The good news is that European politicians are no longer in denial about the EU’s decline. But Richard Youngs warns that the bad news is that there are no signs of a strategy to reverse that decline.
A refrain that is all too familiar to chroniclers of European integration is that only when external challenges are really serious do EU governments overcome their petty squabbles and unite. Post-war reconciliation created the European Communities; American and Japanese competition drove the Single European Act; the Cold War’s abrupt end gave birth to the Maastricht treaty and, less resolutely, 9/11 and international terrorism prompted a deepening of security co-operation.
Now the EU faces the equally tough challenge of how to respond to its relative decline and the rise of Asia in a ‘post-Western world’. But so far there’s no sign of the spirit of “convergence-in-adversity”.
Or perhaps that’s not entirely fair. European leaders have committed to fashioning “strategic partnerships” with emerging powers, and EU defence ministers have agreed to share defence equipment by cutting out duplication. The EU is courting Asia more assiduously than before as diplomatic rapprochement with rising powers has become de rigeur. The EU has signed an usually far-reaching free trade agreement with South Korea, and trade talks with rising markets have helped return external trade flows to pre-crisis levels. If 2010 had any positive aspects it is that the penny at last dropped that the EU must more systematically confront and mitigate its decline.
Why, then, is Europe so disinclined to look beyond makeshift short-termism? Among the most oft-cited reasons for euro-sluggishness is the contention that this inertia is a result of the EU's institutional design. Its institutional processes undoubtedly need to be improved, and let's hope the Lisbon treaty's reforms start to yield concrete improvements. But institutional re-design will not be a magic wand for a smooth and effective EU foreign policy. Nobody believes that two or three EU governments hold in their hands superbly crafted plans for reacting to Europe's decline but are prevented from implementing by minority blocking votes.
Nor can Europe's policy inertia be attributed to a lack of awareness of how serious its plight has become. This may have been the case three or four years ago, but not now. Until then the very gradual nature of European decline meant that its seriousness had not fully registered, but today ministerial speeches and formal policy documents stress the urgency of an effective and assertive European response. Some Brussels officials may bristle at the hyperbole of declinists, but few still claim the EU is on a glide-path to superpower status. European leaders can no longer be accused of being in denial.
A broader concern is that the EU continues to lack a geostrategic blueprint. Although the EU shouldn't be aiming for an overly-simplistic strategic approach, it needs to engage in deeper thinking that could provide a geopolitical compass for its external policies. Such a geostrategy would need to be eclectic and should contain doses of co-operative realism, mixed with internationalism, the encouragement of transnational linkages and pinches of regionalism. It should also work at steering the U.S. towards a less hegemonic form of multi-lateralism.
American hegemony persists even in a world that is fast becoming more polycentric. The EU must work to remould U.S. power rather than situating itself as a pole equidistant between the U.S. and the rising powers. Eventually a rules-based world order must move from depending on U.S. oversight to enjoying a multiplicity of guarantors. The EU must work with the U.S. in influencing this trajectory, if the international order is to retain some degree of liberal internationalism even as it moves beyond the underwriting of U.S. hegemony.
At a European level, the EU now has little excuse for not moving up a gear. The Union needs to define its interests and mould its policy instruments accordingly, rather than maximising the number of ad hoc policy initiatives almost as an end in itself. There are no simple answers, so the EU will need to avoid both under- and over-reaction, but it needs simultaneously to correct over-ambition and introspection. It certainly is clear that a deepening of the EU's internationally-oriented strategic reflection is urgently needed before inertia mutates into terminal paralysis.
Read more: Article > Europe’s challenge is to shake-off inertia before it becomes paralysis
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