INTERNATIONAL
How to get Europe’s common foreign policy out of the doldrums
Summer 2007
The vaunted CFSP is at best a glass half empty, says Joachim Bitterlich, who was German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s foreign and security policy advisor. He puts forward a plan for Javier Solana to re-vitalise it as his parting gift to the EU
How far the EU still is from a real Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has been made abundantly clear by just a few recent controversies. The debate about the Baltic Sea pipeline from Russia to Germany, promoted by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and the discussion around the missile shield being pushed by the US Administration are both significant examples.
The EU has become an economic giant, and is therefore a serious global actor and partner. But politically it is still a paper tiger, only partly able to defend its own vital interests. Its Common Foreign and Security Policy has for years been considered as a vital asset that must be developed so as to underpin Europe’s weight and role in regional and global affairs.
So where are we Europeans today? Has the CFSP got a realistic chance, or has it become a never-ending dream? Do we need little more than the fresh impetus that a new approach or a new institution could give us, or is our basic problem that a European common foreign policy has been a failure?
Chancellor Helmut Kohl was given to saying during his last years in government that the very last area where the Europeans will reach a common and integrated policy would be the CFSP because national traditions there are so deeply anchored. And if we compare today’s CFSP to the tremendous progress over the last 20 years in the area of justice and home affairs his warning seems to have been borne out.
The balance of the history during the 30 years that spanned the first steps within the framework of “European Political Cooperation“ (EPC) and the launch of the CFSP itself certainly suggests progress, but that would be deceptive once you try to measure its real impact. The CFSP is still to a large extent virtual, falling far short of Europeans’ common convictions and certainly their ability to act in common.
Regular efforts to reinforce policy integration in Europe have yielded slow and steady improvements and a growing mood of concertation, but when it comes to important policy questions a genuine breakthrough has so far eluded the CFSP. At times when useful progress has been achieved, we have seen some European governments take fright at their own boldness and start edging backwards. Thus the EU publishes its solemn declarations on critical developments around the world, but fails to act as one on vital issues.
The EU’s attempts to get its act together were perhaps stronger in the 1980s than of late, chiefly because when Hans-Dietrich Genscher was Germany’s foreign minister, he more than any other politician tried, though with limited success, to unify European foreign policy. At that time the basic idea had consisted of establishing a concrete list of issues where Europeans had vital interests in common.
Then came the Maastricht treaty, which gave birth to the CFSP but endowed it with a relatively weak content compared to the deal that was struck on Economic and Monetary Union. Only a few weeks earlier the Franco-German initiative of October 1991 had set out a much more far-reaching approach to CFSP, but did not get the unanimous approval it needed from the member governments. The sort of ambitious ideas it had rather undiplomatically expressed in blunt terms came to grief when an unholy alliance of more traditional foreign policy thinkers in Britain, France and Germany toned it down during the run-up to the EU heads of government meeting in Maastricht. At that point, those of us who had hoped to achieve real progress started to give up. Perhaps, we told ourselves, the time was not yet ripe.
The next match to be played out in this high-stakes game was in Amsterdam, where the EU’s new post of High Representative for the CFSP was born, along with its permanent working structures in Brussels. Once again, the EU was to by-pass fundamental disagreement between the member states by simply creating a new institution.
Of course Maastricht and Amsterdam marked positive steps forward, thanks in large part to the commitment of Javier Solana and his team. But in Amsterdam, the debate was between foreign ministers, with their bosses only distant spectators. And Javier Solana himself was thus labelled as not representing a real danger to EU leaders’ freedom of action or their room to manoeuvre.
CFSP’s track record in recent years bears testimony to its in-built weaknesses. In diplomatic terms, it has achieved a measure of progress in many areas, but still it has not been a real success story. No substantial or sustained breakthrough has been achieved where it matters.
A depressingly familiar scenario has begun to mark its operations: once a common approach to some key issues becomes a recognisable threat to some national interest or other, member states refrain from taking that vital last step toward a common position and fall back on their own various national lines.
Examples of this are legion: The EU’s relations with the US, Russia or China, the Middle East peace process, the Mediterranean or Africa, not to mention EU development policy as a key part of any common foreign policy. And because of this the EU has had to endure a succession of damaging setbacks – the most recent being over Iraq and then Russia. The 2003 wounds of Iraq were slowly healing when the next setback followed. Chirac’s and Schröder’s special scheme with Russia with regard to Iraq was followed by the row over Schröder’s pipeline deal with Gazprom which upset all the Baltic states and Poland. The Russians, meanwhile, have been delighted by the competition between EU members for their oil and gas resources.
