European Strategy in the 21st Century: New Future for Old Power (Routledge Studies in European Security and Strategy)

by Sven Biscop

First, the Global Strategy states that the EU will “guarantee the security of its citizens and territory”.

Second, it will “advance the prosperity of its people”.

Third, the EU will “foster the resilience of its democracies”.

These three vital interests cover the three dimensions of what I have defined as equality.

In order to be able to maintain these interests, the EU will, fourth, “promote a rules-based global order with multilateralism as its key principle and the United Nations at its

Five areas in which in view of the threats and challenges around us, priority action is necessary in order to defend our vital interests.

The first priority is “the security of our union”. Our territory, our borders and our citizens must be protected.

The 2003 strategy did not really addre...

Priority number two is “state and societal resilience to our east and south”. The EU cannot save the world, at least not in a day, and thus opts for a clear focus on its own periphery:

if the regions surrounding us would be destabilised, the potential impact on our vital interests would be the largest.

Our periphery should be understood broadly, however: according to the Global Strategy, it reaches until Central Asia in the east and Central Africa in the south.

countries than the existing European Neigh...

In its new strategy, the EU effectively distances itself from the earlier policy of active democratisation.

But the Global Strategy refers only to Tunisia and Georgia as successful examples. In many other neighbouring countries there is no trend toward democratisation. Many countries are not even aspiring to closer ties with the EU. Hence a new emphasis emerges: not on equality, but

on the resilience of states and societies as an alternative for democratisation.

What is resilience exactly? “States are resilient when societies feel they are becoming better off and have hope in the ...

The third priority that the Global Strategy advances is “an integrated approach to conflict”.

“Europeans must be able to protect Europe, respond to external crises, and assist in developing our partners’ security and defence capacities, carrying out these tasks in cooperation with others”. If necessary, the EU should be able to act on this level of ambition alone, or so it can be deduced from Mogherini’s plea for “strategic autonomy” in her foreword. The Global Strategy does indeed say that “European security and defence efforts should enable the EU to act autonomously while also contributing to

The fourth priority, “cooperative regional orders”, can also be read as a recognition of the need for realpolitik.

Finally, the fifth priority links back to the more idealistic agenda of 2003.

“The EU will strive for a strong UN as the bedrock of the multilateral rules-based order, and develop globally coordinated responses with international and regional organisations, states and non-state actors”.

This will require a much more active and creative foreign policy than the EU has waged up to now.

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States on 8 November 2016 has added an additional factor of uncertainty to the many existing tensions. The EU itself is fragile too, more than we thought. There’s not only Brexit but also the success of explicitly anti-EU parties, both old and new.

How autonomous does Europe really dare and want to be with regard to the US, and what does that mean in the long term

the role of NATO? Which sort of relationship do we want to maintain at the same time with the two other great powers, China and Russia?

John Bew, Realpolitik: A History. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.

The reason is simple: seen from Washington, Russia no longer threatens America’s position in the world. Russia is a declining power, with a unidimensional economy

that is entirely dependent on the energy market and with a stagnating population.

It remains a nuclear power, of course, and even a power in decline can strike hard when it wants too; it might in fact be even more motivated to ...

At the 19th congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in October 2017, President Xi announced that by 2050 China aims to create a “world class military”.

What remains, for the most part, are big logistic hubs rather than combat units, from which forces can be deployed and supplied anywhere in the world (including in Europe itself, if that were necessary). Only on the border with Russia has the US deployed new combat units again, starting in 2017, as part of the prepositioning of forces

differently. Naturally, the US remains a global power with global interests, and if those interests are threatened it will intervene, including in Europe or the Middle East. But those regions are increasingly seen as distractions rather than objectives in their own right. What Washington wants to focus on if it can is China and Asia.

