More on European Foreign Policy – and Physics (or maybe Maths).
Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B.
By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of B.
The formula for calculating the surface area of a sphere is:
Whereas the formula for calculating the volume of a sphere is:
This, as Archimedes worked out while playing with a rubber ball in the bath, means that for every doubling of the radius the surface area goes up by four times, but the volume goes up by eight times.
So as the EU has enlarged over the years, the surface area of its foreign policy has increased significantly (lots of offices all round the globe), but the volume of its foreign policy (as measured in hot air output of declarations and working groups) has increased even more!
How does the Lisbon Treaty affect the equation(s)?
Three articles are worth reading, since they each suggest that whereas the surface area and volume of EU foreign policy indeed have increased even more under Lisbon, the velocity has declined.
And, worse, the ball is leaking air.
First, RFE/RL on Lisbon’s Dark Side:
Only higher, shared ends and values can check the national instinct of self-interest. With the decline of the role of the European Commission heralded by the way the Lisbon Treaty is being put into practice, it is inevitable that the EU’s encouragement of political and economic reforms beyond its borders will gradually become less a political imperative and more a project carried forward by bureaucratic inertia provided by existing mechanisms of cooperation.
Then two from European Voice, on faltering collective EU policy towards Cuba and Uzbekistan. In each case some member states are pushing their vision of what should happen at the expense of an EU common position. Yet the ‘common positions’ themselves in practice were so feeble as to be meaningless if not embarrassing. So is much in fact being lost?
What are we mere voters and taxpayers to make of all this?
The idea of a powerful group of reasonable, successful countries coming together to pursue joint interests and positions is attractive. Note that those countries need not all be European – indeed, presentational and operational gain if they are not?
But if it turns out that those joint positions and interests amount to next to nothing in practice, is the effort and money devoted to all that work simply going down the drain?
So risks but also opportunities for the next UK government, one fervently hopes a Conservative one.
By collapsing a number of obviously obtuse or banal ‘EU common positions’ it can clear the way to identifying where European states in fact can add value by cooperating in a hard-nosed way to get real results. Those who want to do something and are prepared to commit real resources can join, the rest can sit and watch.
And if governments like the one in Spain want to suck up to decrepit doomed Communist regimes in Latin America, countries who want to promote democracy there can get on with it free from fretting over lowest common denominator EU junk diplomacy.
Which is fine for issues such as Cuba/Uzbekistan which are interesting but not existentially important for Europe and the West.
Dealing with Russia and China is a different matter. But here too an inner core of countries which together can deliver something like a coherent policy are best place to agree what can be agreed, and agree to manage differences as sensibly as possible on what can not be.
In all this the new Lisbon Treaty structures may come to be seen to be adding people and process to no real purpose, other than being awkward vehicles for delivering whatever policies the main member states agree?
Surface area, volume, velocity: all about looking at policy in the round.
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