Across the globe, the EU’s changed line-up of policymakers will face some significant early tests: the coming year will tell us about their priorities, their resolve and their coherence.
The makers of the European Union’s foreign policy have a bewildering array of uncertainties before them as they head into a new year.
For the European External Action Service, which in practical terms came into being on 1 January four years ago, this could be an important year for rebalancing its relationship with the other EU institutions.
Federica Mogherini, who took over from Catherine Ashton as the new chief of EU foreign policy on 1 November, stated the obvious as she prepared to take up office: the Ukraine-Russia crisis would be her top concern. The crisis remains the main problem for Europe’s foreign policy going into 2015; Ukraine and Russia may well be policymakers’ biggest headache going into 2016 as well. Mogherini’s personal challenge in 2015 remains as it was when she took up office – to shake off her reputation for being soft on Russia.
The starting point for her and the EU is to maintain the level of commitment demonstrated by the EU’s institutions in 2014, as Ukraine will spend 2015 struggling to carry through deep and wide reforms in the midst of a military conflict and a huge economic crisis.
José Manuel Barroso, who was president of the European Commission until 31 October, took personal command for the EU’s institutional response, mobilising immediate support for Ukraine – in terms of diplomacy, personnel and emergency funding – and steering through the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine, a new EU task-force and security mission for Ukraine, as well as a gas deal between Ukraine and Russia.
Who will ensure that the EU’s institutions maintain that momentum? Two months into the presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker, it seems that Juncker will not try to emulate Barroso (in a speech in October setting out the priorities for his Commission, Juncker saw fit just to make one fleeting reference to Ukraine and none to Russia). On the other hand, a further instalment of aid to Ukraine will feature on the Commission’s agenda early in 2015.
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The role of leader of the EU’s institutional response will fall to Mogherini or to Donald Tusk, the new president of the European Council, or to both. To date, the EU has managed to stay firm on Russia while keeping the channels of communication open, to be supportive but firm towards Ukraine, and to maintain its attention to the crisis. Maintaining that approach will be challenging, but necessary. One of the big tests will come early: as Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told an audience of EU policymakers on 16 December, Ukraine “desperately needs a package of financial support from all international institutions and G7 member states”.
One of the casualties of the Ukraine crisis has been the EU’s past policy towards Russia. Tusk was stating the obvious when he said at the end of the last EU summit, on 18 December, that the EU needed a new long-term strategy towards Russia. This may be the hardest strategic question for thinkers in the EEAS this year, which is why there is increasing interest in exploring how to develop ties with the new Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). The EEU may be dominated by Russia, but its two other members are a large energy state – Kazakhstan – and a country, Belarus, that is serving as a useful intermediary in the Russia-Ukraine crisis. At the end of December’s European Council, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said the EU should be “open-minded” about trying to forge a trade deal with the EEU “if there is sustainable progress on implementation of the 12 points” in the Minsk process intended to lead to peace in eastern Ukraine. Expect to hear a fair bit more of the EEU this year, particularly if Russia helps the peace process.
The EEU is not the only reason why central Asia may receive more EU attention in 2015. With international troops removed from the front line in Afghanistan as of 1 January, the burden of helping Afghanistan maintain a semblance of stability moves from soldiers to diplomats.
Afghanistan’s prospects could be improved significantly by the outcome of EU-led talks between Iran on one side and the United Nations’ five permanent members, plus Germany. If Iran does agree to roll back its nuclear programme and accept international oversight, Afghanistan’s western neighbour could become part of a more co-operative and comprehensive international response to the challenges posed by Afghanistan.
Could the re-integration of Iran into the UN’s fold also help in Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East? It is a question that the EU and its member states can be expected to explore by increasing their diplomatic presence in Iran – which, in the case of the EEAS, is currently non-existent. But would the EEAS send many staff to a new delegation in Tehran? The EEAS has few staff in some major areas, and member states have been reluctant to reallocate staff in the EEAS headquarters to bolster the response even to major crises in Libya, Sudan and South Sudan.
Strategic priorities, the distribution of resources, and flexibility of decision-making are also among the major issues that Mogherini and the member states face as they continue a review of the functioning of the EEAS. It was four years ago, with the transfer of staff who had previously been in Commission departments, that the EEAS became operational. Before and since, in interactions with the EU’s member states, Ashton earned a reputation as a scrappy fighter in institutional turf-wars. The easy choice for Mogherini would be not to fight hard to develop the EEAS, and, instead, to focus on trying to make fuller use of the European Commission. Mogherini is already paying much more attention to her role as vice-president of the Commission than Ashton did, but that may not be to the neglect of the EEAS: the early signs are that Mogherini intends to stake a claim to as much territory as she can. Most people expect Stefano Manservisi, the head of Mogherini’s private office, a veteran Commission official, to be more resourceful and effective than was Ashton’s counterpart, James Morrison.
He has already re-opened a series of personnel competitions for posts within the EEAS that were about to be decided, giving Mogherini an early opportunity to make her mark on the service. Further personnel decisions remain to be decided, some of them very senior – including who will manage the Asia department and, above all, who will be Mogherini’s deputy (Pierre Vimont, the EEAS’s executive secretary-general, is about to retire, David O’Sullivan, who was the chief operating officer, has become ambassador to the US; and their posts will be merged).
Mogherini has yet to clarify in full where she intends to allocate her time. She has liberated herself from much of the work on Iran, by asking Ashton to see through the EU-led international talks with Iran. She has, by contrast, said that she will, as Ashton did, lead talks to consolidate the April 2013 breakthrough that saw Serbia begin to co-operate with Kosovo’s government. But how much time the new chief of EU foreign policy is willing to devote to this issue will partly depend on the outcome of ongoing discussions with Kosovo’s new government and Serbia’s new-ish government.
