ABSTRACT
European foreign policy is in the doldrums. The European Union (EU)’s influence in world affairs appears to be increasingly attenuated. Its success in achieving foreign and security policy objectives and ensuring that external actions contribute to domestic challenges has diminished. The financial crisis has left Europe introspective and defensive. The EU’s aims in the field of trade liberalization have been frustrated. The EU has blunted its own ability to transform other states through further enlargement. Europe has stood impotent as new conflicts have erupted in Africa and the southern Caucasus, and as long-running ones in the Middle East and Southeast Asia have deepened. It has failed to lever progress towards the Millennium Development Goals or to defeat a widespread authoritarian backlash against support for democracy and human rights. And increasing energy dependence has occasioned serious differences between EU member states. As emerging powers rise inexorably, Europe has been mired in the navel-gazing of its own internal institutional modifications, with the importance of the new Lisbon Treaty exaggerated. This book argues that a common thread weaves its way through all these
sobering trends: the EU has become increasingly ambivalent in the pursuit of liberal internationalism. This is both cause and effect of the policy challenges facing Europe’s role in the world. In recent years, debates on EU foreign policy have been dominated by
sharply opposing arguments. A benign take extols the virtues of a European liberal concept of power. This line of thinking holds the EU to represent a new form of power based on normative suasion, and predicts that Europe’s star will be ascendant in the twenty-first century. The opposing arguments are anti-liberal. Realists see the EU’s commitment to cosmopolitan liberalism and soft power as a sign of weakness rather than strength. Critical schools of thought insist that the EU’s liberal internationalism is a mere cloak for self-interested power maximization. This book argues that each of these perspectives misses the most notable
trend in European foreign policy. They misreadwhat the EU actually does in its external policies and the way it wields influence. The EU is increasingly failing to deploy its potential comparative strengths. Its foreign policies are increasingly
less liberal across a range of areas. Realists are wrong to think that adherence to a liberal world order is a sign of weakness. Neither is the liberal commitment mere garbed up power politics. For all their apparent diametric opposition, anti-liberals and the ‘EU as superpower’ proponents offer the same diagnosis of the European condition as one of embedded liberal internationalism. The difference is that, whereas the former frown concernedly, the latter are comforted by this condition. But each argument mistakes EU rhetoric for reality and fails to see that, in practice, the EU is not following through in its support for liberal international values. This book judges the EU on its own terms as a liberal power. It examines the
policy record, rather than simply asserting that the EU’s liberal commitments in themselves denote either a superior or an inferior foreign policy approach to that of the United States. The book argues that, in a range of policy areas – trade, multilateral diplomacy, security, development cooperation, democracy and human rights, and energy security – the EU appears to be in retreat from liberal internationalism. And it suggests that this European retreat is a self-emasculating mistake. In
this sense, the book is self-consciously an outlier. It will incur the opprobrium of what are now the mainstream strands of thinking about European foreign policy. This book does not seek to offer a highly nuanced, ‘glass-half-full-half-empty’ type of account. That would be to recount a story already told many times. Neither is it a commentary on ‘the EU versus the US’. Such accounts struggle to avoid clichés on both sides; moreover, this is a focus that misses so much of what now counts in international relations. Rather, the book expounds a single thesis: that the EU has over-reacted to concerns and criticisms made against liberal internationalism. In Europe’s pursuit of cosmopolitan liberalism, diffidence and expediency increasingly subjugate conviction. To its sea of troubles, Europe increasingly applies temporary balm, eschewing the profundity of longer term vision. The evidence offered demonstrates that Europe needs to recalibrate its foreign policies if it is to defend the kind of liberal world order necessary for its own and other countries’ long-term interests. The world does not need intemperate idealism. But Europe increasingly errs in holding a foreign policy of cool-headed wisdom to be synonymous with a patched-up placidity of the present.
