Africa is churning and Asia is rising. Where does Europe stand in the current geopolitical landscape?
fighter jets took off from an air base in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, on February 3rd and flew north over the savannah and the scrubby Sahel towards the Sahara Desert. There the French planes bombed a column of some 50 lorries carrying rebels south from the Libyan border. Paris’s action was co-ordinated not with the rest of the, but with Chad’s brutal government and Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan warlord who controls swathes of his country.
established a mechanism for a “Common Foreign and Security Policy”. In 2011 it created the “European External Action Service”, a form of diplomatic corps, and a “high representative” to lead it . In the decade since then it has brokered a deal curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and taken on pirates near the Horn of Africa. In February it held its first summit with the Arab League and on April 9th it deployed newly tough language in a summit with China.
has been “irrelevant” in the Syrian conflict, despairs one European diplomat. Germany is still promoting NordStream2, a gas pipeline that will increase Russia’s power over countries like Poland; Spain frustrates efforts to guide Balkan states towardsmembership; it does however back Turkish membership, whereas Austria viscerally opposes that and others have doubts.
The common foreign and security policy still works on unanimity. It can take positions only where the’s 28 member states agree. One sensible proposal is to adopt “qualified majority voting” on foreign policy, allowing theto act against the will of minority stick-in-the-muds. But that can only achieve so much. On matters where it already applies, like the single market, member states tend to find fudges preserving unanimity. Where they do not, decisions can prove divisive.
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