The time she devotes to Serbia-Kosovo will be an indication more broadly of how interested the EU’s new leadership is in the western Balkans or with countries such as Turkey that are candidates for EU membership. A new tension in EU foreign policy is already evident: Juncker, an old-school European Christian Democrat, has shown little public interest (or, apparently, private interest) in enlargement in general or, more particularly, the western Balkans or Turkey. By contrast, Mogherini, a socialist, hails from a country, Italy, that is keen to see the western Balkans more integrated with the EU. (Her compatriot Manservisi, before he came to work for her, was the EU’s ambassador to Turkey.) In December, Mogherini led a relatively large EU delegation to Turkey to show, as an EU official said, that “this [EU-Turkish] partnership must be politically played in full”.
Days later, the Turkish government rounded up critics of the regime perceived to be allied to a rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It now seems a long time since Erdoğan was a source of hope among EU policymakers, pursuing an EU agenda that dovetailed with his own desire to reduce the power of the military.
The dilemma that the EU faces in Turkey – how to push forward relations with a candidate for EU membership that is led by an increasingly authoritarian government – may be surfacing in the western Balkans as well. In October, the Commission gave a very positive, albeit carefully worded, appraisal of Serbia’s progress. But there are features of Aleksandar Vučić’s government – including a clampdown on the media – that should worry the EU. How might Mogherini respond? The swiftest progress would be to concentrate on the government, to the neglect of increasing ties with ordinary politicians and civil society. The risk, if no progress results, is that Serbia would be left with stronger leaders, a dispirited opposition and a weakened civil society.
The dilemmas facing the EU in relations with its would-be members are, of course, as nothing compared with those involving Ukraine and Russia – and to those in its southern neighbourhood, where the list of crises now includes Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq with the risk of more to come this year. EU officials now talk of an ‘arc of fire’. It has burnt up the EU’s old neighbourhood policy; the new European commissioner for neighbourhood policy, Johannes Hahn, has been tasked with devising a new policy during 2015, but the principal responsibility really lies, surely, with Mogherini. In the face of those huge and historic changes in the south and east, expect the new neighbourhood policy to look modest and – very probably – to be described as modest.
In practical terms, the policy adopted may be less important than whether the EU and the United States – the EU’s indispensable partner in both areas – can work together as intensely and concertedly in the south as they have during the Ukraine crisis.
The review of the EU’s neighbourhood policy comes a year after the de facto review of the EU’s Africa policy, ahead of the EU-Africa summit in April. This year, the weavers of Europe’s latticework of Africa-related policies will need to weave in the 17 objectives and 169 specific targets likely to emerge from the United Nations’ debate on the sustainable development goals for 2016-30, which will matter particularly for Africa (34 of the 48 world’s ‘less-developed states’ are in Africa). The EU often talks about the need for a ‘comprehensive approach’ on the international stage; in Africa, the comprehensive approach is visible – and, in practice, requires the EU to work closely with the world’s network of supranational institutions.
The UN’s development agenda is the big, long-term Africa-related issue for the EU this year. But the most pressing African question in 2015 may well be the same as it was in 2014 and in 2013: how well can the EU respond to crises? The previous chief of EU foreign policy, Catherine Ashton, failed to see a predictable crisis coming, removing the EU’s special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan two months before fighting resumed in South Sudan. In the Central African Republic last year, the EU laboured hard and long to come up with a small bridging force (in the end, one of the biggest contributors was, in fact, not an EU state: Georgia). The EU is also struggling to maintain a long-term response to crises: for example, its most over-worked delegation (its own assessment) is in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The EU’s struggle to find the resources, the will and the flexibility to respond to crises should form a large part of the review of the EEAS. It also raises questions about the EU’s original choice to make the EEAS a global service from the outset, rather than, as some suggested, to focus its limited resources on areas – such as the EU’s neighbourhood and Africa – where the EU’s interests or influence had traditionally been greatest.
The pressure on the EEAS’s resources and effectiveness may increase if an EU summit with the states of Latin America and the Caribbean – CELAC, in diplomatic shorthand – hints at new potential in the relationship between the two continents. The year will certainly start with a major change in the diplomatic map, courtesy of US President Barack Obama’s decision to re-establish relations with Cuba, but will 2015 end with the EEAS able to report notable progress in the region or with the EU any closer to a long-sought trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc?
While in Latin America the EU may make more marked progress in 2015 on the diplomatic front than on the political, in Asia it is trade that is to the fore. Two trade deals are heading towards a conclusion – one with Vietnam; another, further into the future, with Japan – and China has hopes that it may complete an investment agreement with the EU. Mogherini has said that the EU’s challenge in Asia is to make itself relevant to Asian countries. Trade is one way to make the EU relevant, but there is also an increasing interest in Asia in the EU. The attendance at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in October – the vast majority of the 53 delegations in Milan were led by presidents or prime ministers – suggests that the EEAS’s next managing director for Asia has plenty of top-level interest to capitalise on ahead of a meeting of ASEM foreign ministers in the winter.
It might perhaps be too much to expect the CELAC summit to produce a step-change in the EU’s relations with Latin America, and it is unimaginable that in 2015 the EU will emerge as a major actor in Asia. But the more concerted engagement with these two continents at the EU level does suggest that the services offered by the European External Action Service – wanted from it by member states – are increasingly global. As it enters its fifth year, expectations of and demands on the EEAS are growing; it now needs to find ways to meet higher expectations with limited resources.