The EU's "Global Strategy" is very much a work in progress

Despite some prior discussion about the timing of its release, the European Union’s first “Global Strategy” was presented, as planned, to the European Council meeting in Brussels on 28th June 2016. Consultations and drafting for a revived European Foreign and Security Policy have been a year in-the-making, and under other circumstances might have provoked some lengthy reflections on the EU’s place in the world. Yet, as post-Brexit debates continue to hog the limelight, the very idea of a grand global strategy seems out of touch with the mood of the times. The timing is not, self-evidently, the fault of the Strategy’s main authors. Since the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, initiated an external policy review in early 2015 her aim has been to put forward some guiding principles and areas of focus, both geographical and thematic, for the EU’s member-state governments to consider and reflect on before the Strategy’s formal adoption at the end of this year.

Whichever way the UK’s vote fell, the presentation of the Global Strategy to EU heads of state at June’s European Council meeting was always going to be overshadowed by the outcome of the referendum. But the Conclusions of the European Council meeting of 28th June 2016 did not echo the ferment going on outside the Council room; it merely noted in its last item of business (item 23), that “[t]he UK Prime Minister informed the European Council about the outcome of the referendum in the UK.” Simultaneous debates in the European Parliament, and in press and media reporting focused far more on item 23 than on updates on “the EU’s comprehensive approach to the migration challenge” (item 8), or of the Council’s adoption of an agenda “to bring the full benefits of the Digital Single Market to all stakeholders” (item 11), much less “the progress achieved in the work towards completing the Economic and Monetary Union” (item 16). The Global Strategy was not discussed, but its presentation acknowledged, and the High Representative, Commission and Council invited “to take the work forward” (item 20).

Every institution requires formal procedures, processes and its own forms of wording, but rarely have the EU’s senior decision-making bodies seemed as out of synch with the public mood as now. As many around Europe have observed since 23^rd June: Brexit does not just affect the British or the future of the United Kingdom, but reflects a widespread mood of disenchantment by European citizens with their governing elites that will only get worse as the Spaniards face the consequences of another inconclusive majority at general elections held just after the EU referendum, the French and Germans prepare for their own general elections next year, and the Greeks await this autumn’s review of the European financial bailout due to expire in 2018. The internal dynamics of the EU already constitute the primary focus of European leaders, a number of whom already fear for their jobs. The unity of purpose on which the Brussels institutions rely to convince member-states to act in consort externally may well evaporate in the process.

The lack of internal EU unity is serious, but the signs of divergence have been apparent for as long as the Strategy has been under preparation. In the current context, the resulting text reads more as a rallying cry for what has failed to emerge from previous external policy frameworks, above all a “Joined-up Union,” and less as a detailed template from which obvious consequences and actions will follow. Without any evident consensus over how to move things forward, it displays the weaknesses of previous such endeavours, of which there are three.

The first is that the EU cannot bind member-states to anything in the external sphere that individual governments are not prepared to align their own foreign policies to achieve. External relations, it should be remembered, are not the same as foreign policy in EU parlance; in simple terms, Europe’s external trade relations are decided collectively, just as development assistance to third countries is to a large degree pooled for disbursement by the Commission; the diplomatic relations of European states with the same third countries are a different matter: sometimes subject to commonly agreed “positions” (over sanctions, for example), but more often dictated by bilateral interests that cover areas the EU aspires to influence but which national sovereignty overrides when issues such as national security come into play.

Seeking greater synergies between external and internal EU policies, and between member states and EU institutions, as does the Global Strategy, has been a game of cat-and-mouse for as long as the Union has existed. If the three key states (now reduced to two) agree, then some joint external action is likely to result; where Germany, France and the UK have been at odds, then different combinations may act (as in France and the UK’s joint military venture, with Italian and NATO backing, in Libya in 2011). Ensuring that anyone acts on agreed common positions, however, has always been a matter of forging coalitions of the willing, in which the Brussels institutions can act as catalysts, but not masters of the outcome.

The second, which results from the tensions between communitarian and nation-state prerogatives, is that the aspirational nature of EU external policy documents is often at odds with what is strictly doable with, or in, third party states and regions. Because of the bilateral interests of individual EU member states, the EU’s institutional actors can rarely permit themselves to call a spade a spade in respect of the concrete shortcomings of existing policy implementation, or of the contradictions inherent in often competitive bilateral commercial or security relations between member states in respect of third party states. Thus, in order to pass muster with all 28 (soon to be 27) member states, the EU’s framework policies have to be expressed in terms of the benefits of cooperation, common interests, collective visions and ambitions, alongside Europe’s common democratic values.

The third weakness is that none of this is particularly credible with the third party states and regions which are the subject of the policies outlined. They already know how to exploit the communitarian/nation-state divisions within and between European states to their best advantage, and avoid the kind of reforming zeal that accompanies much of the EU’s collective exhortations. Real reform, in any case, has to come with sticks as well as carrots, as well as engage with a receptive audience of third country reformers prepared to do more than pay lip-service to agreements signed with European Union officials. The history of the fall-out from the EU’s “Near Neighbourhood” is replete with examples of a mismatch between generic goals agreed to by member states and the specific details of who is responsible for ensuring what gets done in the mutually agreed work programmes that accompany EU funding lines.

This is not to say that all strategic planning at the EU level fails; but it is a wake-up call to those who would wish to see the Union prosper, with and now without the UK onboard. If matching the rhetoric of senior politicians to the political realities of their citizenry will be the primary axis of tension within EU member states for the foreseeable future, finding a way to match the EU’s collective global aspirations to the concrete questions of “how?” and “by whom?” will continue to dog the EU’s role in the world for some time to come.