Asena Baykal, Global Public Policy Institute

The dynamics of the Eastern Mediterranean gas conflict are the result of the EU’s lack of a common strategy in the Southern neighbourhood, where energy and security issues conflict.

For the EU, the discovery of gas in the region led to hopes of diversifying its supply of resources and revitalizing local economies. Instead, this sparked a dangerous jockeying for access.

EU member states Greece and Cyprus and some Southern neighbourhood countries, most notably Israel and Egypt, use gas cooperation as a security guarantee against Turkey. France has eagerly joined in.

As for Turkey, it has tried to use its leverage with Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) to set its controversial maritime claims in stone. The result is an added layer of complication to the conflict in Libya.

At the same time, sinking gas prices and the current state of the EU energy demand question the need for extensive gas exploitation. In short, the dominating security imperative in the region risks pushing the EU to overemphasise these gas reserves. This endangers the EU’s security as well as its energy transition goals.

Instead of complementing immediate security concerns with long-term energy transition visions, the EU leaves individual parties to go with the flow of day-to-day brinkmanship and overblown rhetoric.

Deadlock is still preventable. For instance, Germany is actively trying to counterbalance its EU partners to limit further escalation and maintain communication channels to Turkey.

Easing these tensions gives the EU room to re-think what it actually wants from and for the region. It also allows individual member states to cooperate, so as to not stand in each other’s ways and sabotage jointly formulated energy transition goals.

Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin

The EU’s longstanding strategy for its neighbourhood has centred on fostering peace, stability, and prosperity by exporting liberal democracy cum market economy. This strategy has largely failed.

The EU expects the neighbourhood countries to fulfil the criteria for membership without, however, offering a membership perspective. Nor are liberal reforms consistently rewarded with better market access and visa facilitation.

Resilience-building rather than democracy promotion provides for a more pragmatic approach. Yet, as long as the EU and its member states fail to practice what they preach, any EU strategy is bound to fail.

Pol Morillas, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs

A foreign policy strategy should encompass an accurate reading of the global environment, the risks and threats emanating from it, one’s priorities and interests, and the instruments at disposal to face these challenges and fulfil its goals. The EU is rather good at the first two, while it performs poorly in the last two.

Both the European Security Strategy (2003) and the EU Global Strategy (2016) provide a timely and accurate reading of the EU’s global environment and the risks to its stability.

In the early 2000s, at a time of Western optimism, EU interests included the spread of political and economic liberalism, a normative foreign policy based on democracy and the rule of law, multilateralism, and regional integration. Then, threats emanated from troubled neighbourhoods, global terrorism, failed states, illegal trafficking, poverty, and global inequalities.

In 2016, the EU’s optimism turned into a more realist reading of its position in the world and its capacity to foster resilience (and not transform) its neighbourhoods. Behind this pragmatic turn was the consolidation of a multipolar world, the increased US-China rivalry, the consequences of inequality, the rise of global populism, and more trouble in the neighbourhoods, both south and east.

In its foreign policy strategies, the EU accurately reads and provides good language on how global trends, risks, and challenges affect its global position. But the interests of member states often diverge and the instruments at its disposal fail to be enacted in a coherent, joined-up fashion. EU countries put forward contradictory strategic priorities when it comes to their relations with global powers—the United States, China, or Russia—and their approach to conflict and humanitarian crises, for example in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine. Also, policymaking based on unanimous decisions and the parcelling of trade, foreign, and energy policies often limits the EU’s geopolitical stance.

While Brussels increasingly raises expectations when it comes to devising a strategic narrative, the EU’s interests and capabilities remain caught in customary shortcomings.

Patrycja Sasnal, Polish Institute of International Affairs

There is bad news and good news. The EU cannot have an implementable and effective strategy for its neighbourhoods because of the incomplete integration of member states’ foreign and security policies. Internal paradoxes weaken whatever ambition the EU might have.

Look at the examples. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been tearing Europeans apart for decades. France and Italy support opposing factions in the war in Libya. Germany and Poland quarrel over Nord Stream 2, while French views of Russia send shivers down Lithuanian spines. Other countries relentlessly exploit these differences to the detriment of European political efficacy.

Differences of opinion originate not only in geography or history. At the bottom lies the question of how to deal with non-democratic systems—such as Russia, Belarus, Egypt, Turkey, Syria—when Europeans themselves have trouble resisting authoritarian tendencies.

Yet, there is good news too.

On the EU level, the processes of negotiating joint strategies and instruments for both neighbourhoods have created normative red lines and common denominators that the member states cannot ignore without risking ostracism. Ostentatious espousal of authoritarian governments—France decorating Egypt’s President Sisi, Hungary hugging Turkey’s President Erdogan—causes internal European uproar.

Support for civil society in the East and South has become an indispensable element of EU policies and EU representatives are to be counted on in multilateral fora to defend fundamental human rights and democratic values. It does not make the policy planning of those EU neighbours who do not wish a united Europe, well, any easier.