In the past 16 months, the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the global trade order. Trump pulled out of the Transpacific Partnership; put TTIP negotiations with Europe on ice; pushed his administration into an intense NAFTA renegotiation with terms unacceptable to Mexico and Canada; and dusted off the rarely used Section 232 National Security Provision to slap global sanctions on aluminum and steel. The Trump administration’s trade bombast has set off a flurry of reactions globally, leading many to ask: Are we on the brink of a global trade war?

The evidence points to the need for a bit more level-headedness. First, Washington’s current trade war-mongering follows a familiar pattern that has characterized the Trump administration’s policy choices from climate change to the Iran nuclear agreement: A dramatic announcement meant to shake the international system to its core and create an atmosphere of uncertainty, quickly followed by a series of furtive claw-backs, exemptions, and carve-outs.

Second, for all its flash, the administration’s protectionist bluster has not affected significant change in global trade. The WTO sees strong trade growth of around 4.4 percent in 2018, roughly on par with 4.7 percent growth in 2017.

Third, with the most recent imposition of tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, and other goods and products, Trump is delivering on a campaign promise to get tough on China. But a long-term reciprocal trade war would hurt the very people that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.

China and the EU have aimed a dagger at the heart of his base, the 35 percent of US voters from Iowa to Ohio. The EU has dangled retaliatory measures on Kentucky Bourbon and Wisconsin-based Harley-Davidson, a largely symbolic action meant to deal a blow to the Republican Senate Majority Leader and House Speaker, respectively.

But American farmers in the heartland would be hit especially hard by Chinese tariffs on soybeans, pork, cotton, and other items. Beijing announced those trade sanctions on April 4, and they will indeed go into effect should the US and China fail to reach an alternative agreement. The US exports $12 billion in soy to China every year, and soy crop is essentially the life blood of economies in prairie states like Nebraska.

Fourth, other economic powers are trying to balance US protectionism. Thus far, the bark and bite have not matched. But if Trump pushes ahead with strict tariffs, free traders in Europe, Asia, and Latin America are already working to create a post-American safety net for the global trade order. Under Canadian leadership, eleven Pacific states signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP) without the United States in March. The EU and Mexico successfully concluded negotiations to retrofit their trade agreement, with Merkel praising Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at this year’s Hanover Messe trade show.

From Hot War to Deep Freeze

In reality, the story of the trade order is more nuanced. The global trade system is entering into an ice age. It looks something like Han Solo frozen in carbonite—not dead but not moving, at least not institutionally.

Trump is in many ways just the natural extension of a global trend to put the brakes on trade liberalization. The WTO system, which still has a role in trade enforcement, has been diminished as an agenda setter since the Doha Round failure more than a decade ago. For both Germany and China—the greatest beneficiaries of the classical trade system—free trade evangelism tends to be narrowly-defined and self-serving.

For all Chancellor Merkel’s current free trade sanctimony, she did little to salvage the EU’s most ambitious trade project, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as approval in Germany tanked and more than 200,000 protesters took to the streets in 2016. China, the other free trade darling of the moment, is massively protectionist on digital services, so much so that the five biggest US companies (Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) barely make a dent in the social media and e-commerce landscape of the middle kingdom.

Choppy electoral waters, national elections in Mexico, the US midterms, the European Parliament elections in 2019—bring more challenges to a deepening of the trade system. EU member-states have been aggressively reasserting the right of national—and regional—parliaments to have veto power over trade agreements negotiated by the Commission. In the United States, even if the Trump administration is able to successfully conclude a NAFTA 2.0, it looks highly unlikely that Congress would ratify it.

The Great Illusion

In 1910, British public intellectual and Labour activist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion—the “End of History” of its day—which triumphantly declared that the depth of trade between the great powers of Europe had rendered war impossible. Yet today, as then, the unlikelihood of a trade war must not fuel complacency about the likelihood of actual war. Even if business does not have the power it once had to drive a positive trade agenda, the status quo trading system is still sticky. The same cannot be said for an increasingly unmoored security system with ongoing wars in Syria and Ukraine and the potential for even greater conflict in North Korea and Iran. Trade war is not what should worry us—it’s actual war.

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© REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

After its brief spring, the Arab world has had to endure a long and bitter winter. In the seven years since mass demonstrations broke out across the region, around half a million people in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon have become casualties of war. Islamic State militants gained a foothold in the region, then lost it. Some elections were free and fair (Tunisia, Egypt in 2013), others less so (Syria 2014, Egypt 2015), and some were marred by low turnout (Libya 2014, Egypt 2018).

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, has been plagued by mass demonstrations that have resulted in protester deaths. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi was recently re-elected with 97 percent of the vote; the war in Syria seems likely to end with victory for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad; Libya seems to be perpetually on the brink of a military coup. The citizens who hoped to bring about democracy through protests have not seen their lives improve. It seems as though freedom might never reach these shores.

And yet, despondency is unjustified―because it’s only a matter of time until the next Arab Spring. None of the conditions that seemed deplorable in 2011 have improved. In fact, the opposite is true: things have deteriorated further. Seven years ago, youth unemployment stood at 26 and 30 percent in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively. Those figures have increased to 35 and 33 percent. In both countries, there is a statistical correlation between unemployment among 19-to 25-year-olds and political instability.

