Nacho Sánchez Amor
Member of the European Parliament
The foreign policy agenda of parliaments, like that of governments, is inevitably conditioned by the succession of crises to which a more or less immediate response must be given. This leaves little room for reflection on the horizontal or permanent aspects of such foreign policy, on its instruments of whatever nature (political, legal, financial, diplomatic, personal, security, etc.) and on their suitability for the proclaimed purposes. From this point of view, European external action is not very different from that of the member states either; the pressure of current events forces one to jump from Syria to Nagorno-Karabakh, from Libya to Belarus or from Afghanistan to Ukraine, and there never seems to be time for a calm analysis of the connection between the means and the ends. And this lack of synchrony is all the more apparent when it has been established (and apparently accepted without much resistance) that the present European Commission would be a “Geopolitical Commission”, whatever that means. The obvious thing is that, by putting on such a label, the gap between instruments and objectives is already too obvious to ignore any longer.
To begin with, the EU will never be a global actor if it does not equip itself with the means to be one. The usual wishful thinking and generic claims about a crash course in the “language of power” are not enough. We need the grammar, phonology and semantics of power. And it is necessary to practice, of course.
To the usual (self-interested) confusion of roles between the High Representative, the President of the Commission and the President of the Council (“too many faces and too many egos in European foreign policy”) must be added the lack of experience of the props at everyone’s disposal. The only truly tested and fully functional instrument has long been the Union’s trade policy, not least because it does not depend on the “lowest common denominator” game often played in the Council. It is not superfluous to underline that the EU’s most powerful lever for unilateral influence in the world has been and is a tool in the hands of the Parliament, not the executives. From there, a lot of stammering.
Our traditional soft power is ceasing to be functional. Since our model of mature democracy is no longer a universal paradigm, and authoritarian and illiberal systems claim to have their own “models” of democracy, talking in the ear is no longer enough. They used to ask us for time, citing their difficult cultural, religious, ethnic or traditional political starting points. They no longer do so, they now reaffirm these supposed “democracies” adapted to their societies and in accordance with their cultural substratum. Before they allowed themselves to be advised, now all this is neocolonialism, interference, paternalism or Eurocentrism. It is we, it seems, who must revise our model, which is too open, anarchic and slow compared to authoritarian efficiencies.
Our European diplomacy is a mixture of term state loans and Commission technicians neophytes in embassy jobs. Great professionals all of them, but educated in 28 foreign traditions, one for each member state, plus that of the Commission. EU ambassadors know they must return to the corridors of their home ministries and, depending on their personal commitment, begin to look sideways at that prospect and carefully align their attitudes and approaches with those of their capital. Some do this in the latter part of their EU term and some do it from day one. Moreover, even if they try to correct themselves for the better, specialized diplomatic experience means that, for example, many Iberians go to America and many French go to Africa. And, as if that were not enough, how many governments can do without twenty or thirty ambassadors without harming their own agenda? Only the big ones, resulting in a European diplomatic corps of big member states to the detriment of the small ones. The idea of a new European diplomacy from its origin, formed to represent the EU and only with that perspective, seems to have arrived at the right time, and hence the good reception of the Pilot Project of the Parliament to create a European Diplomatic School, in whose origin is the idea that European diplomats should be selected and trained as such from the beginning, to end in the medium term with the policy of seasonal transfers.
Another obvious shortcoming when it comes to being a global player is that in many foreign scenarios we go in virtually blind. It has happened to us twice in Ukraine and once in Afghanistan, among other scenarios. Our Atlantic partners are not smarter at analyzing, they simply have better intelligence sources than the EU. It has been proven again by our reluctance to believe what American intelligence assured us, that the invasion was going to happen. I am not asking for an intelligence pool, as is sometimes naively demanded, what I am asking for is that, in an external crisis scenario, the EU Foreign Service should know at least as much as the member state that knows the most. The pressure for a European intelligence service of its own will grow in proportion to the stinginess of member states to share with Brussels their intelligence on an external scenario. If they were to share generously with Brussels, this pressure would diminish to the same extent. And, mind you, I say “with Brussels”, not with the other 26 national services. And for that, of course, the Foreign Service must be extraordinarily careful with its security protocols.
The absence of a common but proper European cultural diplomacy is another deficit to be corrected. Europe’s foreign cultural identity cannot be the inarticulate accumulation of what the great foreign cultural institutions of the capitals (Cervantes, Goethe, Alliance Française, etc.) do around the world. It must be its own and different, relying of course on these institutional aircraft carriers, but knowing how to emanate an image of its own and distinguishable from national images. Endowing the New European Bauhaus with an external dimension could be the vehicle of that common identity and of that “European way of life” that generated so much justified reticence at the beginning of the legislature.
Trump was not the killer of multilateralism, but only its coroner. Material fatigue was already obvious and we had better not insist on simply resurrecting the multilateralism of the post-World War II era. Either it is a new model or it will not be. And this new model must include new international actors that are no longer state actors, such as the EU. If the United Nations understands this, it will do what is necessary to make room for these new actors; if it does not, it will continue its slow but sure path towards irrelevance, for many other reasons, but also for this one. The EU will continue to pursue being the global player it wants to be with absolute disregard for the fate of the UN. Having a seat of its own for the EU in the Security Council would be an asset for the UN. And, moreover, putting imagination into how such an outcome can be reached from the French seat and in a prudent time frame would test the sincerity of so much Parisian hullabaloo about the Union, would put lyrics to that caressing but gratuitous music.
There are some other deficiencies in European foreign policy, but this would already be a reform program sufficient to endorse the sincerity of the EU’s preaching as a global actor. Although there are also “oscars” for secondary actors.
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