In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nathalie Tocci – Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali and part-time professor at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute – discusses the direction the EU has taken in recent years in the light of its global strategy and how far it has managed to become strategically autonomous; reflects on what principled pragmatism implies in the context of the rise of illiberalism; and considers what could change during the second European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen – and whether the EU’s center of gravity might be shifting.
The conversation was recorded at the Budapest Forum for Building Sustainable Democracies
Ferenc Laczó: You played a key role during the preparations of the European Union Global Strategy, which was penned and circulated in 2016. It seems to me that several of the challenges and threats that the EU was already facing back then – whether we are talking about the climate emergency, illiberal rule outside but also within the EU, Russia’s revanchist aggression, the growing influence of an authoritarian China, or the inequitable policies towards migration – have only become more severe in the years since. Let us perhaps begin our conversation with a brief overview of this vast terrain. May I ask how you would assess the overall direction the EU has taken in the light of the global strategy you helped outline nearly a decade ago? More specifically, how far has the EU managed to achieve its goal of strategic autonomy?
Nathalie Tocci: Many different things have happened since 2016 but they have made the world that was painted back in 2016 a lot worse. We are now dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as opposed to Russia’s military intervention in Eastern Ukraine, as we used to call it back then. US-China competition, although it existed back in 2016, has become a full-fledged economic and technological competition. We are more aware today that this conflict could actually spill into an all-out war – whether we are talking about the South China Sea or Taiwan.
Whereas there were growing tensions and even wars back in 2016, now those tensions and wars are on steroids.
With regards to the issue of complexity in the international system, which was really a story of multipolarity and the way in which power was shifting, I think we are still at a phase now where it is not quite clear what is actually crystallizing: we are not quite clear on whether we are in, or edging towards, a new bipolarity, multipolarity, or non-polarity. I think the only thing that we know is that it is not unipolarity. Therefore, the good old days of the liberal international order and a world premised upon the hegemony of the United States of America are gone.
Moving on to examining how the EU has reacted, we can adopt the glass half full analogy. On one level, you can make the argument that there is far greater appreciation of the issues today than there was back then for the very simple reason that they are a lot worse today than they used to be. Whereas in 2016 many of the discussions of contestation and conflict were confined to the foreign policy community, both in academia and in institutions in the private sector, contestation and conflict have become so obvious by now that the proverbial man and woman on the street are also well aware of them.
That greater understanding also explains why the Commission – at times in a rather clumsy way, I should add – made the transition from saying that they are a political commission to insisting on being a geopolitical commission. I don’t think there was really much of an understanding of what exactly was meant by those terms at the time, but there was the sense that the world was headed in a direction and the EU had to do something about it.
If we fast forward to today and we take, for instance, Mario Draghi’s new report on competitiveness, what I find interesting is not only the detailed proposals that are made – and those proposals in some respects make sense today just as they would have ten or twenty years ago –, however, today they are framed as existential. They are existential today because of some of the things we have been talking about: because we are in a context of war and US-China competition and, we should add, because the big challenges of our age are transnational in nature, whether it is demography, technology, or climate. Those challenges require multilateral co-operation. Albeit this point was made already back in 2016, it has also become more obvious since.
Moving on to the half empty part of the glass and to the question of strategic autonomy: although I do not want to diminish what has been done over the last four years, I must state that in some respects we did not use the last four years as effectively as we could or should have done. I think this was very much the product of what happened in the US. Donald Trump gets elected in 2016 and the sense behind the global strategy of the EU at the time was, “Oh my God, we have got to learn to be on our own. We do not like being on our own, as the EU is intrinsically multilateral in nature, but if we are forced to be on our own because others do not want to be with us, then we have got to do something about it.” That was the spirit back in 2016.
In 2017, Emmanuel Macron comes on board and he latches on to European strategic autonomy while giving it a French spin. By the time we get to 2020, following Joe Biden’s election in the US, there is a sentiment in Europe of “sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.” Strategic autonomy becomes somewhat toxic in a way in which it actually was not at all in 2016. Just to remind everyone, this was a time where the United Kingdom was still a member of the European Union. Back then, in the global strategy, the UK itself had no problem with strategic autonomy as long as it was defined as being cooperative in nature.
