and think in different terms if they are to make their mark and protect their own security and welfare.

The second major shift is even harder for EU member states and European strategists to comprehend. The fabric of relations and connections between states and societies has been radically altered. The international pattern is no longer primarily government-to-government. The information age has taken away the monopolies of data and international intercourse between state authorities and placed it in the hands of countless groups, professions and interests which can and do coordinate activities and pressures across national boundaries regardless of official stances and policies. What this means is that the evolution of external policy and relationships, whether at member state or EU strategic level, is no longer predominantly in the hands of officialdom. The pattern is being crafted at sub-governmental and non-governmental levels between professional bodies, regulators, battered banking authorities, local government, scientists, judicial experts, medical authorities, media magnates, international designers, standard-setters in safety, health, sports – the list is endless.

We are looking here at what has been called the privatisation of foreign policy, which could also be described as the emerging biochemistry of international relations in a networked world, a world in which no great centralisation of rules, laws and powers and no great role of ‘world leadership’ by a single nation or bloc is either required or relevant.

Europe’s approach to the wider world, and consideration of its own future, has to take account of all this. It is not merely a question of recognising that power has migrated significantly from the debt-sodden West to the high-saving and cash-rich nations, but of understanding that influence in the new networked world comes in entirely different packages. An interesting consequence of this is that organisations that had seemed redundant in Cold War times or before the Internet Age are now engaging a renewed usefulness. A good example is the Commonwealth network which emerged out of the old British Commonwealth and now embraces almost two billion people in a subtle lattice-work that provides major opportunities for influence and the promotion of its members’ interests.

A third problem for European strategists, as they struggle to make sense of a this kaleidoscopic world is that the resources patterns of the globe, particularly energy, are being radically transformed and will have a profound impact on how power is distributed internationally. Much is made of Europe’s need to reduce its dependence on Russian gas through a common energy policy, and with a more evenly balanced EU-Russia relationship. But in practice this may be viewing the whole issue through the wrong lens.

Climate concerns and the goal of drastically reduced CO2 emissions are the main drivers, and major technological advances in the efficiency, safety and economy of nuclear power mean there is a realistic opportunity for Europe to escape the Russian grip altogether. Even in the short term, Russian gas exports to Western Europe plunged by 22% between 2008 and the 2009 likely requirement, and prices dropped too. Extensive new natural gas developments on European soil will further weaken the Russian bargaining position. Dependence on Middle East oil may also be on the same downward path. In both directions, the energy factor is now taking second place to the need for different sorts of relationship. What Europe needs from Russia and from heavyweight Asian players like India, China and Japan is greater cooperation in containing Iranian destabilisation and detoxifying the Middle Eastern quarrels that fertilise terrorism – neither America nor the EU having proved capable of mounting the necessary pressure on Israel to settle the Palestine issue.

In this international scene of extraordinary fluidity and uncertainty, the EU cannot afford the stilted rigidity of direction which treaty procedures and formalities of hierarchy impose. Its world view must be flexible, agile and above all realistically attuned to the inevitable constraints which a ‘committee’ of 27 countries, inevitably imposes.
Europe can come together and act effectively on specific and well-defined issues, but not on everything. It cannot substitute for the growing mesh of bilateral relations which the information age has created. Nor can it live within a legislative or treaty-determined straightjacket. That is why so many good and sincere Europeans nevertheless feel uncomfortable with the Lisbon treaty's aspirations, which claim not to touch foreign policy matters and yet clearly point in the direction of a single European voice and an EU Foreign Minister in all but name.

Behind this realism there lies what is perhaps the most difficult issue of all for European strategists to accept. It is that there is neither a settled world nor a settled and ‘complete’ EU to be positioned within it. Euro-enthusiasts like to talk about an ultimate end-point for European integration, a ‘solution’ or goal, with movement towards which constituting ‘progress’. But this concept is both intellectually and philosophically flawed. European nations, in all their glorious diversity, have now been pitched into a state of permanent mouvimenti, or oscillation. Questions about the distribution of powers and competences between different levels will remain under constant and continuous challenge. It is in the nature of human affairs that they will never be settled. There will be no final treaty or constitution that can sign off and seal the task. Arguments will come and go for powers to be administered centrally or peripherally as circumstances alter.

The key for this restless Union to operate effectively on a treacherous world stage is an appreciation of the limitations of an EU common foreign policy, and an equal wariness of over-ambition as a potentially fatal disintegrating force.

A world view has nowadays to be formed in constantly shifting conditions, and formed by a Europe that is itself a constantly changing political process and not a settled and organised platform. Charting Europe’s future is akin to navigating a storm-tossed vessel in the worst possible sea conditions, and will call for leaders with better piloting skills than now and better charts than our treaties so far if we’ve to avoid the ugly rocks ahead.