The latest European foreign policy failure at the time of writing is the anti-missile shield that our US allies have been relentlessly pushing for in NATO since 2002. Some member states seem to be ready to back this project, even though it doesn’t seem entirely ripe yet, but others are refusing to follow, in part because they fear angry reactions from Russia and perhaps the start of a new arms race. So far, however, there has been no serious debate of this issue between European leaders.
As to China, another key European foreign policy issue, most close observers of Chinese attitudes to the Europeans would probably come to the same conclusion; the EU member states and their business sectors are all busily competing with one another in a race for market share. Yet psychology is clearly not the Europeans’ strong suit; on the day that European foreign ministers lifted the arms embargo against Libya, they decided to maintain it against China.
Iran, meanwhile, could have become a positive example of the CFSP’s effectiveness. France, Germany and Britain have been trying to convince Iran to renounce its plans for developing nuclear energy to the point it would have a nuclear weapons capability. But they were either unwilling or unable to understand that the only possible solution was to allow Iran to do so by proposing the same formula that Germany had devised back in the early 1970s – namely that Iran could enrich uranium under IAEA auspices provided it do so within an integrated international company with France and Russia as partners.
Yet another sad chapter is that of the United Nations Security Council. Neither Britain nor France are prepared to offer their own existing permanent seat as a “European voice“ in cases where EU member states have reached a common position. It’s hardly surprising, given the way Germany and Italy have been quarrelling so noisily over becoming a new permanent member through different formulas for UN reform.
Brussels’ insiders like to say that real progress has been reached on security policy in recent years, but how true is this? Yes, we’ve seen the first EU-led military and police peacekeeping operations, and, yes, the EU member states are also progressively reinforcing joint structures and capabilities. And some brave spirits are even beginning to talk about a European Army, a topic that hasn’t been broached for the past 15 years. Clearly it should be placed back on the EU’s common agenda, not least because national armies across Europe are now suffering from a serious lack of money, so that the majority of member sates are no longer capable of maintaining full fledged military forces, and where the rising costs of high-tech equipment cry out for common solutions. Despite all that, the Europeans are as hesitant as ever.
But Europe’s basic problem, though, is still that of establishing a close relationship with the US that is built on mutual trust. If anything, transatlantic relations have been worsening.
It is probably true that relations have improved during the Bush administration’s second term. Europe and the US have both learnt to soften their differences when dealing with third countries, and on bilateral issue there has been a degree of progress with deals like “open skies” pact on civil aviation and the readiness of both sides to scrap the barriers created by different standards and regulations. The latter came when Chancellor Angela Merkel championed ideas developed through the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN) that links parliamentarians from both sides.
But where is the permanent transatlantic consultation and early warning structure we need? The widely-held perception in the US is that EU countries are fading away from their commitment to NATO. For the US, the key relationship should remain NATO, with the EU able to lead military missions so long as it has NATO’s agreement and therefore that of the US. In American eyes, such an agreement would not mean a division of labour between NATO and EU, but EU military action under US control. Not a few Europeans, of course, see matters somewhat differently. This divergence is becoming more and more evident, because the reality is that the EU is developing its own military structures that are independent of NATO’s.
The European perception, meanwhile, is that the problem doesn’t lie with Europe but with the Americans, who have become increasingly unilateral and incapable of accepting a common decision with the EU, let alone a dissenting European view. The idea of independent EU action, or of a pre-determined European position within NATO representing an EU caucus, may seem natural to some Europeans, but for the US, it is still a vision of horror.
To be realistic, the transatlantic partners are today less united than ever; despite the common goals they share, they seem to be pursuing a different vision and purpose. And the disagreements between them have been multiplying as fast as the lengthening list of important tasks where Europe and the US need to act together. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was right when he sparked controversy in early 2005 by saying that a re-examination of the NATO-EU relationship is overdue – in my opinion what we now need is a new alliance between the US and the EU!
An overall assessment of the CFSP that found the glass to be no less than half empty could we be about right. But that’s not enough when set against the challenges that lie ahead of the EU, and what is globally at stake for we Europeans.
So what should Europe be doing? Should we go on muddling through, perhaps avoiding the most difficult issues by instead creating new institutions, such as a common European diplomatic service? Or should we undertake for the first time a frank and open stock-taking? Could EU foreign ministers and their national leaders find the courage in advance of choosing Javier Solana’s successor, to set up an independent committee to examine the problems that now face the CFSP and develop suggestions for a new start? And they could do a lot worse than ask Solana to head such a body – he arguably has a better overall record than most ministerial colleagues, and it is a formula that has already proved successful in other sensitive EU areas. If such a suggestion were to be put to the European Council in good time before Solana’s mandate ends, it could be the best farewell gift to the EU he could ever make, by giving the Common Foreign and Security Policy a badly-needed fresh impetus.