I say all this because I think it is relevant today. Here we are talking in the lead up to the US election.
I think the paradox of that election for Europeans is that in a Trump scenario, we are less likely to achieve many of the goals, including European strategic autonomy, but more likely to try because we will not have a choice. Alternatively, in a Harris scenario, we would be more likely to succeed because we have a cooperative partner, but less likely to try.
We need to figure out a way of exiting this Catch-22 we find ourselves in.
FL: The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has substantially altered our reality here in Europe. It has also altered our perception of that reality, forcing us to revise some of our very basic assumptions. The EU has done much to decouple from Russia in the meantime and has pursued a major energy transition, something you analyze in detail in your recent book A Green and Global Europe. In a number of respects, certainly when it comes to defense, the EU has also become more dependent on the US and also more interdependent with other players some of whom, you may say, help the EU substitute Russian sources of energy with a price tag attached. How well has the EU adjusted to the much harsher new realities on our continent over the past two and a half years? How well has it managed to use this epochal crisis and tragedy as an opportunity to unite further and develop new competences and capabilities?
NT: I think we need to unpack this in different areas. I remember a very interesting poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations back in the summer of 2022: less than six months into the war, they painted a picture of a growing divide between a peace camp and a justice camp in Europe.
I think it is fair to say that, despite the fact that differences exist and that there are outliers, Hungary being the prime example, on the whole political unity has prevailed.
We see this playing out on many counts, including the successive sanctions packages. That does not necessarily mean that unity will last forever, of course, but it has held so far. If I were to grade it, it would perhaps be a score of 8 or 9 out of 10.
Likewise on the energy front, albeit more can certainly be done and there has not yet been a total weaning off from Russian gas, particularly LNG, we have made remarkable strides forward in ways that were considered unthinkable prior to 2022. We have done so partly by diversifying our gas relationships, but also by doubling down on the Green Deal – which is incidentally the reason why I think it is so fundamentally important not to lose sight of the ball, and not to get carried away by greenlashes of different shapes and kinds. All in all, for energy, I would also give it a score of 8 out of 10.
I am far more critical on the defense front. From an inside-out perspective, what has happened is almost revolutionary. However, from an outside-in perspective, a lot more needs to be done here.
It is true that important steps have been taken. For example, a European Peace Facility has been activated. For the first time, the EU channels military assistance to a third state at war. But if you just take ammunition, it is quite shocking that North Korea provides Russia more ammunition than what 27 of the richest countries in the world collectively provide Ukraine. There is something that is just not quite right there. For defense, if I am going to be really generous, I would give a score of 6 out of 10.
The final point concerns enlargement. This is difficult to grade because it is a story in the making. Frankly speaking, enlargement appeared to be dead prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although Brussels and countries in the Western Balkans spoke of enlargement and reform, nothing was really happening. However, at present, enlargement is back on the agenda: the EU has opened its eyes and started to remember, so that it has become a strategic priority. Things are happening and not only vis-a-vis Ukraine and Moldova. Georgia is in suspense at the moment, of course, as there is a real risk of an end to democracy there. In any event, even in the case of the Western Balkans, there is real movement. If you think about the growth plan, for the first time, there is a real prospect that citizens in the Western Balkans will receive as much money from the EU as EU citizens under cohesion funds.
However, even though we do know that the enlargement train has left the station, we do not quite know yet what will be its final destination. That is why it is difficult to grade the EU’s performance in this regard.
FL: There is also an intricate theoretical question here which might deserve some more attention, I find. The EU may be called a liberal creature in an increasingly illiberal world. How do you view the potential tensions between the EU being a project that is a key part of the liberal international order and it turning into a geopolitical actor? In other words, how should we think about ‘principled pragmatism’ in the context of the rise of illiberal forces and a more contested and dangerous world?
