TIRANA, November 5/ATA/- The new EU leadership team taking office in Brussels knows that, if the bloc’s common foreign policy is to command respect, the first place where it must achieve success is in Europe’s neighbourhood. It needs to be well-planned, as united as possible, efficiently executed and imbued with a larger sense of long-term strategy. In all these regards, two recent episodes — one concerning the Balkans, and the other Syria — have been little short of a debacle, Tony Barber writes in an article published today in “The Financial Times”.
Each incident points to the EU’s inability to translate its undoubted weight as a commercial and regulatory bloc into hard power on the world stage. It is not just a matter of lack of military muscle, important though that is. The real problem is that, whenever two or more of the EU’s biggest countries are in disagreement, a common European foreign policy is either paralysed or becomes a question of finding the lowest common denominator among 28 states.
An often overlooked point is that these disagreements tend to arise out of domestic political tensions in individual countries — over, for example, irregular migration or attitudes to Islam or Russia. Such tensions hobble the attempts of governments to find common ground with their EU partners. In any case, France, Germany and other EU countries usually prefer to keep their freedom of manoeuvre when it suits them.
The Syrian episode centres on Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is Angela Merkel’s preferred candidate to succeed her as German chancellor. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer was named defence minister in July in an apparent attempt to raise her profile with German voters. But the proposal for a multinational security zone in northern Syria that she came up with this month was startling for its naivety and lack of preparation.
Before unveiling her plan, Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Ms Merkel as the Christian Democratic party’s leader in December ahead of elections due in 2021, consulted neither her Social Democratic coalition partners nor Germany’s Nato and EU allies. Her proposal skipped over crucial questions such as whether the UN Security Council would endorse it, whether the US would take part and whether Germany’s under-resourced armed forces would send soldiers to Syria. To each question it rapidly became clear that the answer was almost certain to be no.
Indeed, it was hard to tell who was more dismissive of the initiative — Russia and Turkey, which control events on the ground in Syria, or Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, who is of course a colleague of Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer. In this way, the plan served no purpose other than to illustrate the incoherence of the German coalition’s foreign policy, not to mention the EU’s near-irrelevance in Syria.
This is a sobering thought in view of the fact that the 2015 arrival of large numbers of war refugees from Syria and other conflict zones, plus other migrants, precipitated one of the EU’s worst crises since the 1957 Treaty of Rome that set up the bloc.
The EU’s mis-steps in the Balkans are no less painful to watch, but in this case the main culprit is France, not Germany. By blocking Albania and North Macedonia from opening EU membership talks, President Emmanuel Macron shocked and undermined a region whose stability is integral to the stability of the European continent. In North Macedonia’s case, Mr Macron’s move made the EU reek of hypocrisy. For the EU had long promised to start entry talks, provided that the Macedonians compromise with Greece over their country’s disputed name — a condition fulfilled in the Prespa agreement, which came into force last February.
In fairness to Mr Macron, he is not alone in having doubts about enlarging the EU into south-eastern Europe. Denmark and the Netherlands joined France in opposing Albania’s entry talks. Moreover, when the European parliament adopted a resolution last week in favour of starting accession talks with the two Balkan states, some 136 MEPs — or almost a quarter of those who voted — backed Mr Macron’s position.
Furthermore, Mr Macron has a point when he suggests that the EU should focus on internal reforms before absorbing new members. The EU’s most important project, the 19-nation eurozone, remains a half-built house. Effective EU-wide action is woefully lacking in areas such as migration and asylum policy. However, Mr Macron would sound more persuasive, but for the persistent rumours that France’s true objective is to close the EU door forever to western Balkan countries. Instead they would be fobbed off with membership of the European Economic Area, which would keep them out of the EU’s political institutions and make them permanent second-class Europeans.
The Syrian and Balkan embarrassments are symptoms of an EU unsure of its place in the world and suffering from ineffective Franco-German co-operation. But if the EU cannot get things right on its own doorstep, where can it? //a.i/
