Changing Gear in EU Foreign Policy

The former Estonian foreign affairs minister, in office for nine years between 2005 and 2014, talks of his personal experience, retracing the evolution of world affairs and the shakier developments of a European foreign policy that is still in gestation. A member of the Renew Europe group at the European Parliament and of the committee on foreign affairs, of which he is one of the deputy chairs (at least until the mid-term elections scheduled for 24 January 2022), Urmas Paet (47) can only regret the minor role played by the EU on the international scene. Like many other actors and observers of this pusillanimous Union, the author calls for a change of gear and for the rule of unanimity to be traded in for greater efficacy.

“It is vitally important for the EU and all its member states that the political influence, economic weight and military force of authoritarian powers such as China and Russia do not increase to the point of undermining the cohesion and values of Europe. A more united Europe is required, not only to defend our collective interests as a union, but also to support weaker countries which are at ever greater risk of falling under the shadow of Moscow and Beijing”, the MEP argues. He believes that the capitals desperately need to start basing their reasoning on the long term rather than immediate interests, so as to create strategic orientations that will allow Europe to help shape the world in the future, instead of running the risk of having to live in a world imposed upon it by other powers. Paet is actively in favour of an EU that is proactive rather than reactive. To achieve this, it will require increase in efficiency, the author stresses, criticising the length of decision-making processes and the coming to light of internal divisions, that are all too easy for third countries to exploit. Hence the need to scrap the rule of unanimity as quickly as possible, although he acknowledges that this will not be easy.

Paet firmly believes that all strategic infrastructure, in areas such as energy and telecoms, must remain exclusively in European hands. “The EU must treat Chinese businesses seeking to operate in the EU in the same way as European businesses are treated in China”, he writes, while acknowledging a slight improvement following recent bilateral agreements on investments. He adds: “non-EU businesses, including those from China, taking control of EU companies must be examined more seriously. Strict rules are necessary to avoid compromising competitiveness and security interests”. Relations with China are one of the greatest challenges facing the European Union, the author goes on to stress, expressing concern at internal divisions caused by the country in terms of the financing of infrastructure and bilateral agreements with national governments that have been lured by Chinese financial manna.

“We must not stint in our efforts to resolve our differences with Russia any more than we must stint in our efforts to find a sustainable peaceful solution for Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine (…). The EU must bring as much pressure to bear as possible to force the Kremlin and its allies to change direction. Nord Stream 2 must also be cancelled to exert economic and financial pressure. We must also continue to show unflinching support, in word and in deed, to our partners in the East, who are under pressure every day from the malevolent influence and aggression of Russia”, the author argues, also dwells at length on the transatlantic relationship that has been undermined by Donald Trump. “The transatlantic alliance can work well only if it acts like an evolving relationship between equal partners. To this end, the EU must prove in the future that it has the capacity to find its own way in the world when it needs to do so, rather than following the example of the United States”, stresses Paet, who believes that a “strong and self-sufficient EU is perfectly compatible with our partnership with the United States”. He goes on to say that “the relationship between the EU and NATO should be a true partnership, with two partners taking full and equal responsibility”. Although he reiterates NATO’s central importance in European security, he is nonetheless of the view that European strategic autonomy and defence are not a threat to NATO, but can, quite reverse, reinforce “collective security”. (Olivier Jehin)

Urmas Paet. From Spectator to Actor – Changing Gear in EU Foreign Policy - John Harper Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-8380-8985-6. 252 pages. €35,63

The EU’s Defense Ambitions

In this largely insipid study, Raluca Csernatoni contends that bringing the institutional structures of the EU and the defence industry closer together has allowed the emergence of a European industrial and technological defence complex that has the potential to “make the union a more capable and strategically autonomous global defence technical actor”. She considers that recent launches of several initiatives, including the European Defence Fund, indicate a shift in the “relatively slow process of creating a common defence consciousness”.

“The closer cooperation between the European defence industry and the European Commission was a key development in bridging the technology gap compared to the United States, as well as to maintain both the EU’s long-term market competitiveness and strategic autonomy in key technology areas”, writes the researcher, who also refers to the role played by the European Parliament and the contribution of the Kangaroo Group, particularly in the development of security and defence R&D programmes. As regards the creation of the European Defence Fund, she does not hesitate to refer to the “erosion of intergovernmentalism”. Csernatoni however notes that following the cuts made by the European Council in the initial budget proposed by the European Commission (8 billion euros rather than 13 over the period 2021-2027), the EDF’s “real potential to incentivise and add value to technological and industrial cooperation and competitiveness in Europe remains unclear”.