NT: I would say that it makes things both easier and a lot harder. When we were living in the liberal international order during US hegemony, the EU was not the primary power. But as the EU was swimming along with the tide where the world was heading, it made life so much easier for it. The EU was in fact at the forefront of that tide. The European integration project was multilateralism in its most extreme form.
The EU is very much the product of the 1980s and the Single Market Act. It had built its institutions and its policies, for example its competition policy, within a neoliberal economic system, in sync with how the world was going back then. Initiatives of regional co-operation really took the EU as their gold standard. Similarly, the idea of soft power is very much embedded in the DNA of the EU.
Now that the world is moving in the opposite direction, how does that make things easier and how does it make things harder?
On one level, it obviously makes life a lot harder because we are no longer swimming with the tide. The EU almost needs to reinvent itself – and at times we do this in a somewhat clumsy way.
Take the question of industrial policy. Whereas the states have in their recent past experiences with industrial policy. Even if the policies of the 1950s, 60s and 70s cannot be applied in the same way in the 21st century, as states are familiar with the concept, what they have to do is take it out, refresh and repackage it for the 21st century, and implement it. However, the EU itself never had industrial policy in its DNA and must invent it from scratch. Moreover, the EU does not really have the institutions to do so.
Let us take another example: the concept that may be summarized as “the world is a big, bad and ugly place, and thus, we must toughen up and learn to become more transactional.” I think that the EU knows that it has to go in this direction, but it doesn’t really know how to do so. There is an underlying and still unresolved tension, for instance, in its development assistance.
The EU understands that it has to move from development assistance as it once was to international partnerships. If you take Global Gateway as the prime feature here, it remains a story of overpromising and underdelivering. The left, right and center in the Global South do not think very highly of what the EU is doing. I think there’s an element of clumsiness there – of knowing that you have to change, but not really knowing how to make that change.
However, the fact that the world is moving in the opposite direction in some respects makes things easier, especially closer to home in Europe. Earlier, I was talking about enlargement and the question of Ukraine. Richard Youngs in his recent book – Geoliberal Europe and the Test of War – painted the idea of the EU as a geoliberal project. What is interesting there is that it brings the harder edge of the geopolitical together with the liberal.
Particularly closer to home, as we opened our eyes with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we realize that toughening up also requires protecting a liberal project within, including via enlargement – which also helps us explain why enlargement is being revived.
If there was not that principled element of protecting the liberal in us, there would be no need for the harder edge – for the simple reason that you would not really need to protect yourself from anyone.
In other words, you are essentially protecting a system which is principled in nature. However, to do so, you must toughen up and that is where the pragmatism comes in.
FL: There have also been numerous discussions concerning the meaning of this year’s elections to the European Parliament. How significant of a rightward shift there has been and what consequences such a shift might bring have both been subjected to extended debates. I should say that, at least on the surface, continuities appear much more evident. However, trying to deepen integration further has arguably become a more complex and fraught endeavor. Would you expect the new Commission to essentially continue the work of the previous one? Which new accents will the second commission headed by von der Leyen want to set, and why?
NT: I think you are absolutely right. Despite all the political chaos, confusion and right-wing surges, it is a picture of continuity, both on the political and policy front. I think this is fundamentally so because it is the external context that is determining the policy agenda.
Going back to the to the Draghi report, many of the factors in that report make sense today just as they would have yesterday, or ten or twenty years ago. What makes them existential now is the external context – the US-China competition, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the threat to democracy.
All of these factors make the European integration project mortal in a way in which it was not a few years ago.
Inevitably, whoever you are, whether you are Viktor Orbán or Giorgia Meloni, you cannot completely close your eyes to that external reality and that external reality basically presupposes more Europe.
In this world, European countries are like small fat chickens in a jungle, and small fat chicken in the jungle do not last long – they either stick together or they end up as someone’s lunch.
