When the European Union’s foreign ministers assemble in Brussels, they symbolise the combined authority one of the world’s great centres of economic and political power.
That, at least, is the theory. The 27 ministers who gather every month inside the ugly, plate-glass edifice of the Justus Lipsius building represent 500 million people, and their countries jointly account for a third of the entire global economy.
Together, the EU member states have a gross national product of about £11 trillion – slightly larger than America’s economy and more than four times the size of China’s. This immense concentration of wealth allows the EU’s governments to spend almost £150 billion on their armed forces.
On the face of it, these numbers mean the EU should deploy the kind of economic, political and military might that ranks second only to the United States. Yet for all the pious aspirations of diplomatic communiqués and the vaulting rhetoric of some European leaders, the EU consistently fails to turn this theoretical clout into genuine power. Instead of bearing comparison with America, the EU almost always punches below its weight. Aside from foreign policy questions that are either uncontroversial or relatively minor, the member states do not mobilise their collective strength.
They are not held back by a lack of institutional ability. Successive treaties have given the EU an elaborate foreign policy-making machinery. The 27 foreign ministers meet as the “general affairs and external relations council”, decide a “common foreign and security policy” and allow a single “high representative”, in the person of Javier Solana, a former Nato secretary-general, to represent their collective will.
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