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A Small Power?Hanns MaullPublished online: 30 Mar 2011.

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The European Union as a Small Power: After the Post-Cold War Asle Toje. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. £57.50/$85.00. 264 pp.

The Foreign Policy of the European Union: Assessing Europe’s Role in the WorldFederiga Bindi, ed. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010. £21.99/$29.95. 367 pp.

The Europeanization of National Foreign Policy: Continuity and Change in European Crisis ManagementEva Gross. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. £50.00/ $85.00. 216 pp.

In 1991, against the historic backdrop of the end of the Cold War and the unification of a divided Germany and Europe, the Maastricht Treaty was to transform the former European Community into the European Union, with a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as one of its three pillars. Europe’s new ambition was to become a global player, and objectives were certainly set high: to safeguard the values, fundamental interests, security, independence and integrity of the Union; to consolidate and support democ-racy, the rule of law, human rights and the principles of international law; to preserve peace, prevent conflicts and strengthen international security; to foster the sustainable economic, social and environmental development

Review Essay

A Small Power?Hanns Maull

Hanns W. Maull is a Senior Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, on leave as Professor of Foreign Policy and International Relations at the University of Trier, Germany. He is a Contributing Editor to Survival.

Survival | vol. 53 no. 2 | April–May 2011 | pp. 177–187 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2011.571020

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of developing countries, with the primary aim of eradicating poverty; to encourage the integration of all countries into the world economy, includ-ing through the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade; to help develop international measures to preserve and improve the quality of the environment and the sustainable management of global natural resources, in order to ensure sustainable development; to assist popula-tions, countries and regions confronting natural or man-made disasters; and to promote an international system based on stronger multilateral coopera-tion and good global governance. This (slightly abbreviated!) compendium of worthy aims is listed in Title V, Chapter 1, Article 21.2 of the post-Lisbon version of the Treaty of the European Union. These are not, it must be said, particularly modest goals.

Three new books, each very different in character, offer assessments of the state of these ambitions, and their conclusions are sobering. For Asle Toje, a Norwegian scholar affiliated with the Nobel Institute, the EU simply comports itself as a ‘small power’. Similarly, in their concluding chapter, Federiga Bindi and her co-author Jeremy Shapiro note some successes but also observe that ‘the EU’s actual capacity to deliver has led to disappoint-ment and frustration’ (p. 348). And Eva Gross, concerned with the willingness of key national capitals to provide common solutions to crisis-management challenges, finds some, but not all that much, ‘Europeanization’ of national foreign policies.

The volume edited by Bindi aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the EU’s external relations, including not only the CFSP and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), but also a range of other EU poli-cies with important international dimensions, such as competition policy or justice and home affairs (which deal with issues such as migration and security from terrorist attacks). There are also seven chapters on Europe’s relations with its neighbours, as many on relations with other countries (ranging from an analysis of US–EU relations by Andrew Moravcsik to a chapter by Mara Caira on European relations with China), and no less than four chapters on how the EU promotes its ‘values and models’ abroad. Thus, it is the only book of the three which does justice to the EU’s variegated and multi-dimensional involvement in international relations.

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The other two books focus on the ESDP, that is, on Europe’s role as a mil-itary power in international relations. That focus is, as I will argue below, too narrow and somewhat misleading, yet understandable: in many ways, the ESDP (or Common Security and Defence Policy, as it is now officially known under the Lisbon Treaty) has been the most visible part of European external relations. Since its inception in 1999, it has developed, as Javier Solana, the first high representative of the CFSP, famously put it, ‘at light-ning speed’, both institutionally and in terms of its activities.1 The ESDP today boasts a whole panoply of institutions and has undertaken more than 20 military or civilian missions. It has also drawn considerable scholarly attention,2 and the EU’s own Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) have both conducted comprehensive evaluations of the ESDP and its missions during its first ten years.3

