One of the unintended consequences of Russia’s troop build-up on the border with Ukraine — which, according to NATO, has yet to be dialed back — has been to create a sense of unity among European Union members that are more often at each other’s throats on security issues.
How long this will stick is another question entirely.
First, the good news. While the bloc seemed invisible and inaudible at the start of this crisis, unable to get a seat at the US-and-Russia table, the shuttle diplomacy of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has helped build a united Western position around deterring Russia via sanctions and supporting Ukraine.
US pressure is clearly at work — with the UK also now pledging a crackdown on dirty money flowing in from Russia — but France and Germany’s willingness to take a tougher line after years of one-way dialogue with President Vladimir Putin still marks a shift. “[Putin] has tried to divide us… That failed and didn’t happen,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the Financial Times.
This is an unwelcome development for Putin, even as he revels in the confusion and tension he’s created. A more assertive and ambitious EU, even one that still believes in diplomatic solutions to the current crisis, would make it harder for him to sow chaos. His well-worn grievances against NATO’s creeping expansion into Russia’s Cold War-era back-yard — which has created a “Rashomon moment” out of statements made in 1990 — mask the central role played by the EU, whose own gravitational pull in Eastern Europe has rattled him, according to Amelie Zima, of Universite Paris 2 Pantheon-Assas.
Ukraine’s long-running balancing act between Russia and the West is proof of that. In 2013, Kyiv’s initial rejection of an association agreement with the EU (without membership) led to political upheaval, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and separatist conflict in the Donbas region. The chart above shows how the EU, which shares a border with Russia via five members, has deepened trade ties with Ukraine after it was signed.
Still, the EU’s indisputable economic heft isn’t matched by its actual firepower, especially after Brexit, nor has it been able to combine broader expansion with deeper integration — as internal fights over democratic backsliding and NATO commitments demonstrate. The result is a bloc that looks irrelevant when the likes of Putin poke at its soft underbelly, as the “hybrid war” tactics of crises in Belarus and Ukraine demonstrate.
And while moments of peak fear serve as a geopolitical alarm clock, there’s a tendency to hit snooze when they pass. Germany’s growing dependency on Russian gas was viewed as dangerous over a decade ago. Yet, even today, Berlin fights hard against France’s promotion of nuclear energy as a diversification tool. Militarily, the formation of multinational EU battlegroups goes back to 1999, but they have never been deployed.
Understandably, advocates of closer European security integration want to make sure this crisis serves as a genuine turning point beyond more support for Ukraine. In two reports adopted by the European Parliament on Thursday, lawmakers listed a dizzying range of threats facing the EU — climate change, cyberattacks, space, border conflicts — and demanded the bloc speak with “one voice” by investing in military joint ventures and speeding up decision-making on foreign policy (such as by reducing the ability of one member state to block decisions affecting all 27).
Some of these proposals may make sense in future, but the EU’s more immediate challenges are more prosaic: Defining what its actual priorities are, and allocating the resources to match. The bloc doesn’t lack for ideas. Its draft “Strategic Compass” recently proposed a military joint intervention force by 2025, among other projects, and analyzed the landscape of threats in an increasingly hostile world. But it lacked concrete budget commitments, and failed to tackle the lack of political will that has stymied efforts thus far. Everything, and nothing, at once.
So while the current phase of unity is welcome, it will take serious work to translate into something more permanent. At a time when the EU is eyeing “strategic autonomy” in everything from semiconductors to space, yet at the same time facing criticism over its ability to actually deliver on it, leaders will hope the simmering conflict at their doorstep doesn’t escalate further. Threatening sanctions isn’t the same as delivering them.
Bloomberg
