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Without looking it up, can readers of this newspaper name the chief diplomat of the EU? Or, to stand on ceremony for a moment, the “high representative for foreign affairs and security policy”? Can even one in 10? If not, this isn’t all the fault of Josep Borrell himself, a dogged enough sort who has given the job his best during a convulsive period. It is just that an envoy for 27 states that don’t pool their external policies — not really, not outside of trade — is no envoy at all.
Fragmentation: this is one reason for the curious weakness of the EU, which has far more people than America and a share of world output to rival China’s at current exchange rates.
Before setting out the other reasons, it is worth going over the extent of that impotence. Yes, the EU, its constituent states and Britain are straining themselves to help Ukraine, with Germany a prolific donor of materiel, not just of finance. But the future of that violated nation, with which the EU has a border, hinges to a great degree on tens of thousands of swing voters in the American rustbelt, plus Georgia (not the one in the south Caucasus) and Arizona. There I was on these pages in September, attempting to divine the foreign policies of a second Donald Trump administration, when the real story is that, a human lifetime since the Marshall Plan, Europe still has its fate decided abroad.
At the same time, Israel, which is about 200 nautical miles from EU member Cyprus, looks more to Washington than to all the continent’s capitals put together. Europe’s dependence on the US in and around its own region is so familiar now, so much a part of the wallpaper of world politics, that we have lost all sight of its outlandish weirdness.
A more centralised foreign policy would help. But even if this “Hamiltonian moment” were to come, it would mean — what? The better co-ordination of insufficient resources? And so to Europe’s second problem.
The foremost militaries in Europe are Britain and France. One nation has fraying public services, a tax burden that is high by its own standards and so much debt that markets howled the last time it tried to borrow much more. In the other, the government incurred some of the strongest protests since 1968 for raising the pension age from 62 to 64. Throw in the German predicament — the economic model there counted on Russian gas as an input and China for customers — and it is fanciful that Europe is going to fund a permanently stronger defence posture. This is a case of too little growth over too long a period creating too few fiscal receipts to cover all too many outgoings. Gross domestic product is not everything, but it is almost everything, including life and death.
You will notice that both of these problems — the institutional fragmentation and the underspending on defence — are practical. I have assumed all the way that a European superpower would do good things, if only the humdrum arrangements could be made.
Would it? In Washington, Europe’s worst mental habit is often assumed to be a kind of peacenik naivete. But most of that died out a while ago. Almost no one of consequence in the EU believes it can redeem the world through diplomatic finesse, economic aid and sheer power of example. (Even Sweden wants to join Nato.) No, the problem is much worse than that. It consists of that large minority of politicians and voters who do think in hard strategic terms, but have dark preferences.
Ukraine fatigue in Europe is not the same as the America First kind that is growing on Capitol Hill. For one thing, it is often directed against the US. There is a vein of European thought that tends to seek accommodation with whatever is the most presentable counterweight to “Anglo-Saxon” power. Some of it is a sincere belief that a multipolar order is more just. (Based on what precedent?) Some of it is much pettier. This isn’t the major force in European intellectual life, but it spans left and right, and has pedigree going back to the Seven Years’ War, the most under-discussed event(s) in modern history, which helped to determine that anglophone countries rather than France would mould the world.
This autumn, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National at last repaid a notorious Russian loan. In the not unthinkable scenario that she were president of France, the idea of a geopolitical Europe would take on a rather different cast. We are left to wonder if the irrelevance of the EU’s highest diplomat is cause for embarrassment, or the profoundest relief.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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