Charting a road map for the European Political Community
Europe’s latest new organisation unites 44 states but its purpose and value remain open questions
First, the results of last week’s poll. In response to the question of whether China’s economic influence and soft power in Europe are too strong, some 75 per cent of you said yes, 11 per cent were on the fence and 13 per cent said no. Thanks for voting!
Non-Europeans, and for that matter most Europeans, deserve a medal if they can name and define the purpose of all the institutions set up since the second world war to defend peace, liberty and prosperity on the continent — or just to provide an opportunity to meet, talk and not do very much.
In a nerd-free world, many would struggle to distinguish between the European Council and the Council of Europe, or to remember much about the European Social and Economic Committee or the European Neighbourhood Policy.
Now we have the European Political Community, or EPC. In October it held its inaugural meeting in Prague, with 44 countries in attendance. In spring, everyone will reconvene in the Moldovan capital of Chişinău. Later on in the year the EPC will meet in Spain, and then the UK will play host in the first half of 2024. This map, prepared by Geopolitical Intelligence Services, shows the group’s members, bringing together all European countries except Belarus and Russia.
First and foremost, the EPC is an informal club for diplomatic discussions among equals. It doesn’t have a central secretariat or financial resources of its own, as pointed out by Sir Michael Leigh, a former senior European Commission official responsible for EU enlargement.
The EPC’s member governments do not wish it to overlap with weightier institutions such as Nato, the EU, the G7, the G20, the OSCE or the OECD, as Christian Turner writes for the UK in a Changing Europe research unit.
Who is in the EPC and who is out
The EPC doesn’t include Russia or Belarus — and so the gathering in Prague carried a certain symbolic significance as a moment of collective opposition to the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine.
At the same time, the US and Canada are not part of the EPC, which is therefore a purely European entity — welcome evidence of autonomy to those who would like Europe to stand more on its own feet in the world. On the other hand, the EPC isn’t directly involved in what, for Europe, is the most critical decision-making of our time — the west’s military and financial support for Ukraine’s war of self-defence.
Neither, strictly speaking, is the EPC a club of democracies, since it includes countries with a questionable record on civil liberties, free institutions and the rule of law such as Azerbaijan, Hungary, Serbia and Turkey.
However, the EPC is distinctive in that it brings together all 27 EU states, some that have been trying to join for many years (mainly in the Balkans), some that have just been invited to join (Moldova and Ukraine), some that are outside but aligned with the EU in various ways (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland), some that will probably never join (Armenia and Azerbaijan) and one that has just left (the UK).
Is the EPC an excuse for putting off EU enlargement?
Immediately after President Emmanuel Macron of France gave a speech last May proposing the EPC’s creation, some countries expressed concern that the new group might serve as a way of being nice to them while ultimately keeping them out of the EU.
“Nothing that falls short of EU membership would be acceptable,” warned Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister.
The EPC “should not and must not be a substitute for full European Union membership”, said Dimitar Kovačevski, North Macedonia’s prime minister.
To their credit, however, the French quickly reassured these doubters that the EPC would not be used as a vehicle for blocking their progress towards the EU. For this reason, the EPC should in principle have more staying power than the now largely forgotten 1989 proposal of François Mitterrand, the late French president, for a “European Confederation” of states.
Central and eastern European countries, which had just thrown off Soviet-imposed communism, correctly saw Mitterrand’s initiative as an attempt to fob them off with something less than full EU membership.
How can the EPC be useful in practical terms?
At the EPC meeting in Prague, discussions were held on issues such as peace, security, climate change, energy, migration and economic co-operation. As Suzana Anghel wrote in a perceptive piece for the European parliament’s research service, the informal nature of the Prague talks recalled the type of meetings once held by leaders of the old European Economic Community — the EU’s forerunner.
It was not until December 1974 that EEC leaders decided to hold regular, formal summits as the European Council, the body that unites EU heads of state and government. After that step, a kind of bureaucratisation of high-level policymaking took hold — something the EPC’s member states want to avoid.
What, then, did the EPC achieve in Prague, and what can it do in the future?
Well, the Prague event provided an opportunity for some useful talks on the sidelines to try to defuse the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, things have gone into reverse on that front since October.
The Prague meeting also saw the UK quietly expand contacts with its former EU partners, leading to an agreement in December on British participation with EU and North Seas countries on renewable energy projects. The British government goes so far as to call this “a new phase of UK-EU co-operation”.
The UK’s willingness to host the EPC in 2024 is another sign that even a neuralgically Eurosceptic Conservative government is apparently comfortable with hanging out with other Europeans in a new, loose format.
If things go well, the EPC will start promoting further practical initiatives on energy and infrastructure. This might be a way of integrating EU candidate states, such as the Balkan countries and Ukraine, into some EU activities in the period — likely to last many years — before they qualify as full members, as Milica Delević writes for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
But I still have some concerns.
The EPC’s relevance would be severely tested if some crisis arose, for example, between Greece and Turkey, or if Moldova came under even more pressure than it already is from Russia — on which, please read this incisive analysis by Jakob Hedenskog for the Stockholm Centre for eastern European Studies.
It would be unfair to write off the EPC at such an early stage as just another European talking shop. However, the jury is out on whether the EPC can and will add something useful to the somewhat higgledy-piggledy architecture of European co-operation.
More on this topic
The EPC should function like a “regional United Nations” rather than a discussion forum or the EU-style body that its name implies, Derrick Wyatt, emeritus professor of law at the University of Oxford, writes for the London School of Economics’ European politics blog
New order: there can be no turning back — an analysis of the impact of the Ukraine war on Europe and the international system by Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador, for the Paris-based Institut Montaigne