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

7. Conclusion: Redesigning Global Europe

123 chapter 7 ConClusion: Redesigning global euRope E urope’s crisis has not been and does not need to be apocalyptically negative for European foreign policies. It would be exaggerated to paint the EU as a stricken Paradise Lost, set for dusty, anachronistic oblivion. Positive, global ambition is still appropriate. Robert Kagan reminds us that the United States has always been caught in a struggle to stay influential and appeal as a model; there was never a halcyon zenith of perfectly effective power from which the United States now declines.1 In some sense, this could be said to be even truer of Europe, in terms of both the time-stretched vicissitudes of the integration process and national foreign policies that have already passed through the post-colonial humbling of power retraction. In mitigation, European governments have begun to inch toward a more coherent and proactive geopolitical vision to navigate the choppier waters of a crisis-reshuffled world order. After summarizing the book’s findings on how EU external relations have responded to the crisis, this concluding chapter outlines some of the challenges that such a vision is likely to encounter. As Europe recovers from its fiscal rehab, how should it position itself in the world? 124 the UNcertaIN LeGacY OF crISIS The legaCy of CRisis The crisis has bequeathed an EU that is more vulnerable and less selfassured . The Damoclean sword of relative decline hangs a little more menacingly over Europe’s baleful glance. In the darkest days of the crisis, the EU stared for the first time at the merest possibility of its own mortality —an experience that was, as any such realization, shuddering in its disorientation and concentrating of mind. The crisis has tainted the spirit as well as the material. The EU now often appears to be buffeted by the tide of global affairs more than charting its own course through these challenges . It is more importuning than compass setting. The EU no longer bestrides the world, or even its own neighborhood. Conscious of its need for international support, the EU is a less contrarian power. The crisis has bred a less imperious and less intemperate Europe. A wider temporal perspective adds little comfort. 2014’s centenary of the First World War provides a sobering reference point. A century of self-inflicted destruction dislodged European nations from the pinnacle of their global power; in fighting each other, European powers all lost out to a resurgent East. And now, in the distended shadow of this long sweep of decline, in what seem less dramatic and disruptive times, deep economic crisis once more evokes the ghosts of discord. The past decade has been especially humbling for the UK as the country suffered military embarrassments in Iraq and Afghanistan, sinking its reputation in the one area of policy where it continued to punch above its weight; saw its overdependence on financial services brutally punished in the economic crisis; and now stumbles myopically toward marginalization within Europe. Of course, the EU can recover its economic footing; rising powers may well falter; and effective European influence can recuperate even as other powers gain long-term structural weight in the international system. Yet, even if all this occurs, the pain and costs have been too great to reduce Europe’s predicament to no more than a temporary and even fortuitously redeeming parenthesis. While the lesions run deep, not all is grim and faithless retreat. There is a spillover from the internal crisis, but the effectiveness of European foreign policy should not be seen as entirely dependent on any particular redesign of EU institutions. Even a rolling back of some internal post- cONcLUSION: reDeSIGNING GLOBaL eUrOpe 125 Maastricht commitments need not take Europe back to disastrously conflictive relations. The EU is neither declining nor improving wholesale; dynamics differ depending on the policy area. Headline conclusions from the preceding chapters highlight this balance: • Economic crisis has for now (late 2013) been calmed, but without qualitative improvement to the model of integration or a solution to the EU’s seriously aggravated “democracy problem.” • The crisis has left a serious dent in EU global influence but has also spurred efforts at compensatory coordination and revived ambition. • The crisis has pushed the EU to be a more geoeconomic actor, in some welcome, and some less beneficial, ways. • The EU has invested huge effort during the crisis to correct its erstwhile neglect of Asia’s rise...