Speech given at the „German Symposium 2016“, London

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

thank you for having me.

On my way here, I had a brief scare at the airport. All the signs were pointing towards the “exit”. Then again, I don’t believe in signs.

I was invited here today to talk about our common foreign policy. So let’s hope, one year from now, at the next LSE “German Symposium”, we will still be discussing our common foreign policy.

1. An (In-) Opportune Time

This June, the EU will introduce a new common European security strategy ‘humbly’ titled: “global strategy”.

The timing is curious, to say the least.

Last summer, the EU was shaken up by the Euro crisis that almost ended in a “Grexit”. And don’t let the absence of the issue from public debate fool you, the banking crisis is not resolved.

In the past year, thousands of refugees trying to escape the bloody wars in Libya and Syria have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.

The refugee crisis exposed the failure of the Dublin system. The countries on the border of the European Union were blatantly overwhelmed with registering the raising numbers of new arrivals every day. In what should have been the “hour of Europe”, most member states withheld solidarity. Instead they put their border controls back up.

These days, many European officials appear to be asking themselves:

“What would Donald do?”

• The head of the German police union wants a fence along the Austrian border.
• Austria itself has decided to cap the number of incoming refugees at 80 a day. The Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann even declared Schengen „temporarily suspended“. Austria and the Balkan states are now meeting without Greece and amongst themselves decide that Greece shall bear all the costs.
• Hungarian President Viktor Orban has announced a referendum on whether or not to take in refugees – independent of what’s been agreed to in Brussels. So we should be asking ourselves: are we looking at a #Huxit? Hungary has fenced itself in forcing refugees to take a detour through Slovenia.
• Which, of course, has prompted Slovenia to put up barbed-wire along the Croatian border. And now its military will be deployed to patrol there.
• Finally, the Visegrad states in cooperation with Macedonia and Bulgaria are building a fence on the Greek border. With this, they are making good on a threat made by the Austrian minister for the interior Mikl-Leitner. She wants the external border of Schengen moved up towards Central Europe should the Greek border remain open. In other words: the expulsion of Greece from Schengen.

That’s pure populism – which is presently quite popular in the European Parliament:

• There, we got the Hungarian Fidesz, Viktor Orban‘s national conservative party. That is the Orban to whom the refugee crisis is but a welcome excuse to end – and I quote – “the era of liberal blabla” in Europe.
• Fidesz belongs to the European People’s Party, as does Merkel’s CDU.
• Whenever the European People’s Party is a few votes short of a majority, they turn to the European Conservatives and Reformists. This Euro-skeptic party hosts Cameron’s Tories, as well as the German right-wing populist party, the AfD, who is represented by one Beatrix von Storch who recently gained notoriety for her suggestion to shoot at expecting refugee mothers at the border. Of course, she still considers herself to be “pro life”.
• And then, there is PiS, the party that’s currently busy dismantling free press and the rule of law in Poland.
• In a different faction of the European Parliament, the British UKIP is cozying up to a former representative of the French National Front.
• And on the far right, we got the political group “Europe of Nations and Freedom” which hosts the French right-wing extremists as well as the Freedom Party of Austria.

You see, right of center, Europe is shimmering in fifty shades of brown.

And finally, we got the Brexit hanging over our heads. On June 23^rd, the people of Great Britain vote: in or out. In effect, you decide if the ‘success story’ that’s been Europe’s peaceful integration is allowed to go on. Or if we will bear witness to the first step backwards since the foundation of the Union.

One might say, Europe’s too busy not to fail to even think about a new common security strategy. On the other hand, we might have never needed it more.

So at this in-opportune time, the EU has decided to come out with its “Global Strategy”.

2. A Global Strategy

First off, an overhaul of the old security strategy was long overdue. Thirteen years ago, High Representative Javier Solana drew up the last one that famously diagnosed:

“Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free.”

Well, it’s a different world out there today.

2.1 New answers to new challenges

Our High Representative Federica Mogherini and her team put it this way:

the world has become more “connected, complex and contested”.

That’s a very technical way of describing the “ring of fire” which currently surrounds the European Union.

