New Year in the EU: All or Nothing

The last four years have been a bitter reminder for the European Union that history is not over. The doctrine of development, which before the pandemic was supposed to secure the EU’s place in global competition alongside the US and China, has been replaced by thinking in terms of resilience and survival. Both the sluggish response to COVID-19 and friction in the approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine have exposed weaknesses in the EU’s cooperation mechanisms and decision-making processes, and highlighted divisions between member governments. While Vladimir Putin was recruiting hundreds of thousands of new conscripts by a single decree, the EU was bogged down in debates about sanction lists that lasted for weeks and sometimes months. It was also a harbinger of further institutional and administrative problems. Managing an organisation of 27 countries, and more than 30 in the future, on a legal basis shaped in completely different political and economic conditions, is an arduous task.

Discussions on this subject come at a time when new conflicts are erupting around the world, in which the EU is playing an increasingly marginal role. Following the withdrawal of French troops from Burkina Faso, Mali and finally Niger, the government in Paris lost its last influence in Africa. In the Israeli-Palestinian war, the EU has the status of a secondary player. The attempt to draw the Global South to the side of Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine failed. And China, from which the EU wants to become independent, despite resistance from some capitals, is looking at all this with calm.