Opinion | Columnists
Eye on a more potent foreign policy
Europe requires energy security most and Ashton will have to strive for a new, pro-active function of the union
- By Stuart Reigeluth, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 March 14, 2010
Europe has many redeemable qualities, but its foreign policy is not one of them. Europe needs a radical shift in its outlook to the world, especially the Middle East. It needs to accept that it's no longer the geopolitical centre of global attention as it was during the 20th century. It must fix up its house first, then tend to the surrounding garden.
The economic meltdown in Greece that led to vehement demonstrations in Athens this winter is a stark reminder of how far the European Union (EU) has to go still in consolidating its confederation of 27 member States. Greece is the extreme case, but Portugal, Ireland and Spain also are suffering serious economic hardships, namely large unemployment. The southern European countries joined the EU in the 1980s and relied on massive subsidies from Brussels and therefore opposed eastern enlargement.
Greece now requests 3.4 billion euros (Dh17.16 billion) from Brussels for its bailout, lest the IMF intervenes. Germany says condescendingly that it will not give Greece a cent. But the more important question beyond overcoming inter-European squabbling is that whenever European tax-payers' money is going abroad, it is going mainly to lost causes and to the waste of long wars.
European nation-states have long looked across the Atlantic to seek guidance in their respective foreign policies. For decades, the formulation of European foreign policy was essentially synonymous to joining the security-defence supra-national structure of Nato. European adherence to Nato strategy emerged as a result of an acclaimed historical indebtedness to the US for saving it from Nazism and then from years of synchronising political priorities during the Cold War with Communism.
Europe and the US remain each other's most important commercial partners with an approximately $2.5 trillion (Dh9.19 trillion) trade per annum. But having stumbled into the 21st century after the relative upheaval following the break-up of the USSR in the 1990s, Europe failed to see that the international equation was shifting: new economies in China and India were emerging rapidly and the special trans-Atlantic alliance was no longer as relevant. Europe was being used to fund distant military operations that they joined, not led, in the Gulf and Central Asia.
‘Payer' rather than ‘player'
Europe is quite happy to go along with being the "payer" rather than the main "player". Former high representative for the Council of Europe, Javier Solana, further showed Europe's inadequacies abroad with his attempts to play a role in the Gulf. While his efforts to negotiate with Iran flopped, the Palestinian case still remains the most flagrant example of counter-productive EU policies.
Solana deployed two Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions that have been largely ineffective: the monitoring mission meant for the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza has been suspended for years; while the police reform mission only operates in the West Bank both therefore further divide the Palestinians' polity and consolidate the fragmentation of Palestinian territory.
On the "humanitarian" level, the European Commission takes pride in being the largest donor to the Palestinian people, contributing around half a billion euros a year. Most meaningful construction projects, such as Rafah International Airport, were also paid for by European tax-payer money and destroyed by Israel.
In fairness to the Scandinavians who have consistently advanced the "peace process", the Swedish Presidency of the European Union condemned in late 2009 the illegal nature under international law of Israel building colonies on Palestinian land, whether in Occupied East Jerusalem or the West Bank, and said that the status of Occupied Jerusalem should be resolved as the "future capital of two States". This is European "constructive ambiguity" in action. Israel hardly pays any attention to US complaints, so any ways: why listen to the EU?
In today's globalised world, to paraphrase Borges on dreams, peripheries are nowhere; centres (of conflict) are everywhere: Europe is also embroiled in those fuzzy far-off wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the first EU Foreign Minister, Baroness Catherine Ashton, prepares to create a team of astute diplomats to form the new ‘External Action Services' next month, she will have to come out with a new pro-active and strategic EU foreign policy one that reflects Europe's interests most: energy security.
‘External action'
Don't hold your breath: all this talk about the Lisbon Treaty creating an EU foreign minister may simply show how Europe formulates its new "external action" according to the same-old US-security parameters. But rather than buttressing the declining power of the US, Ashton could see to cleaning up the European fortress, downsizing foreign deployments and focusing on what's closest to home: its neighbourhood policy around the Mediterranean and relations with Russia both arenas have tremendous sources of energy, which can provide great potential security for Europe.
Stuart Reigeluth is editor of www.revolve-magazine.com
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