• For one, there’s Libya. The Western military intervention left a failed state that’s now torn between two warring factions, both with little effective control, and countless militias. The UN is in a race against the clock. Special Representative Martin Kobler is trying to broker a joint government while the Islamic State is taking hold in the country. Expectations for success are fairly low. All the international community wants at this point is for Libya not to turn into a second Syria.
• The war in Syria has been raging for five years.  Syria used to be a country of 23 million people. Half are now internally displaced. 4 million have fled the country, and despite what the right-wing extremists in Europe want you to believe, most went to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan – not Germany or Great Britain. Those who remain suffer from Assad’s barrel bombs, IS terrorism, and international airstrikes.
• In the turmoil of the war in Syria and post-war instability in Iraq, the terror organization Islamic State was founded and quickly grew into one of the world’s top threats with terrorist attacks being carried out in the heart of Europe.
• Also close to home, the situation in Ukraine remains unresolved. After Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, the conflict is now frozen. And with the recent political upheaval in Kiev – the realization of provisions from the Minsk II peace agreement has become a very distant prospect.

Now, vis-à-vis these and other challenges:

the idea is to draft a strategy that fits all 28 EU member states and that will guide European foreign policy five to seven years into the future.

What could possibly go wrong?

2.2 Pitfalls of the New Strategy

Some challenges Mogherini and her team face in drafting the “Global Strategy” are apparent.

One, in these fast-paced times, we are running the risk that this strategy might be outdated before it even goes into press.

• For instance: four years ago, the Islamic State was merely a footnote in reports about the Syrian conflict. Today, it dominates most of Western strategic thinking.

And it’s not just the changing world that’s threatening to overtake Mogherini’s writing process.

• The EU for which the strategy is being drafted might not be the EU that will have to employ it. Let’s say Britain leaves the European Union, or Greece gets bullied out, or the EU disintegrates into a multi-speed Europe. All these scenarios require different strategies. But for now, they are a taboo that won’t be addressed.

Two, it will be interesting to see how 28 member states agree on anything in foreign policy. Their different sizes, geographical locations and historical experiences guarantee that they differ on ‘problem definitions’ as well as ‘treatment recommendations’.

• When it comes to defining the problem, the view from Warsaw might be quite different to the view from Rome. Take Russia for example, Eastern European countries are understandably worried. Southern European countries not so much.
• But even, when 28 countries converge on a problem definition, say “the Islamic State poses a threat”, they still have to agree on what to do about it. Conducting airstrikes in Syria and Iraq with a Coalition of the Willing? France and Great Britain are all in, Germany – which is ‘eager to please’ but still mostly a civilian power – is helping out with reconnaissance flights, while Italy’s Matteo Renzi has firmly said no.

Of course, Mogherini knows that and will try to find a way around these issues. As a consequence, the new strategy might end up being watered down until it’s vague enough for all 28 to agree. And it might evade the question of implementation altogether. From what you hear in Brussels, implementation will be left to later add-ons to the strategy.

3 Europe as a Global Actor

Despite all these challenges, one thing is abundantly clear: we live a globalized world. That means not only is trade globalized, but also conflicts and crises.

We need to tackle them together or fail together.

The European “Global Strategy” will present Europe as a global actor. What might that look like?

3.1 Global Approach

A global actor needs a global approach to foreign and security policy.

Yes, many challenges to EU security originate in its immediate neighborhood. And how we deal with these conflicts along the shores of the Mediterranean will be the litmus test for our common security strategy. But these conflicts must be viewed in a broader perspective. They are the result of a multitude of intertwined causes. Only if we appreciate that will we be able to solve them. Syria is a prime example of this:

Assad has always been a dictator whose Alawite regime has brutally suppressed Sunni minorities. But that has not kept the West from cooperating with him and his security forces. Let them torture terror suspect in the Western “War on Terror”. This cooperation, in turn, bolstered his rule and weakened Western credibility. Assad’s regime has been responsible for bad governance including very poor water management. Which became a problem during the extreme draught Syria experienced between 2006 and 2010. The likelihood of these extreme weather phenomena in the region has been increased dramatically due to global warming. This particular draught forced 1.5 million people from the rural areas into the cities where social tensions had already been running high with a host of refugees from Iraq creating a hotbed for the 2011 popular unrest and ensuing civil war.

