On Wednesday 22 November, European Commissioner for Neighbourhood Policy Johannes Hahn said while the EU helped many countries in the world financially, it was not yet a global power, or even a regional one.
"What we have to do, to improve in the future, is to pull what we are doing in a way that you can produce political leverage", he said at the "Global Trends to 2030" conference. "In many areas we are probably the biggest payer worldwide, but we are by far, not yet, a real regional player", he added. Hahn also said the EU should analyse the payer and player role in a way to move towards the magnitude of what it is paying. "Our weakness is that we do not appear as a whole", he said.
Hahn took the example of Egypt, which he defined as one of three "key" countries in the EU's neighbourhood, with Turkey and Ukraine. He said that while the IMF had made €12 billion available, the EU, its member states and financial institutions were helping the country with over €11 billion. "But we are not capable of using this as political leverage", he regretted, saying that progress was needed in this area – and all the more so as this type of situation was happening in nearly all African countries.
In Hahn's view, the EU and the members states have not thus far succeeded in being coordinated to be able to talk with a single voice, and thus to create political leverage. Nevertheless, he said the Commission or the European External Action Service should not necessarily always be manoeuvring, "one-member state being able to act for all of us". "The important thing is that this should be done in a coordinated way and with a single voice", he said, believing that it is in this way that the EU can become a global player. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)