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A Geostrategic Project

A European Community of Values

Europe is, of course, a continent, but the EU has long been an open political project with no geographical predestination. European unification after the Second World War evolved not as a matter of geographical ‘manifest destiny’, as happened in nineteenth-century America, but rather as a matter of cultural-communitarian ‘manifest history’, sporadically with some gentle coercion from a USA that was fearful of nationalism and eager for stability in Europe.

The Europe of patriarch Jean Monnet was a kind of post-war Western European fraternity that grew up around hereditary enemies France and Germany, before being rather inevitably joined by a democratizing Southern Europe. The accession of the United Kingdom was special, precisely because of the special position of the British Isles in the history of Western Europe, but it was also logical and for the same reason. Indeed, Brexit is the flip side of this history. Not coincidentally, European integration in this phase happened under the official rubric of a European ‘Community’ – expressing ties of history that form a common bond and underlie the unification of common national interests – though of course it was also a community that, from an American perspective, responded to a harsh cold-war logic of regional blocs and anti-communism, particularly in the case of the United Kingdom.

After the fall of Communism, the same European-communitarian logic applied to the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 to include the former Eastern Bloc and the Soviet countries and states of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Behold culturally and historically European countries that had simply ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, combined with a West and an East Germany that were destined for reunification. This did bring some initial immigration concerns of a mainly economic nature, and it did fall quite a bit short in the subsequent cultural praxis of democracy and rule of law – think of the vicissitudes with populism and ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary and Poland or with corruption in Romania – but it never encountered any real geostrategic objections. Of course, the ‘Europeanization’ of former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries was the result of the geopolitical landslide caused by the implosion of the Soviet Union. But their entry into the EU was much less a matter of geopolitics than their entry into NATO.

Before the end of the Cold War, EU enlargement – in terms of both its membership and its geography – was primarily an internal European mission. This remained the case at the end of the Cold War, when a sense of European mission and destiny trumped any geostrategic considerations. The EU was to the European continent what globalization was to the whole world: an ever bigger and more inclusive home for a growing community of nation-states with a core of common values and a common market. The EU saw itself as a ‘union among the peoples of Europe’, united by common values of freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, pluralism and non-discrimination.1

Tellingly, to this day the official criteria for joining the EU focus on stable democratic institutions and a functioning market economy, ignoring any formal limitations of geography or cultural identity.2 These so-called Copenhagen criteria date from the 1990s. At that time, both Europe and the wider Western world cherished the belief that economic and political freedom would spontaneously converge and unite humanity, as we shall see. The EU could therefore continue its march eastward, blissfully unconcerned about its internal cohesion or the effects of its enlargement on the rest of the Eurasian continent. The EU was an open space, not a geographical place.3

That position has been totally reversed. The pendulum has swung from world order to world disorder, triggered by the global power conflict between the USA and China, and recuperated and exacerbated on our continent by an atavistic, revisionist, jingoistic and militaristic Russia.4

The second existential question – relating to how Europe wants to deal with the (more dangerous) world – is forcing the contemporary EU to consciously position itself geostrategically. While EU enlargement started off as an external dynamic aimed at broadening European community building, now it is the opposite: enlargement is an internal European question about the EU’s strategic-geographical position in the world.

In other words, the very existence of the EU and its composition are matters of institutionalized geopolitical strategy in a changing world order. Either we define that strategy ourselves or it is projected onto us by the outside world. This means that the EU must very consciously address these questions: where are my borders, where is my sphere of influence? By asking these questions, we think about Europe’s position on the vast Eurasian continent in terms that are analogous to how Putin and his Russia think about it: as a projection of our international strategic position, rather than as a common expression of values and identity. We do not have to fall into an existential geographical obsession like Russia; we do not necessarily need to construct our spatial footprint as an offensive threat to the outside world; but we do need to embrace and answer the question of our geostrategic position.

The case of Turkey is a telling example of open European unification without a European strategic-geographical identity. Turkey’s pathway to EU membership started under a Cold War logic in the early 1960s, complementing its earlier NATO membership. It agreed a customs union with the EU in 1995, which was reconfirmed under the aforementioned Copenhagen criteria in the early twenty-first century.5 Meanwhile, however, European geographical history is back and Turkey as a member state seems a mistake or a utopia, at least for now. At the same time, Moldova, Albania, Serbia and Ukraine, among others, have also become candidate countries for EU membership, reflecting an EU expansion that is now primarily geostrategic, not Euro-communitarian. Whipped up by Russian aggression and in the context of the new world order, the EU is becoming less a values-driven European club and more a geopolitical coalition on the western part of Eurasia. The eastern ring of (potential) EU member states with mostly Slavic and/or Orthodox cultural-historical roots – think Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, northern Macedonia, Serbia and later Ukraine – testifies to an EU that is no longer primarily a community of historically European nations. Moreover, since Brexit, the EU’s western external border has become less Atlantic and its centre of gravity has clearly shifted eastwards towards Central and Eastern Europe.

A Geostrategic Coalition

Enlarging the EU is a slow bureaucratic process with its fair share of transitory bumps and subsequent bruises, as evidenced by the struggles with recent acquisitions such as, say, Hungary and Poland. On average, the accession process for a new member state takes more than nine years from the time of formal application, which is often preceded by years of diplomatic, institutional and legislative preparation.6 If we in Europe want to establish our own geographical sphere of influence, and not simply undergo, defensively or reactively, what the outside world unleashes on us, the EU will have to show creativity in turning its geostrategic moment into real momentum. Thus, EU enlargement must not remain a merely passive process, with eager and suitable candidates spontaneously falling into the European fold; it must also become a strategic process that proactively pushes and pulls wavering countries into the European orbit on the basis of conscious European strategic geographical positioning.

Devising a layered or tiered membership that separates economic integration from political integration has long been under consideration as a conduit for expansive European unification overall. The EU has long been experimenting with various and flexible degrees of integration. For instance, currently the eurozone is limited to twenty of the twenty-seven EU member states. Further, through association treaties, the Euro–Mediterranean Partnership and the Eastern Partnership, the EU has developed relationships of preferential cooperation and selective integration with more than twenty of its neighbouring non-member countries. The opt-out clause technique – (in)famously obtained and favoured by the United Kingdom pre-Brexit – can allow EU member states to be on the sidelines of EU initiatives they do not support. The European Economic Area extends the European single market to third countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. And so on.

The strategic consideration in any geographical expansion of the EU has invariably been: is it broadening or deepening first? Should the EU grow in geographical scope and number of member states first, or deepen the integration of EU powers and policies first? We can obviously do both at the same time, if we work in layers: a deepened proto-federal core EU – a coalition of the daring and the willing that should evidently include at least a hard core of historical member states and a cluster of the larger countries – and an expanded looser layer around it.7 Moreover, widening is the new deepening: deepening towards a geostrategic EU works...