14 March 2022

LSE: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine signals new beginnings and new conflicts for the European Union

The EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprecedented both in its speed and its scope. Floris de Witte writes that by acting decisively, EU leaders have set a new course for the integration process.

It is difficult to overstate how much the EU owes Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Their heroic defence and determination in the face of Russia’s invasion, and their commitment to values that have long been seen as central to the EU’s mission, have given the EU the motivation and courage to stand up.

They have both highlighted the necessity and increased the willingness of the EU to defend its own values and interests. The actions by the EU in the past weeks have been applauded by many as uncharacteristically swift, ambitious and effective. They also, however, foreshadow much more fundamental and long-term changes to the EU’s self-understanding and its institutional and political structures, and hint at the emergence of controversial choices to be made.

The EU is not new to crisis. The last 15 years has seen a succession of existential challenges for the EU that are well documented. The refrain from these crises is by now well-rehearsed: the EU is slow to react, its response characterised first by internal disagreement and only at the point of emergency by – more or less successful – creative legal and political solutions.

This is especially so in external affairs, where the EU is hamstrung by the requirement of unanimity and the wide variety of member state interests allowing internal and external actors to play member states off against each other. There’s even a Twitter handle @isEUconcerned that collects the standard response to crisis that the EU is good at delivering: a well-balanced statement indicating the level (very, deeply, strongly, seriously, gravely, extremely) of concern. However, the EU’s response in the first weekend after the Russian invasion, on 26-27 February, was different. In the words of @isEUconcerned: ‘For the first time in eight years I don’t have anything to tweet’.

During that weekend in February the EU recast itself: it shed its self-understanding and image as a reluctant global actor that focuses on diplomacy and normative power; and instead emerged as an actor that can swiftly and effectively protect its strategic short and long-term interests. This new geopolitical role for the EU, however, comes with a number of implications that will – indisputably and irreversibly – change the EU in the long term.

An unprecedented response

This transformation of the EU into a geopolitical actor, able to reflect and act on its strategic interests at home and abroad, did obviously not happen overnight. It has a longer trajectory, and will take decades to lead to its logical conclusion. But that weekend in February, and the weeks that followed it, have spectacularly accelerated the process.

Calls for the EU to become a stronger geopolitical actor, or to strengthen its ‘strategic autonomy’ or ‘sovereignty’ have been around for a few years. Luuk van Middelaar’s piece in 2021 for Groupe d’études géopolitiques, for example, highlights the deep transformation that a turn towards a geopolitical EU would require, aptly defining such a move as ‘painful yet liberating’.

French President Emmanuel Macron has for years highlighted the need to ensure the EU’s ability to act in the absence of support from its traditional partner across the Atlantic, a call reiterated whenever the EU finds itself dependent on external actors for access to vital products – be it high-tech goods, fossil fuels, vaccines or protective personal equipment. And the EU has started to act in this space, with initiatives ranging from a massive fund to kickstart microchip production, and a temporary export ban on vaccines, to a €300 billion investment in Africa through the Global Gateway programme.

It is in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, that we have seen a speed and ambition of EU action hitherto unknown. Within days, decades’ worth of taboos were overcome both within member states and in the context of the EU’s external action. The decisions are well-known: an expulsion from SWIFT for seven Russian banks, limits on the Russian Central Bank, sanctions on a number of oligarchs and politicians linked to Putin, the blocking of state-sponsored Russian media channels, a €450 million disbursement of the European Peace Facility to offer lethal weapons for Ukraine (on top of member state commitments in this space), a commitment to lower Russian gas dependency by 75% by the end of 2022, the invocation of the Temporary Protection Directive, and the outlines of a Ukraine recovery plan.

High-level discussions, likewise, hint at a new ambitious energy transition programme (called RePower EU), which is rumoured to include debt mutualisation to the tune of €200 billion that serves to ensure the EU’s strategic autonomy in military and energy matters. There is also talk of changes to the bloc’s debt rules and state aid norms to facilitate this transition towards the building of EU military capacity and the decrease of the EU’s dependence on external oil and gas.

New beginnings

What does this mean for the EU of today and in the longer term? Arguably, the EU’s response to the Russian invasion foreshadows some fundamental changes to its nature. A first change sees to the EU’s purpose. For a decade there has been lots of soul-searching about the ‘point’ of the EU. Whereas its mission of ‘peace and prosperity’ was certainty able to galvanise elite and citizen support in the first four decades of integration, it is no longer credible. War between member states or continent-wide poverty is unimaginable: surely partially thanks to the EU, but, ironically, no longer dependent on its existence.

What, then, is the ‘point’ of the EU? Why would member states and citizens bear with the (perceived and real) costs of integration in the decades to come? We now have a new answer to that fundamental question: the point of the EU is that it protects the strategic geopolitical interests of its member states and its citizens – whether within the context of climate change, or in its relationships with other global powers, including protection from military threats. It can be expected that the EU will make much of this in the coming years: the creation of a new raison d’être that fosters its legitimacy, shapes its internal structures, and allows its member states and citizens to rally around the blue flag with its yellow stars.

But such a new raison d’être also, inevitably, comes with institutional reforms. If the EU wants to be a strategically astute geopolitical actor, its internal machinations must be tweaked. Already we can see the first steps in this direction – a second way in which the geopolitical turn of the EU is changing it. Emmanuel Macron has successfully positioned himself as the strategic political brain of the European Union, both due to his role as an interlocutor with Putin and Zelenskyy, but mainly because his geopolitical vision of Europe has been fully vindicated by Putin’s actions. The fact that Russia’s invasion coincided with the French presidency of the Council, including a high-profile European Council in Versailles, only further enhanced Macron’s profile....

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