If we stick together, we can hope to become say a medium-sized elephant but if we do not, then we end up as someone’s lunch. Relatively rational Eurosceptics cannot close their eyes to this either. The policy agenda is in many ways made out for us concerning competitiveness and growth internally but also in terms of the external dimensions, including tech, defense and energy.
That, of course, does not necessarily mean that we will succeed.
Given that it is quite an ambitious agenda, the question is as follows: is the new, more nationalistic and Euroskeptic Europe willing to do what it takes to address these challenges? It may understand the challenges. It may even agree on the policy direction. However, is it going to have the oomph to actually take on them and get the job done? That is where skepticism comes in.
Let me add a final point though. The big absentee in many respects is the Global South. There is the story of continuity of a mildly more right-wing and nationalistic EU, which is getting it right at least in terms of what it is trying to do internally via looking East, looking at China, looking at the US, looking at Russia etc. However, when it comes to the Global South, we are, frankly speaking, nowhere. Although the new Commission will have a Commissioner for the Mediterranean and International Partnerships, we are neither talking about heavyweights, nor are we talking about a clear policy agenda.
That is a serious problem in a world in which these players are increasingly making their voices heard.
There is no reason why the Global South should latch on to the Global East but if we continue this way, we shall push them further into a rather unnatural kind of alliance with the Russias and Chinas of this world.
The more we continue to ignore the Global South, and in the process validate many of the views, perceptions, maybe even misconceptions, that they have about the EU, the more likely they are to bandwagon with the Global East.
FL: It is quite conspicuous that the illiberal right has grown more popular precisely in France and Germany, which raises serious doubts about the future of a Franco-German engine. With such illiberal forces being in an even stronger position in Italy and the Netherlands, it has become somewhat questionable whether the four largest founding states of today’s EU can still be viewed as some kind of core areas of EU integration. What consequences do you expect this quite strange new situation to bring? Would you say that the EU’s center of gravity might be shifting these days?
NT: Yes, I think there is a shifting center of gravity. I would point to two different directions. While one is not necessarily bad and may even be good, the other is far more problematic.
Let me consider the possibly positive shift first: there is a very clear tilt to the east, and maybe even the north, which can be observed in the new Commission as well. Think of the role that Baltic countries play in it: High Representative from Estonia, a Defense Commissioner from Lithuania, a Latvian Commissioner who will retain very important competences regarding the economy, a Polish commissioner who will be at the head of budget, a Slovak commissioner who will be responsible for trade, and also a Romanian Vice-President.
I think this shift to the east can bring renewal to the EU, and it is a change that has been very late in coming. In and of itself, this tilt is good while the proof is in the pudding in terms of policy delivery.
The second direction or shift, which is not geographic but political, is where there is a major cause for concern. The European Parliament elections demonstrated, firstly, that the center holds and secondly that there is a right-wing surge. What is most important and possibly most damaging, in my opinion, is the nature of that right-wing surge. Unlike in 2016, where the far-right, nationalistic, populist parties had an exit agenda, consequent to the unmitigated disaster of the Brexit, such parties do not think about exiting anymore. Rather, the agenda is now to change the European project from within. For example, in the election campaign, I saw billboards across Italy with Giorgia Meloni’s smiling face and with a caption that read “Italy changes Europe.” Changing the EU in this sense means hollowing it out – it means corroding and eroding the European project from within. In and of themselves, such forces do not have the strength to do that. The threat is that, by allying with others, they may actually be able to move their agenda forward.
The center-is-holding narrative which we spoke about does not necessarily mean that there is a constant majority across all policy agendas. On specific policy agendas, Ursula von der Leyen’s new Commission may not hold the majority. For example, only a couple of days ago [the conversation took place on September 20], during the European Parliament’s vote on Venezuela and the approach to the Maduro government, we saw the European People’s Party voting with far-right groups. Incidentally, this concerned an issue where they are probably right as opposed to those to the left.
However, such a vote indicates something more general.
It indicates the fact that on specific policy issues, there can be a center right–far right coalition which could translate into the aim of corroding the European project from within.
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity in cooperation with Agana Gunawardana. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio recording.