Who you calling small?Toje’s book, which is based on exhaustive interviews with decision-makers in Brussels and national capi-tals and an impressive mastery of the literature, is a closely argued, ruthless vivisection of Europe’s shortcomings as a military actor. Toje’s aim in being provocative, one assumes, is to help prod the EU into finally ‘getting its act together’, a wish apparently shared by all of the author’s interlocutors in Brussels. Toje himself has a sharp eye for the shortcomings of the ESDP. In his discussion of ESDP decision-making he notes ‘a sense of two-mindedness’: while member states broadly favour a common European role in world politics, they have proven ‘surprisingly timid’ in agreeing on common policies (p. 178). (Actually, this judgement might even be considered generous, as the analysis of the foreign-policy innovations of the Lisbon Treaty by Nicola Verola in the Bindi volume shows: the treaty’s language revisions ooze with the determination of member governments to make sure that their national foreign and security prerogatives remain sacrosanct.) Clearly, member states do not want to see the CFSP as an alternative to national policies as long as they can possibly

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help it (or, more precisely, as long as they think they do not need Europe to solve their – domestic – problems). This produces what Toje calls, with a nod to Christopher Hill’s well-known ‘capabilities–expectations gap’, a ‘consensus–expectations gap’: expectations about Europe’s role in the world have been pumped up by the EU’s ambitious rhetoric (‘the European Union is a global actor, ready to share in the responsibility for global security’4), while actual foreign-policy output has often been disappointingly modest. Toje seems to suspect this may actually be two sides of the same coin: the grandiose rhetoric about Europe as a ‘formidable force for good in the world’ (as the European Security Strategy proudly proclaims) in his view may be meant to substitute for, rather than preview, forceful action.

In his analysis of the ambitions, the institutionalisation and the perform-ance of the ESDP, Toje again and again finds that EU member states have failed to muster the collective will to define common interests and objectives, to coordinate their efforts, to agree on how to share costs, to mobilise popular support, and to strengthen the EU’s power as a global actor. Washington need not have worried: this ESDP never was a serious alternative to NATO, nor is it likely to be one in the future. Member states have also frequently showed a disturbing lack of solidarity. The result is, as Toje shows, a record of ESDP missions which, while rather successful in a technical sense, fall far short of the original ambitions. Others have arrived at similar conclu-sions: the EUISS, in its own assessment, demanded more political support from member states for formulating visions and taking decisions for a truly common and effective foreign and security policy, while the SWP’s evalu-ation bemoaned member states’ neglect of ‘fundamental preconditions for strategic action’ by refusing to set priorities, failing to plan in advance, and concentrating on specific aspects of crisis management. ‘The EU is not yet a strategic actor in its security and defence policy’, the study concluded.5

Still, Toje’s assessment of the European Union as a ‘small power’ seems puzzling. After all, the involvement of Europe in world affairs is certainly not ‘small’: its economy is actually slightly larger than that of the United States; it is far and away the world’s largest trading power; its combined military resources still dwarf those of China and Russia; and it has a presence in international organisations, from the UN Security Council on down, which

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exceeds that of the United States. Obviously, the EU as an international actor cannot be compared with nation-states, and much of the peculiarity of its behaviour and influence (such as it is) in world affairs is due to its unique status as, to quote Toje, ‘a multi-purpose, multidimensional, semi-supranational, semi-intergovernmental actor’, which has come into being because it is compatible with the other (national) ‘strategic identities’ of its member states (pp. 177ff.). But it clearly should be able to do more than a ‘small power’.

According to Toje, however, over the last decade the EU has scaled down its great-power ambitions and, due to the reluctance of member states to seriously empower the ESDP, has drifted into hedging in its relations with leading powers. For Toje, this is characteristic of small powers: such entities, he argues, are unable to defend themselves, and thus behave defensively and rely on hegemonic powers. But they are also opportunistic in times of systemic change, such as we are seeing now: ‘The EU seeks to contribute as little as possible to American geopolitics while clinging to the security guarantees of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. If power corrupts so, apparently, does a lack of it’ (p. 175).

