Who will take the wheel?

From Political to Geopolitical Commission

In December Ursula von der Leyen took office as a President of the European Commission. Already Juncker’s commission was widely criticized for being too „political”, yet tasks and challenges of this one will be probably even more complex than those in previous years. Von der Leyen’s call for the EU as a geopolitical player factually coincided with renewed migration crisis, problems in the Middle East, the pandemic and the great power competition. All those issues might be more urgent, not only for the new Commission but for a Europe as a continent. To be truly geopolitical, EU has to overcome few major challenges.

Task 1: European economy, investments and innovations

International financial architecture of the EU is mostly represented by EIB and EBRD. Both of them have as a part of their portfolio investments and development activities. The European Commission is managing development through the EU budget and the European Development Fund (EDF). Topic of innovations and European Green Investment Deal are currently on the table. In 2017 the EU set up the European Fund for Sustainable Development (EFSD), a fund to scale up private sector involvement with economic and social development in Africa and in the countries bordering the EU. This ideas and program targets were also used in the making of the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+), that has been proposed for the new budgetary period 2021–27. Recent days have exposed fragility of international financial system, stock markets in Europe and the US are braced for their biggest falls since the 2008 financial crisis. This will be most probably the first big challenge after we will overcome the pandemic. The new emergency initiatives also show us the way this Commission will deal with the crises. Startups and SMEs with technologies and innovations that could help in treating, testing, monitoring or other aspects of the Coronavirus outbreak were called to apply for the next round of funding from the European Innovation Council and therefore to contribute to the fight against pandemic. There is still a big question what will be the response of the EU to the financial crisis that will come after the virus.

One of the biggest player will definitely be the ECB (European Central Bank), that already promised to launch a new temporary €750 billion Pandemic Emergency Purchase bond Programme, this for many surprising decision came after a long governing council talk in late March. Through this move, the ECB will try to buy government and corporate debt until the end of 2020, mostly to increase the money supply and encourage lending and investment in the Eurozone. About Eurobonds, we could hear already previously during the euro zone debt crisis that followed the global economic crash of 2008, but these were defeated by opposition from northern countries, including Germany and the Netherlands. The situation of Today is very much different from the previous one, but even though the former Eurobonds were rebranded as “corona bonds” they are discussed in the same situation of divisions between North and South, and between East and West.

Task 2: Common Defense, fear from the Libyan scenario and the new enlargement methodology

The Libyan scenario has shown us the long time needed coherent Europe-wide strategy in our neighboring regions. It took Russia and Turkey just a month to take the lead and outplay Europe from the “Big Game” in Libya. It was mostly unpreparedness and lack of a long-term strategy in this region that brought us to the point, where main negations are taking place in Moscow instead of Berlin. We can continue with the question of enlargement, the real challenge of geopolitics and integration capacity for the EU. The block of Albania and North Macedonia membership talks in October by a group of states lead by France demonstrated the limit of the foreign policy talks at EU level. This rupture came despite a recommendation from the European Commission and the European Parliament and having the official “candidate” status in their EU membership bids. That move brought a number of concerns, including the risk of destabilisation of the Western Balkans.

The EU enlargement process can bring lots of new policy and economic diversity and itself be challenging, but at same time also fulfilling the geopolitical role. In February, European Enlargement Commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, announced a revised methodology. The new approach might improve, fasten and make the negotiation talks more clear. He proposed that to speed up the process the related issues will be negotiated together in clusters. The Commission’s new proposals also specifically mentioning the area of Western Balkan countries and promising them some of the benefits of EU membership even before accession. There is an idea to open the accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia even before the EU-Western Balkans summit, that might be held in May 2020 in Zagreb, Croatia. Commissioner Várhelyi commented the situation on late March: “Opening of accession talks sends a loud and clear message not only to the two countries, but to the Western Balkans as a whole. It reaffirms and delivers on the EU’s commitment to the European perspective of the region: its present is with the EU and its future is in the EU. The Commission will move quickly and propose soon the draft negotiating frameworks with the two countries integrating the elements of the revised methodology. Today’s decision confirms the geostrategic importance of the Western Balkans and demonstrates that Europe is willing and able to take geopolitical decisions even in these trying times of corona virus pandemic.”

Not only the envisaged direction of foreign policy, but also the European defence strategy differ between member states. After the questioning of the current role of NATO by Emmanuel Macron in the famous “NATO brain death” article by The Economist we saw an immediate critical reaction from Germany, Bulgaria and some other member states. The common ground anyway is the current problems in Alliance itself, whenever we talk about Turkey’s Middle Eastern engagement or the role of an army spending and the role of the USA as a part and grant of the alliance. One may observe two groups of states within the organization: first is in favor of the European defence autonomy, second that might be called US strategic partners. It seems almost impossible to overcome such major differences and come to one widely shared narrative. There is definitely a shared idea to continue with the process of deepening defence cooperation between those EU Member States, mostly through the projects like PESCO. Most capability development projects will equally be for the benefit of the Alliance, as most of its participating member states are also NATO countries and have only one set of forces. The new Director of The European Defence Agency (EDA) Jiří Šedivý with his Alliance experiences will probably be in favour of some kind of EU-NATO platform, but this decisions are still mostly in charge of the EU member states, that would have to find a political will to transfer it to the hands of the commission.

Crisis regime or the reform of the EU

If we understand “geopolitics” as the study of national foreign policies in light of the global distribution of military, economic resources and the respective power dynamics between nations, we also see the tasks and challenges for the new EU Commission. In some of these points the EU institutions already have some powers, but these are really limited and by the member states we currently see no common ground and shared strategy to change it. The whole European continent is in front of a big dilemma. Is the current crisis just one of many, or will we use its impact for a new fresh start? Did this lection teach us to value the EU and its institutions enough to allow it to be truly geopolitical? After all it will be our national politicians that will choose the path and its future.

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