EU staggers towards a common foreign policy

Date: 25/04/1996

The Union's reaction to the current Middle East crisis has highlighted the many shortcomings of its CFSP. But, as Thomas Klau reports, the confusion masks the slow emergence of a united front in dealing with the outside world.

FOR those who would like the EU to come up with an effective common foreign policy, the recent erratic travels around the Middle East of French Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette and his Italian counterpart and Council President Susanna Agnelli seemed like a potent symbol of everything that is wrong with the CFSP.

Instead of coordinating their efforts and agreeing on a single mediator to broker peace between the warring parties, EU governments presented their Middle Eastern interlocutors with the ludicrous spectacle of European ministers hastily rearranging their schedules to avoid embarrassing encounters with each other in the antechambers of Jerusalem, Damascus or Beirut.

With the Europeans frantically rushing about in the wings, it was left to US Secretary of State Warren Christopher to calmly take centre stage and, yet again, appear as the representative of the only power able to handle a major foreign policy crisis - thereby creating precisely the impression that the EU in general, and France in particular, was so keen to avoid.

The Union's inability to stop the war in the former Yugoslavia, its failure to defuse the recent crisis between Turkey and Greece, the Greek embargo imposed on Macedonia against the wishes of all of its EU partners - wherever one turns, the picture seems to be one of confusion, empty gesturing and, sometimes, angry recrimination.

Yet the failure of the CFSP to rise to the expectations created when EU governments agreed to write their foreign policy cooperation into the Maastricht Treaty easily masks another and more significant development, which diplomats say is much better perceived outside the Union than within.

According to officials, member states' foreign policies are increasingly shaped by the awareness that the days when European powers could single-handedly design and carry out effective political or military interventions abroad are over.

“We are only being listened to when we act in common,” says a diplomat involved in coordinating his government's foreign policy with that of its EU partners. “That becomes much clearer as soon as you try to establish a presence outside the EU.”

Furthermore, say these same officials, individual national foreign policies are increasingly becoming too expensive to sustain. “The money is now to be found in the EU budget,” explains one diplomat.

According to these observers, the public's disappointment over the EU's failure to impose a peace in former Yugoslavia - fuelled by over-optimistic ministerial pronouncements about the Union's ability to stop the war - has overshadowed the consensus achieved on issues such as how to deal with Central and Eastern Europe and how to foster stability in the Mediterranean region.

Thus, they argue, scant attention was paid to the real success achieved by member states in agreeing on the group of enlargement candidates - a list initially far more controversial than it might seem in retrospect.

Diplomats point out that the growing readiness and ability to define common interests and act together does not apply to the issue of enlargement alone.

On central policy matters such as their relationship with Russia or Ukraine, EU governments have, in the last few years, managed to conduct their business smoothly via Brussels, without even trying to come up with independent national policies towards Moscow or Kiev.

And although Mediterranean policy clearly and understandably remains a particular priority for the Union's southern members, their northern EU partners, after initial wavering, agreed to accept it as a common purpose for the Union, to be funded out of EU coffers fed mainly by the north.

In the vital field of trade policy, meanwhile, the Union acts and is perceived abroad as a single bloc, notwithstanding the fierce internal battles preceding and sometimes accompanying the work of Commission negotiators.

The consensus that the Union must act as one, even when the chosen course is unpalatable to some, also underlies the complex history of the EU's reaction to the war in former Yugoslavia.

Member states grudgingly followed the German lead in recognising the independence of the breakaway republics. They also preferred to agree on the lowest common denominator of joint military passivity, rather than intervening by going it alone.

“EU habits of cooperation have come quite a long way,” says a US diplomat.

In the past, the job of US political officer posted to the EU used to be called the “rover job” because it entailed so much political travelling to national capitals. That is no longer the case, as the work is now mainly carried out in Brussels. “The CFSP is much better than its reputation,” says an EU diplomat who travels regularly between Brussels and member states, adding: “The feeling that it is a failure is largely due to a structural misperception.”

In the eyes of many inside observers, a key reason for the EU foreign policy's failure in the public's eye is the cacophony and systematic misrepresentation produced by 15 ministers eager to market themselves to their domestic political audiences.

While senior diplomats are busy coordinating positions and action plans, balancing interests until a truly common purpose has been defined, ministers continue to sell Union positions as national initiatives, minimising the role of the EU in order to enhance their own.

“A key problem is that you still lack a European public,” says a senior diplomat. “If a minister wants to raise his profile, which as a politician he must do, he will be addressing his home audience exclusively. Most of the problems come from this basic fact. What we need is a public face for our policy, but that is still quite a long way off.”

The growing ability to define common policies is hindered rather than helped by the institutional framework for the EU's foreign policy, with the different European Commissioners dealing with foreign policy issues often operating at cross purposes with the work carried out in national foreign ministries.

Furthermore, the ministers' own perception that their regular Council meetings are an unwieldy instrument when the Union is confronted with a specific crisis or complex negotiations is increasingly leading the three biggest EU powers to band together and negotiate Union agreements with scant consultation of their partners, as in the Contact Group overseeing the ceasefire in Bosnia.

Smaller member states, for which the CFSP provides a unique opportunity to contribute to shaping international policy, react with increasing anger against this tendency. “Usually, it is the UK, France and Germany in their own right making decisions for the EU,” says a diplomat from a small member state.

The twin central weaknesses of the CFSP - an unwieldy decision-making mechanism aggravated by the lack of a public face and the Union's inability to restrain national governments which decide to act outside the established consensus - are unlikely to be effectively remedied in the current Intergovernmental Conference on EU reform, which will for the first time formally turn its attention to the issue of external Union actions at a meeting in Brussels on 6 May. For, as one EU source puts it, “if ministers agreed to an effective common representative, they would write themselves out of the picture”.

Similarly, most member states are years away from agreeing to a transfer of sovereignty to Brussels which would give the EU the right to interfere with their autonomy on foreign policy matters other than trade.

Diplomats keen to advance the cause of the CFSP now pin their hopes on the common foreign policy analysis unit to be set up in Brussels - one of the few points where a consensus was achieved by the Reflection Group which laid the groundwork for the IGC. Systematically defining common strategic priorities and interests, they say, might speed up the burial of national foreign policies.