EU Is Becoming Too Obsessed With Defense

Defense players and experts get a far readier hearing in Brussels than anyone working on more liberal agendas involving human rights, development or peacebuilding. Funds flow aplenty into new programs on defense and away from these old liberal concerns, many of which policymakers and analysts now belittle as passé.

As they ramp up their defense spending, most member states are cutting their development aid. The incoming commissioners' mission statements are all about security and protecting European democracy from external threats. There is no mention of the work they would do to support global human rights.

If it previously tended to under-securitise its major challenges, the EU now risks over-securitising them. Well beyond the defense sphere, nearly all areas of EU policy are now infused with a more securitized ethos.

The new hard-power orthodoxy risks crowding out any critical questioning of the EU's new enthusiasm for concepts – power politics and zero-sum geopolitical rivalry – that were until recently anathema to its very essence.

This deflects from the broader and more significant question of how the EU needs to mobilize different kinds of power to shape international trends. Contrary to what now predominates as received wisdom, governments' increased defense budgets and EU efforts to coordinate defense investments do not in themselves provide such leverage.

Indeed, with its priority on military defense, the EU has in recent years shown less evidence of qualitatively updating and sharpening its understanding of international leverage. While European leaders ritually claim that the union has“learned the language of power”, the current policy trajectory has diverted the EU away from being more influentially geostrategic.

Outgoing high representative Josep Borrell has himself lamented that the EU risks being better at reacting to its last crisis than pre-empting wider and future trends.

The shift in the EU strategic narrative rests on an unduly one-dimensional reading of global trends. Contrary to what is now a commonly accepted premise, not every international development points towards state-to-state, zero-sum, order-menacing illiberalism.

Much of it does, but the evolving order is also one of intensified societal mobilisation against autocracy and state power. It sees sub-state networks working across borders and citizens seeking problem-oriented cooperation on the ailing global commons.

Articles, political speeches, and European policy documents routinely urge the EU to step back and accept that liberal political values are now contested. But global surveys show strong and even rising levels of citizen support for democracy and underlying social trends away from authoritarian values .

Once a self-styled power of liberal betterment, the EU increasingly seems reduced to a strategy of stemming ordinary peoples' desire for change. It rarely meets citizens' pleas for support in their efforts to spur political and social reform. It has become an ambiguous bystander more than proactive promulgator.

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By downplaying these complexities, the EU fixation on traditional geopolitical power looks increasingly at odds with the emerging order rather than skilfully aligned with it. The EU's now commonly repeated leitmotif of“accepting the world as it is” actually does no such thing.

It actually collides with the underlying ways in which that world is shifting socially and politically. It's one thing for the EU to get real about defending itself but another to become a regressive power that passively moulds itself to the power politics of illiberalism.

Far from going alone, Europe instead needs to fashion more effective interdependencies and coalitions.

As its new leaders take office, the EU needs to move beyond the now omnipresent, yet ill-defined geopolitical narrative. It needs a more precise and forward-looking vision of what it wants power, sovereignty and autonomy for.

If, for many years, the EU dangerously neglected the need for hard, defensive power it now risks moving to other extreme – giving hard power such pride of place that it detracts from the more consequential trends that will redefine the world order.

Richard Youngs is professor of international and European politics, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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