In 2017, however, which saw the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, Trump welcomed Brexit and expressed the hope that more countries would follow the British example and leave the EU. During a visit to Warsaw, in July 2017, he encouraged the Polish government in what he seemed to consider its brave resistance against the Brussels bureaucracy. In June 2018, Trump’s newly appointed ambassador to Germany went so far as to say that he would try to empower conservatives (read: Trump allies) across Europe. The EU cannot just dismiss this: such an attitude at the highest level of our most important ally is very dangerous indeed.

All three told us Europeans what we wanted to hear: that the US continues to support the EU and NATO. But all of them immediately qualified these pronouncements. Tough economic decisions will have to be made, Pence told the EU, whatever that may mean exactly. If Europeans don’t spend more on defence, the US may feel obliged to moderate its own contribution to the Alliance, Mattis told NATO. That

In a multipolar global order, American interests do not automatically coincide with ours, not like it was the case during the bipolar age of the Cold War. During that time, Europeans had to choose sides, between Washington and Moscow. Today there no longer are any sides. In a multipolar world several great powers simultaneously compete and cooperate, in ever-changing coalitions, depending on the issue.

British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston already said in the 19th century – another multipolar age. “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. This famous dictum is as valid today as it ever was.

automaticity. If Europe needs help, it will have to prove why it would be in the interest of the US to lend assistance. This certainly applies to both aisles of Congress.

In 2014, MIT professor Barry Posen wrote that the basis of a new American grand strategy should be restraint (Posen, 2014). The US, says Posen, has ended up assuming nearly the entire burden of the defence of its allies. Has that made the US more secure? No, because it was secure already, having only

The main result is that US allies themselves make far too little effort. The solution: dissolve NATO, thus forcing the EU to mount its own autonomous European defence, and then a new alliance can be concluded with the EU as such. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to US allies in Asia. A whole new school of “restrainers” has now emerged in US universities and think tanks. This is not some marginal view, therefore. It’s only in Europe that many decision-makers still believe that the US cavalry will always come and save us – or try to convince themselves of that against better knowledge.

The transatlantic alliance is one cornerstone of European grand strategy. But a building with just one cornerstone will collapse before long. In a multipolar world, the alliance with the US is still necessary but no longer sufficient to defend Europe’s vital interests.

What Europe certainly shouldn’t do is fixate on NATO only. But Europe is suffering from the “Maginot Complex”. The symptoms: lack of self-confidence, incapacity to see the bigger picture, and a general state of lethargy.

Similarly, many in Europe today put all their hopes in the alliance with the US and NATO – that is their “Maginot”. There was much rejoicing when (on the occasion of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s visit to Washington on 12 April 2017) Trump declared that NATO isn’t obsolete after all, in spite of his earlier declarations. Does that guarantee the security of Europe?

The EU will have to defend its interests itself, putting to use its diplomatic and economic instruments in order to stabilise world politics.

Europe has the instruments. Through its trade and diplomacy the EU can exert a positive influence on relations between the great powers. It doesn’t have to deploy carrier groups to achieve that – which is for the best, since it doesn’t have any.

That in turn is what the CCP needs for its power and legitimacy not to be questioned.

Now that China needs the EU to help maintain the free-trade regime, Europe must use this opportunity to the fullest and try to arrive at a more balanced relationship with China. In February 2017 already, very

day, China remains very much closed to foreign investors and that has to change, otherwise an equitable investment treaty will be impossible.

Various obstacles and mechanisms for control of foreign companies prevent a fair functioning of the market; in addition, there is enormous state support for Chinese companies. The EU must use the present opportunity and instrumentalise China’s vulnerability to protectionism to incite it to introduce substantial reforms to the benefit of the European interest.

If China’s market is too closed to foreign investors, Europe’s, by the way, is too open. In Europe anybody can buy anything.3 Ports, airports,

electricity grids, high-speed rail, TV stations, even nuclear plants: there’s almost no limit to what foreign actors (be they private actors or states masking as private actors) can acquire in Europe. In this way Europe hands foreign powers, in particular China and Russia, the opportunity on a silver platter to steer our decision-making when they choose to. Once a media outlet in an EU Member State is in foreign hands, will it still report the news or present “alternative facts”? When a port has a fo...