Beyond the militaryIt does seem that, in security affairs and international crisis management, the EU behaves like a small power, mainly because member states do not want it to get in the way of their own great-power ambitions. Yet, while Europe’s presence and relevance in world affairs is clearly less than the sum of its parts, it is nevertheless real and substantial, if and when member states realise that they can do things together which they cannot achieve alone. This is the perspective explored by Gross in The Europeanization of National Foreign Policy, in which she attempts to find out ‘how much space individual member states are willing to afford “Europe”’ (p. xii). She does so by ana-lysing European military crisis management in Macedonia, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and by looking at

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national decision-making in Paris, London and Berlin. She concludes that in these cases at least, national governments have allowed Europe some space, but not very much. While it would be an ‘overstatement to speak of the Europeanization of foreign policy in Europe’ (p. 171), ‘processes of Europeanization ... clearly exist but are complex and multifaceted in their influence on national government’ (p. 169). In other words, the possible value added of a common European approach still enters foreign-policy thinking and decision-making in national capitals only at the margin.

Yet this sceptical assessment of Europe’s role in the world, which today seems to be conventional wisdom, misses important aspects of how, and how much, Europe matters in world politics. One obvious problem with the studies by Toje and Gross is their narrow focus on the military dimen-sion of EU external policies: both tend to equate Europe’s external policies with the CFSP, and then to reduce the CFSP to its military component, the ESDP. Toje also assumes that military power and great-power politics have regained their traditional importance, and will continue to dominate world politics in the future – a classical-realist assumption of dubious validity at a time when the US intelligence community identifies climate change as one of the biggest threats to American national security.6 From Toje’s per-spective, Europe’s limitations as a military power matter a great deal, but these may ultimately be rendered irrelevant if the future of international relations differs from his realist assumptions, as seems quite plausible to this reviewer.

Moreover, while the limitations of the ESDP, and the causes thereof, are eloquently and persuasively exposed by Toje, this is not the only game in Brussels. There have been important instances when the EU has in fact been able ‘to get its act together’. One concerns Iran’s nuclear activities. In that case, a joint initiative by Berlin, London and Paris launched on behalf of the EU in 2003 succeeded in drawing both Washington and Tehran into negotiations, which subsequently were broadened to include the other per-manent members of the UN Security Council. Although those negotiations were unable to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, the EU has quite effectively tightened its sanctions against Tehran, contributing not only to a united transatlantic stance in the aftermath of the Iraq divide but,

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because of this, to increased pressure on China and Russia to move away from their permissive stance on Iran’s flagrant violation of the nuclear non- proliferation regime.7 Thus, the EU’s policy on Iran, while not military in nature, is both highly relevant to international security and a European success story which does not fit the ‘small power’ indictment. Yet this story is missed, not just by Gross and Toje, but surprisingly also by the contribu-tors to Bindi’s volume. Non-proliferation has been one of the priorities of the CFSP since 2003, and would have warranted a separate chapter.8

Toje also neglects the EU’s involvement with the Mediterranean, another priority region for European external relations, while Gross confines herself to Europe’s participation in crisis management and peacekeeping in the wake of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2008. Yet the European Communities began their efforts to associate and transform the southern and eastern Mediterranean countries more than 50 years ago, and forging a common foreign policy on the Arab–Israeli conflict was one of the priorities from the very beginnings of European Political Cooperation (the precursor of the CFSP) in the early 1970s. In the case of Turkey, the influence of the EU has certainly been significant, whatever the eventual outcome of the long and tortuous membership negotiation process. Fortunately, this dimension of European external relations is covered exten-sively in the Bindi volume, which effectively devotes five chapters largely or exclusively to that region: there are chapters on the EU and Turkey, the EU and the Mediterranean countries, the Middle East, and the recently created ‘Union for the Mediterranean’, as well as one on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), the EU’s third policy pillar. (Some of the European Union’s per-ceived security concerns in the Mediterranean, such as threats from Islamist terrorism or migration pressures, are dealt with by JHA.) The overall assess-ment of European efforts in the Mediterranean by the contributors to this volume is rather critical, and recent political upheavals and regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt bear this out: the EU effectively sacrificed its ambitions to transform the Mediterranean into an area of peace, democracy, respect

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for human rights and prosperity on the altar of (illusory) political stability as a guarantor of European security interests.

