Inside Europe: EU still stresses talk rather than action

Inside Europe: EU still stresses talk rather than action
By Paul Taylor
Reuters
Monday, April 7, 2008

BLED, Slovenia: Outside the hotel where the European Union foreign ministers stayed in the Slovenian lakeside resort of Bled for their semiannual brainstorming session, a poster advertised an exhibition of "Naïve Art."

It might have been a metaphor for the EU's well-meaning but often largely declaratory foreign policy and the way it is formulated and implemented.

"When something blows up in the world, the Americans get together and ask 'What are we going to do?' " said a British diplomat who has held senior posts in Washington and Brussels. "The Europeans get together and ask 'What are we going to say?' " The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

That allegation might be less true than it was a decade ago.

After all, the EU has run a dozen security operations since 2004, including peacekeeping in Bosnia, Congo, Indonesia and now Chad, as well as border supervision in Gaza and police training in Afghanistan.

The EU is about to embark on a risky mission to help stabilize a newly independent Kosovo.

These may not be at the sharpest end of security compared with the U.S. war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or insurgents in Iraq, but they go well beyond the exercise of "soft power" upon which the EU prides itself.

The most successful example has been the transformation of formerly communist central Europe into market democracies over the past 18 years through the magnet of EU enlargement policy.

The EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, has become a respected player in international crisis management since he became the first holder of the post in 1999 with few resources.

He helped avert civil war in Macedonia in 2001 and broker a peaceful outcome to Ukraine's pro-democracy "Orange Revolution" in 2005. He has negotiated - so far unsuccessfully - with Iran on its nuclear programme, the first time an EU representative has acted on behalf of the major world powers.

The European Union has gradually assumed responsibility for the future of the Balkans, even though NATO, which stopped wars there in the 1990s, continues to guarantee military stability.

Yet the EU take on world affairs often sounds like wishful thinking, designed to express its own values and assuage the concerns of its citizens rather than to change the course of events.

While the United States had made the "Global War on Terror" its foreign policy paradigm after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, much of the EU policy remained based on "a complacency that occasionally verged on the delusional," said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund research institution.

A former foreign minister of France, Hubert Vedrine, who spent five years in the EU's foreign affairs council from 1997 to 2002, speaks caustically of "irrealpolitik," "wishful thinking" and "a certain European naïvety."

Initially skeptical about the idea of a common EU foreign policy, Vedrine believes Europe can make historical differences and divergent interests converge "as long as we don't kid people that they live in a friendly world of six billion Boy Scouts."

"China and Russia are not about to become Denmark," he said.

The main European foreign policy tool often seems to be words.

EU institutions spew out a daily torrent of statements on issues ranging from the conduct of elections in Armenia to the arrest of dissidents in Belarus, an execution in Iran, the assassination of a lawmaker in Lebanon or a decision to expand an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

Like a Greek chorus, the European Commission, the presidency of the EU council of member states, the European Parliament, and often all three, comment on each scene in the global drama.

Violence is deplored, terrorism condemned, dialogue called for, negotiations encouraged. There are never military solutions to problems, facts must not be created on the ground and the rule of law must prevail.

In sum, the world is invited to be more like the European Union - a community based on democracy and the rule of law in which nations pool sovereignty for the common good and settle disputes by endless negotiation in no-longer-smoke-filled rooms.

Whether EU foreign policy will become more operational and less aspirational when the Lisbon treaty enters into force next year, giving the bloc a strengthened High Representative with a substantial diplomatic staff and budget, remains to be seen.

Bureaucratic skirmishing over how the future External Action Service should work has so far brought out the worst in Brussels turf wars rather than focusing on the quest for the most effective organization, insiders say.