I had to laugh when I read last week that Teresa Ribera, one of the many vice-presidents of the European Commission, had been complaining about American “blackmail” of the EU. Apparently, this was because the Americans suggested they could do something about tariffs on steel and aluminium if the EU would look again at its Digital Markets Act.
Blackmail? Ribera represents the organisation that told the UK this year it couldn’t do anything about a foreign policy and defence partnership unless Britain conceded EU access to its fishing grounds for another twelve years.
She represents the organisation that, despite that British concession, has just told Britain it can’t join the SAFE defence procurement arrangement anyway unless it is prepared to pay an inflated fee, a demand so obviously one-sided that even our forelock-tugging Labour government walked away rather than sign up.
She represents the organisation that told us, in 2020, that unless we conceded what they wanted in the trade talks then “we would not be able to move one kilo of butter to Northern Ireland”.
And she represents the organisation that bullied Switzerland into a new, one-sided trade deal by boycotting its stock markets.
Yes, the EU knows blackmail when it sees it. It’s a world expert in the subject.
In reality, the EU’s problem seems not to be the fact of blackmail, but its inability to use it effectively. It can’t get the Americans to see them as equals when it comes to trade, still less to security and defence. And all the ever-increasing sanctions on Russia do not seem to have made any difference to Russian ability to pursue their evil war in Ukraine. So hardly a day goes by without European spokespeople and their commentariat outriders bemoaning Europe’s inability to “stand up for its interests”. Only yesterday, Steven Everts, the head of the EU’s in-house security think tank, grumbles about the EU’s “psychology of weakness”. “Europe is losing confidence, sinking into fatalism”, he writes. Only “joint political authority and financial resources” will enable it to protect its interests.
Well maybe. People like this speak as if the EU had an obvious set of interests and it is only the refusal of its national leaders to face reality, their indulgence in some form of false consciousness, that means it doesn’t stand up for itself.
The truth is of course different. The world’s major powers can see that the EU is relatively weak because it is not a single country, but a messy group with different interests when it matters. Eurocrats hate acknowledging this, but it is still true. It is blindingly obvious that the EU does not have a single national interest in the way that a proper country does. Not every country wants to retaliate against the Americans on trade in the way that Ribera or the French do. They don’t define their interests as she does, and they don’t see those interests as best protected by getting into a trade war with the world’s most advanced economy.
Similarly, there are obvious differences in perceptions of the Ukraine war. For one thing, geography matters, and observers can see perfectly well Spain is not quite as concerned about the wider implications of that war as Estonia or Poland. National finances and reputation matter: Hence Belgium’s refusal, so far, to go along with the seizure of Russia’s frozen assets, and others’ worry about the risk that such action will simply undermine Europe’s wider reputation as a safe home for foreign assets more broadly. And that’s without even mentioning Hungary or the other central Europeans that have similar, if less forcefully expressed, concerns.
And there are differences on broader political and social issues. Not every EU member state is in reality as attached to the EU’s emerging digital regulation and speech control regime as is Commissioner Ribera. Some wouldn’t be averse, perhaps, to a bit of EU pressure. Not every country is as concerned by the trade “threat” from China as those with big EV manufacturing interests. And not every member state was entirely happy with the Dutch tactics in taking control of their Nexperia plant, a reality which meant the EU’s actions were more focused on crisis management and de-escalation than on robust defence of their domestic supply chains.
When I make points like this in seminars and conferences, EU representatives say to me, “You don’t understand. The EU is a complex and sophisticated web of resolving internal differences, in which member states are constantly bargaining and balancing their interests. Only throwback defenders of the nation state don’t understand this.”
Well I understand it perfectly well. And it’s why the EU is relatively weak. EU “national interests” are defined, not strategically by the EU’s so-called foreign ministry, and especially not under its current leadership, but bottom-up by this constant bargaining. This process inevitably means Europeans are more focused on their internal processes and inclined to discount external realities. And it is why the EU’s formal representatives are so obsessed by finding institutional routes around this process – stronger institutions, more QMV (qualified majority voting) rather than encouraging substantively different outcomes.
One such substantively different outcome would be for Europeans – including Britain, of course – to spend more, and more effectively, on defence. Given the budgetary starting point of most European states, that involves finding the resources by cutting welfare, cutting deficits and debt, and reallocating some of the savings to defence. That is something European states can do on their own. They don’t need clever borrowing and procurement schemes to achieve it. But some lack the interest and some lack the will. You can’t solve that problem by institutional tinkering.
As I’ve written before, the EU faces the choice between genuinely building a federal state, a choice that looks politically impossible for now, and rightly so in my view, for all the reasons I have given, and letting member states have more freedom to get on with things their way. Trying to have it both ways just means the EU is less than the sum of its parts. Moaning about blackmail and bullying, complaining that others don’t take you seriously or that you are excluded from important international business, is merely displacement activity from that fundamental problem. Indeed moaning is in itself a sign of weakness. Serious players don’t moan. They don’t get bogged down in process. They act. But the world’s major powers can see that the EU can’t act – and treat it accordingly.
The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union
The British establishment says Brexit is failing but they only offer zombie statistics