An interesting take from an FT pundit Alan Beattie
Ukraine, the new world order and the EU’s role
I’m writing this from Germany. There’s no better place to observe how a new European and international order is being changed in a crisis.
Before the invasion, the 1970s Ostpolitik line of engagement rather than confrontation with Russia had a powerful pull. I found a hugely entertaining interview in the New York Times in 1982 headlined “Helmut’s Pipeline”, in which the NYT’s resident conservative William Safire berated the then chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democratic party for making Germany dependent on Soviet Russian gas. You can still argue engagement with Moscow was the right idea during the cold war, but it was horrendously ill-suited to Putin’s aggressive Russian nationalism, indeed imperialism. Now Olaf Scholz, an SPD chancellor only a couple of months into office, has overturned decades of German certainties.
The EU is changing at lightning speed, its member states arming Ukraine and themselves. It’s particularly impressive given that the EU’s initial response to a new challenge (the eurozone sovereign debt meltdown and the migration crisis) tends to be slow, halting and often wrong-headed.
What else is changing in the international order? Suddenly, as a club of rich democracies, the G7 has a role again in coordinating sanctions efforts. China, whose presence was deemed necessary for any serious conversation about global governance, is in a rather uncomfortable position in lining up with Russia.
Seizing the moment, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is applying for membership. A few member states (including, predictably, Poland) immediately weighed in on its behalf.
Before this weekend I’d have regarded Ukraine joining the EU to be somewhat missing the point apart from as a symbolic move to commit Kyiv to looking westwards. As I argued a few weeks ago (it seems like about a decade now), it was the EU assuming that trade on its own could do the job of foreign policy and signing a politicised “deep and comprehensive free trade agreement” (DCFTA) in 2014 that was the trigger for Putin’s seizing of Crimea.
There are still significant issues with meeting a bunch of criteria, even assuming Ukraine will emerge as a free and independent country after the war. The DCFTA hasn’t ended economic dysfunction, and the EU really doesn’t need another corrupt and authoritarian country on its eastern flank.
But you can now imagine the EU playing at least a supporting if not a primary security role alongside Nato, coordinating elements of national armed forces even without running its own. The EU does in theory have its own mutual protection clause, but not all member states have signed up and there’s no mechanism to put it into action. If the EU wants to become a fully-fledged security power to match its powers in trade, it’s got a long way to travel yet. Mind you, the rate it’s going it’ll be there by Thursday morning.