The Uncertain Legacy of Crisis: European Foreign Policy Faces the Future

1. Introduction

1 chapter 1 IntroductIon B eleaguered Europe continues to lurch from one nominally make-orbreak summit to another, its crisis neither surpassed nor broken in definitive denouement. It appears to be trapped within “the recurrent end of the unending,” to use T. S. Eliot’s evocation of nightmarish repetition.1 Since 2008, the European Union (EU) has largely been in crisis management mode dealing with the eurozone crisis. The short-term imperatives of ensuring the survival of the euro and the wider, political “European project” have been matter enough for EU leaders. Governments claim that as of late 2013, they have calmed the crisis’s most turbulent waters; some observers feel the reprieve is only temporary. Whether or not the worst ravages of turmoil return, it is necessary to look beyond the short term and ask what kind of longer-term legacy the crisis will leave for the EU’s global standing and the long-emergent dream of a coherent, active European foreign policy. The eurozone crisis is primarily economic and internal to the European Union. Yet it is nested within, and is in fact a contributing cause of, a deep shift in global power, one in which Europe commands less relative power, and probably less absolute power, than before. Therefore the view common in some European quarters early in the crisis that it is no more than an ephemeral domestic parenthesis looks unsatisfactorily reductionist. Yet this incipient spillover from the domestic dimensions of the crisis to its international ramifications has been unduly neglected. The time is ripe for a reassessment of EU foreign policy in light of the crisis. This book takes on that task. In examining the myriad effects of the eurozone crisis on Eu- 2 the uncertain LeGacY OF criSiS rope’s relations with the world, it paints a picture of the interconnections between internal European disorder and a reshaped global order. It finds EU foreign policies increasingly squeezed between the imperatives of internal crisis and the birth pangs of a post-Western international order. And it traces how these factors are simultaneously pulling European governments together and pushing them apart. Given the gravity and bitter politics of the crisis, the EU’s pretensions at global shaping now may seem to represent little more than a laughably, even dangerously, outsized ambition. If the EU had to improve its foreign policy game even before the crisis, such a gear change is clearly more urgent today. The gloom cast by the current crisis leaves much commentary feeling like an eschatology of the EU’s last days. Europe certainly presents a more furrowed brow to the world: its tonality is more somber. The EU seems to exhibit the confusion and paralysis of an identity crisis. Yet the book ponders whether there are not also some positive effects. Can Europe defy augury and emerge from the crisis better prepared for the new world order? Many writers and diplomats hold a relaxed view that the crisis has not been dramatic in its impact on the EU’s global role. In this view, the EU is not being weakened so much as it is gradually becoming a less active, more suburban power—relatively well off, less idealistic and more healthily concerned with looking after its own material well-being. I chart a middle course between the most pessimistic and sanguine views. Across the different thematic chapters there emerges a counterintuitive observation: most of the negative features of the EU’s predicament were deepening even before the crisis erupted, for a range of quite extraneous reasons. If anything, the menace of at least some of these policy shortcomings has been lightly tempered and corrected in the urgency of responding to the crisis. The crisis has had multifaceted, and often multidirectional , effects. It is like a receding malady that leaves at once scarred disfigurement and a cathartic sense of self-betterment. Europe now neither projects outward as quite the noble Elysium nor stands as an entirely befouled wasteland. To borrow from Tennyson: “Though much is taken, much abides.”2 intrOductiOn 3 FIve core QuestIons Building a composite map of the external impact of the crisis, the book address five core questions: To what extent is the crisis more than an economic challenge? As a starting hypothesis, the crisis must be understood as a political and ideational crisis, not merely an economic matter. Yet differences remain over how to read the political dimensions of...