The example of Syria illustrates the nexus between several risk factors: climate, instability, inequality and our own policies.

The lesson should be: we need more comprehensive policies.

Alas, the military operation “Sophia” which we are currently conducting in the Mediterranean Sea suggests we have not yet learned that lesson. Instead of tackling the root causes of the refugee crisis, the EU prefers a short-sighted, largely symbolic mission.

3.2 European Actorness

If Europe wants to be a global actor, it needs to be a single actor, not 28 actors. The EU has identified the area of its common security and defense policy as having the biggest potential for further integration. Yet the issue is touchy.

Back in the day, diplomatic common sense told you: “Don’t mention the war – Germany is sensitive” – today it’s: “don’t mention European operational military headquarters – Britain is sensitive”.

But if we are serious about being a global actor, we need to be smart about our resources. We will be most effective, if we drastically increase “pooling and sharing”. Our answers to our common challenges must not be national, but European.

3.3 Flexible Multilateralism

Further, Europe as a global actor needs to be a multilateral actor. That means conducting our foreign and security policy within the framework of international institutions and international law.

To spell it out: never intervene without a UN mandate. By circumventing the UN Security Council with ‘Coalitions of the Willing’, we weaken the very body that is our bulwark against anarchy in the international system.

In the short run, minilateral solutions might appear attractive because they don’t include the hassle of taking an issue to New York for rounds and rounds of deliberation. But in the long run, we do not want a world in which the United Nations has become irrelevant. If you look at the most complicated and dangerous conflicts today from Libya to Syria, the UN is our best hope of solving them.

Strengthening the UN also means contributing. While the number of UN peace-keeping missions has gone up, EU participation has gone down.

This does not mean that everything has to be done at the highest level. Smaller, more flexible formats like the G7, the G20 or the EU3 plus 3 are sometimes better suited to effectively deal with a conflict. The negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program are testament to that.

The key is, for the EU to be somewhat flexible in its multilateralism, but make sure alternative formats are at some level tied into the UN framework.

3.4 Interests and Values

The EU sees itself as a promoter and protector of human rights. Lisbon Treaty Article 21 reads:

“The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement …: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity…”.

In practice that means: the EU is in quite the conundrum.

When you ask around in Brussels, they will tell you: we don’t have an appetite for ‘regime change’. We want stable governments. We want to help them enhance their resilience.

But blind support for repressive governments has gotten us where we are today. And the EU knows it. We are not after the dictators’ false promises of “stability” anymore, they assure you in Brussels.

How to then square the circle?

What’s most important: we cannot afford hypocrisy. For instance, Saudi Arabia is not our strategic partner. The country is currently bombing the Yemen back into the Stone Age. Its human rights record is abysmal. And we should not be selling them tanks. But in order to be effective, arms export control needs to be Europeanized. It makes no sense, if only German arms export policies became more restrictive while French arms sales went up.

Even if Saudi Arabia is not our strategic partner, we should not make it into a pariah either. Like it or not, the conflict in Syria will not be solved without Saudi Arabia. Nor without Iran. Or Turkey. And definitely not without Russia. All these states are autocracies or well on their way there. We need to find a mode to deal with the on the international stage without giving up our values. What the EU needs a realpolitik firmly based in human rights.

4 Conclusion: Europe at the Crossroads

To wrap this up:

Europe finds itself at the crossroads. Where do we go from here? Do we turn inward? Do we really entrench ourselves behind barbed-wire and reduce our foreign policy to reactive crisis management, always too little, always too late? Or do we meet these challenges together?

Let me be very clear:

If we keep up these quote-unquote “temporary” border controls, if we can’t agree on a common migration policy: we will kill the European Single Market and with it Europe and the dream of an “ever closer union”.

In this moment of truth, it might seem premature, maybe even delusional, to talk about “Europe as a global actor” when it can hardly act at home.

But ready or not, these challenges cannot be ignored. There really is no alternative to a common foreign and security policy. In the face of threats that know no borders, sovereignty is an illusion. We are in this together.

And small steps toward further integration in the area of security and defense are much preferable to no progress at all. Now, more than ever, Europe needs a ‘win’.

Thank you.