In this excessively long report (no fewer than 50 pages), financially supported by the Open Society Initiative for Europe programme (the European programme of the George Soros Foundation), the author also highlights democratic controls on the pursuit of European integration in the field of defence and better transparency of the decision-making processes. “The expanded connections between the European Commission and major weapons manufacturers, both within successive security and defence R&D programmes and across various high-level and opaque expert interest groups, also raises democratic governance concerns”, Csernatoni argues, adding: “ideally, the European Parliament and national parliaments should play a more meaningful role in the evaluation and reporting processes on such programmes. Of particular concern is the European Parliament’s and national parliaments’ relative lack of in-house expertise in technological matters, especially concerning disruptive technologies”. (OJ)

Raluca Csernatoni. The EU’s Defense Ambitions: Understanding the Emergence of a European Defense Technological and Industrial Complex. Carnegie Europe, December 2021. 52 pages. The study can be downloaded free of charge from the website: https://carnegieeurope.eu

Quand la connerie économique prend le pouvoir

In this work, the Keynesian economist Jacques Généreux, who has lectured at the Sciences Po university for more than 40 years, resumes his crusade against the dominant economic doctrine by linking it to an impassioned denunciation of the madness that is hitting all sections of society at once, including well educated individuals who have the “assurance of knowledge”, such as the French President Emmanuel Macron, who is soon to announce his intention to run for a second term. The left-leaning author backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2017, but his analysis applies to the entire political class and technocrats throughout Europe, because “economic stupidity” knows no borders.

Emmanuel Macron comes in for the brunt of his criticism. The author highlights selected examples of presidential ineptitude and repeats insults levelled by Macron at his citizens during the five years of his office, in itself making for interesting and amusing reading – because if you didn’t laugh about it, you would cry – a few weeks off the elections. But it is mainly the neo-classical economic theory and its neoliberal avatar to which Généreux principally objects, reiterating in passing that the Social Democrats have also swallowed it whole and applied the same supply-side logic, which is “a way of designing the economy to be the reverse of what it actually does”. Put simply, it is based on the principle that the market regulates whilst automatically balancing supply and the resulting demand, and that there is no point in intervention by the public authorities other than to reduce public spending and the taxes that would have a knock-on effect on the investments of capital-holders. Budget cuts have affected public service and infrastructure and increased poverty and inequality. Austerity has made the consequences of the debt crises more severe. Deregulation, the financialisation of the economy and the development of free trade have brought about an unbridled commoditisation of the world.

“Apart from a sect of economists still preaching the religion of the market at universities, all the wise people of the world have rigorously returned a diagnosis of an economic plague exhausting the earth and human beings: a mad economic system, which liberates and proliferates a virus that is deadly to humanity – the greed for goods and money, a hoarding impulse that by its nature can never be satisfied, as it has no end other than itself”, the author writes, adding that “never has a weakness of the truth been so manifestly experienced. The more science tells us that we are in a hole, the more humanity keeps digging”.

Généreux also criticises the “sophistry of unsustainable debt”: “when debt finances an effective recovery plan to get out of recession, it allows us not only to resume activity and employment, but also to avoid a much greater spiralling of the debt. After the 2008 crisis, the sophistry of unsustainable debt led the European Union to inflict austerity plans on itself, with a resulting long period of stagnation that has sent public debt skyrocketing, because the stagnation, or recession, of activity mechanically leads to an increase of social spending and a drop in tax revenue. If, in 2008, France had carefully invested 100 billion euros in avoiding recession, it would have avoided at least 500 billion euros in additional debt over the following decade due to the ongoing downturn in its activity”.

“The successive treaties of the European Union have withdrawn from the member states the ability to be in charge of their own monetary policy, their budgetary policy and financial regulation. They have forced the members of a ‘Union’ to engage in tax competition and social dumping amongst themselves! They have made necessary the transformation of the public services into businesses subject to the logic of trade competition”, laments the author, who particularly opposed the adoption of the draft constitutional treaty, which was badly designed from the outset and pushed through in the even worse version in force today under the name of the Lisbon Treaty.

“The return to the fore of the supply-side economy is like the astrophysicists of the 21st century deciding to reinstate Ptolemy’s geocentric system! The European austerity policies of the 2010s are as if doctors decided to replace antibiotics with blood-letting! The shock of the major global financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences has by no means shaken the system, the economic and political models that caused it in the first place. It is too early to say whether the shock of the public health and economic crisis of the early 2020s will have been enough to trigger a return to reason”, writes Généreux, who considers that the “infiltration of the virus of competition into the entire social space has delivered serious effects to individual and collective indebtedness”. He goes on to explain, quite correctly: “the race to performance, client base, profitability, financing, ‘likes’, popularity, audience share, etc., to optimise the yield or classification of a business, laboratory, a newspaper, a university, a blog, a television programme, a hospital, a police station… is all nonsense! Generalised and permanent competition and the terror of declassification spread stupidity because they saturate time and mental energy, because they feed into stress and fear, because they reduce concerns of truth to nothing and numb the spirit of criticism. The advent of virtual social networks among generations who have grown up in a society that prefers performance to relevance, the profitability of research to the quest for truth, has obviously not improved matters. The ‘dissociety’ of individuals separate in real life, but connected in virtual space – where billions of egocentric points of view coexist – tends to be nothing more than a giant nonsense factory”.

Will we ever escape? Yes, the author predicts, as long as we thoroughly reform all of our institutions, which are no longer any more than superficially democratic, to establish an authentic, participative, effective democracy, together with a system of “permanent education of a people of citizens” possessed of a capacity for criticism that is vital to instruct and collectively deliberate all matters of public interest. We can always dream … (OJ)

Jacques Généreux. Quand la connerie économique prend le pouvoir. Seuil. ISBN: 978-2-0213-9900-4. 295 pages. €19,00