The EU gets a lot of flak, and not all of it is deserved. But sometimes the ability of the bloc to avoid confronting hard choices really deserves condemnation.
This piece really gets at some of the problems. As Mark Leonard puts it, “Europe’s complete holiday from geopolitics always ends up being very costly.” I’m not a fan of Leonard, author of that deeply insightful book Why Europe will Run the 21st Century, which looks about as prophetic now as all those books about the dominance of Japan from the 1980s, except that then Japan was pretty powerful and Leonard’s book was written at a moment when Europe was already materially weak and visibly intellectually confused.
But here Leonard’s right. (Another voice later in the article calls it “Europe’s lack of strategic thinking,” but the right word is political, its lack of political thinking.) For too long—three or four generations—Europe was able to live beneath the wing of the United States, and the holiday it seems to have taken from geopolitics in those decades has ossified into a permanent retirement from the field. Individual states may do a bit of Machiavellian Realpolitik from time to time, engage in a bit of raison d’état, but mostly at the individual level, and always at the collective level, there is no real political imagination at work.
This was of course encouraged by the US, which was happy not to have anyone else trying to govern the world and so treated the foreign policy shops of the European states as basically resources to plunder for insight and post-colonial manipulation (of its ex-colonies, that is). The Europeans don’t even seem to realize that they lack this now.
This is most visible in the unthinkability of military violence for Europeans. The Yugoslav wars of the 90s went on so long because the Europeans couldn’t, or wouldn't, do anything. Then since Iraq, violence has been radically delegitimated again. It’s a huge disaster, in fact, and not something people in the US should celebrate. A militarily serious Europe would have been a powerful counterweight to Russia, for starters, and a much more serious partner to the US--one who the US might actually listen to from time to time. As it is now, they are punching way below their weight, because they've tried to imagine that politics doesn't involve force, and they've tried to tell themselves that talking about issues, but not making policies and plans and hard choices--say, about the problem of refugees in Turkey near the Greek (and thus EU) border--and instead wishing things would go away. This is a failure in "domestic" (that is, intra-EU) politics and in foreign politics.
(By the way, let’s see what happens with Coronavirus in the EU. I suspect the individual states will all become like Italy, pulling in on themselves, with no coherent overall strategy. As this article makes clear, it’s going to be a hell of a stress test for all of us.)
Again, none of this is something the US should feel smug about. It's a disaster, for Europe, for their neighbors, for the world, and definitely for us. A mature and strong Europe would be a tremendous boon in the world. What can we do to help make that happen? How can we get the European political elite to see the value of making an effort?