All three books deal only cursorily with Europe’s efforts to pacify and develop the Balkans – arguably, another successful exercise of European power, though that particular task is as yet incomplete.9 Toje largely neglects the Balkans; Gross focuses exclusively on the military crisis-management aspects, and thus misses the larger picture. The Bindi volume does offer a good (but rather short) survey on the EU in the Balkans by Luca Gori, but again falls short of a comprehensive evaluation.

All three books have strengths, but also flaws. Toje’s is an insightful and thought-provoking analysis, but his realist mindset sometimes causes him to miss not just a few trees, but whole sections of the woods. Likewise, the Bindi volume, despite its comprehensive coverage, misses several important aspects of European external relations, including non-proliferation, trade, international finance and the euro; while its chapter on JHA is far too short. Several of the contributions are also seriously dated, reflecting the state of affairs in 2007, rather than in 2010. The book by Gross seems too rigidly aca-demic: the analytical value added of her hypotheses remains unclear, while her theoretical framework functions as a kind of Procrustean bed, unduly confining the scope of her analysis. Yet her book also constitutes a valuable, well-researched study on how the national governments of the ‘big three’ have approached European common action in crisis management.

European magnetismSo, what does all this mean for Europe’s influence in world politics? If much gets missed about Europe’s influence in world politics in these three books, this is because it is rather easy to miss that influence, for two reasons. The first is that European influence is brought to bear in widely different, and sometimes even rather opaque ways, and it is exercised – quite often not even deliberately – through many different channels. The second reason is indeed a lack of collective will among its member states, as all three books argue. Because the EU lacks strategy and purpose in world politics, it usually punches below its weight. But this does not mean it is a small power.

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There seem to be two major ways in which Europe can and does make its presence felt. The first results from purposeful individual national and collective action by the European Union, its member states and its common institutions. Here, Europe appears as an absent-minded great power, dis-tracted by petty domestic and national concerns, rather than as a small power. Contrary to a widely held view, which assumes that only institu-tionalised and formalised European action counts as ‘common’, there is also significant potential for effective collective action and even suprana-tional integration through inter-governmental activities. The euro crisis, which started in early 2010, is the most obvious example of this: members of the eurozone are working, primarily through negotiations between gov-ernments, towards a resolution which in all likelihood will include both enhanced financial solidarity and economic and fiscal policy convergence, and hence a considerable deepening of this dimension of European inte-gration. The ESDP is certainly not the only way in which the EU can exert influence if its member governments want and allow it to do so. True, they do so much too rarely, and usually only when the barn is already burning (as in the cases of the Balkans or Iran), but when they do, they can be effec-tive far beyond what small powers could achieve. The onus is on Berlin, London and Paris to lead Europe to surpass its present languor.

The second form of European influence is more diffuse and consequently harder to spot and control. It rests on what the EU is – the world’s largest eco-nomic space and one of its wealthiest and most attractive societies – rather than on what it does. European rules and norms have profound effects beyond the continent in many different and often very indirect ways. This kind of influence is more like a magnetic force than a form of deliberately deployable power. The strength of Europe’s attractive (or repulsive) force depends on how successfully it manages its own space, and on the appeal of its societies. The most powerful expression of this force is the prospect of membership for countries and the persistent efforts of migrants to get to Europe, often at the risk of their lives.

Because of what it is, the EU can also serve as a model to others, and indeed has been a source of inspiration for other organisations hoping to transform intra-regional relations, such as Mercosur in Latin America,

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1 See, for example, Susanne von Koelbl and Alexander Szandar, ‘Verdeckte Gegner’, Der Spiegel, 27 November 2000, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-17925489.html.

2 Examples include Jolyon Howorth, Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Janne Haaland Matlary, European Union Security Dynamics: In the New National Interest (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

3 See Giovanni Grevi, Damien Helly and Daniel Keohane (eds), European Security and Defence Policy: The First

Ten Years (1999–2009) (Paris: EUISS, 2009); Muriel Asseburg and Ronja Kempin (eds), Die EU als strat-egischer Akteur in der Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik? Eine systematische Bestandsaufnahme von ESVP-Missionen und Operationen (Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, December 2009); and the excellent earlier assess-ment by Bastian Giegerich in European Military Crisis Management: Connecting Ambition and Reality, Adelphi Paper 397 (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2008).

4 The EU routinely makes this point in its statements and press releases.

the African Union in Africa, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia. This aspect of European influence in the world is extensively, though perhaps somewhat optimistically, discussed in several chapters in the Bindi volume. Some of this discussion appears overly impressed by the EU’s own, high-minded political rhetoric, which has given rise to academic concepts such as ‘civilian power’,10 ‘normative power’11 or even the ‘quiet superpower’12 of Europe. Yet the EU’s record in actively exporting its own model of democracy, pros-perity, good governance and respect for human rights is, as noted, quite uneven, and in two important ways: firstly, in its relations with developing countries in particular, the EU has not always lived up to its own rhetoric; and secondly, efforts by the EU to promote its values through cooperation and association agreements, and through conditional development aid, have not had much success, either in the southern Mediterranean or in Africa.13 Thus, in the final analysis, the EU’s alleged ‘soft power’ as a model seems to be confined to the powerful attraction the EU holds for those countries and individuals who want to join it, or at least benefit from access to its formidable resources. The problem, of course, is that the EU seems increas-ingly unwilling to welcome new entrants, be they individual migrants or countries.

Notes

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See, for example, European Council, ‘Background’, 16 September 2010, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/116501.pdf.

5 Asseburg and Kempin, Die EU als strategischer Akteur, p. 174 (my translation).

6 See John M. Broder, ‘Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security’, New York Times, 8 August 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html; and The White House, ‘National Security Strategy’, May 2010, p. 47 (‘The danger from cli-mate change is real, urgent, and severe’) and passim, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf.

7 See Sebastian Harnisch, ‘Minilateral Cooperation and Transatlantic Coalition-Building: The E3/EU-3 Iran Initiative’, European Security, vol. 16, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–27.

8 Soon after it adopted its high-profile European Security Strategy, the EU also formally adopted a nuclear non-proliferation strategy document. See ‘EU Strategy Against Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction’, 12 December 2003, http://register.consil-ium.europa.eu/pdf/en/03/st15/st15708.en03.pdf.

9 For a comprehensive assessment of Europe’s involvement, see Elizabeth

Pond, Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006).

10 This concept was first formulated by François Duchêne in ‘The European Community and the Uncertainties of Interdependence’, in Max Kohnstamm and Wolfgang Hager (eds), A Nation Writ Large? Foreign Policy Problems Before the European Community (London: Macmillan 1973), pp. 1–21.

11 Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2002, pp. 235–58; Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe Reconsidered: Beyond the Crossroads’, in Helen Sjursen (ed.), Civilian or Military Power? European Foreign Policy in Perspective (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 14–31; Ian Manners, ‘The Normative Ethics of the European Union’, International Affairs, vol. 84, no. 1, 2008, pp. 45–60.

12 This term was coined by Andrew Moravcsik. See, for example, Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Europe: The Quiet Superpower’, French Politics, vol. 7, no. 3–4, 2009, pp. 403–22.

13 See Patrick Holden, In Search of Structural Power: EU Aid Policy as a Global Political Instrument (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

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