Youth unemployment is particularly disconcerting – and contributes more to political unrest―when it is accompanied by corruption and social inequality. And both indicators have increased dramatically in the region in recent years. With the exception of Tunisia, where corruption has subsided slightly, all Arab countries over the past seven years are doing worse on global corruption rankings. Of the 10 countries deemed the most corrupt in the world, almost half are located in the Arab world: Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Since the Arab Spring called for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” the wealth gap has only widened, with the richest tenth percentile in Arab countries accounting for 67 percent of the region’s income. For comparison, that percentage stands at 36 percent in Europe and 47 percent in the United States. The Arab region has the largest wealth gap in the world, as it did in 2011.

Meanwhile, the price of bread has risen. In Jordan, for example, the price of a loaf nearly doubled in January after the government canceled subsidies. Just weeks earlier, tax increases caused price hikes for staples such as vegetables, salt, oil, and milk.

Political freedoms have also suffered. A repressive central government in Libya that jailed citizens and muzzled journalists has been replaced by a series of uncontrollable militant groups, but the reality for citizens is the same. The country currently ranks 163rd – two places behind Egypt―on a press freedom index that includes 180 countries. It has fallen two ranks since 2011, while Egypt has dropped 37 ranks over the same period. Once again, Tunisia has bucked the trend: the country has worked its way up from 164th to 97th place, meaning it is now roughly equivalent to countries like Liberia, Panama, and Nepal.

A Herculean Task

When a nation becomes prone to unrest, its government has two options: It can choose to engage with its people’s demands, but that route is not a viable one in most countries in the Arab world. To create jobs and keep prices low, these countries would require liquidity and the ability to pass economic reforms. Non oil-producing Arab countries have long painted themselves into a corner in that regard.

In the past, huge infrastructure projects such as the Suez Canal development project enabled the creation of a sufficient number of jobs to keep the political situation stable. Today, that is no longer possible, and unemployment figures have sky-rocketed. Over the past three decades, the number of young people without work has nearly doubled from 13 to 22 million. That number continues to grow both in Egypt and further afield. In order to keep the youth unemployment figure stable, Arab countries would have to create 10 million jobs over the next decade―and if the goal is to push the figure below the socially-acceptable threshold of 25 percent, the countries would have to create roughly four times as many. This Herculean task would be difficult to achieve even under more amenable economic conditions.

This leaves Arab countries with a second option: stifling protest. In order to do so, repressive states employ authoritarian mechanisms, including legislative changes that silence dissent and the deployment of a security apparatus that enforces the rules, allowing autocrats like Egypt’s al-Sissi to confidently claim that his country has no political prisoners and that all inmates have been convicted in accordance with the law.

Nineteen new prisons have been erected in Egypt since the Arab Spring. Every form of interaction is subject to government surveillance, and even industry groups such as the country’s pharmacist association are viewed as suspect. In Jordan, citizens protesting the rising price of bread are immediately brought before a court that handles terrorism and treason cases. Tunisia’s prisons have been operating at 138 percent capacity since a state of emergency enabled mass incarceration, with half of the inmates still waiting for their day in court.

The war in Syria is by far the most extreme manifestation of these methods. But even Assad’s brutality does nothing to solve the underlying problem.

Old Dogs, New Tricks

Egypt has made it strikingly clear that old methods will no longer work. Since the ouster of president Mohammed Morsi by the Egyptian military, the number of terrorist attacks has increased almost tenfold, from 44 attacks in 2012 to the current count of around 390 each year. Some 100,000 Egyptians, most of them young men, are in jail. The government has declared a state of emergency, and is mounting its fourth military offensive in the restive region of Sinai (Operation Eagle in 2011; Operation Sinai in 2012; Operation Martyr’s Right in 2015). The tougher the military offensive and the more young Egyptians are locked away in prison, the stronger the resistance. Cairo must acknowledge what the United States learned the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq: it is impossible to quell an opposition movement with force.

This fact is one that Damascus must also confront sooner or later. Those who think the war will be won by government forces would do well to remember that the destruction caused by the conflict has set Syria’s economy and infrastructure back three decades. Between $100 and 300 billion will be required to rebuild the country. That is money that neither Syria, nor its main backers Russia and Iran, have access to.

The Syrian army has lost around half of its soldiers to desertion or death. It has been decimated, and its remaining rank-and-file are tired and in no way capable of ensuring security during the post-war period. It is one thing to annihilate the opposition, but another entirely to create the conditions that would prevent a relapse into war. Even if a ceasefire can be maintained, the conditions for the next rebellion have already been created by the fact that none of the public’s demands from 2011 have been met.

Decision-makers in other Arab countries will also be forced to make painful concessions in order to maintain stability. While Tunisia has managed to keep elections free and fair, the country’s economy is still run by oligarchs with ties to the regime of ousted dictator Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali. Large parts of the economy are subject to state regulation, which has laid the groundwork for monopolies, inhibited competitiveness, stifled job creation, and fueled corruption. A lack of competitors for companies such as Tunesie Telecom and TunisAir means that an international phone call costs roughly 20 times as much as in Europe, and flight prices are twice as high as elsewhere.

An air traffic liberalization deal with the European Union will open Tunisia up for European charter flights, but budget air travel is still a long way off. Young Tunisians cannot start businesses thanks to a system in which loans are only available to large companies. Tunisia’s monopolies are standing between young Tunisians and employment opportunities, meaning that there will come a time when they will have to decide between their status and political stability. One thing is certain: where there is no willingness for compromise, violent unrest is sure to follow.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Readers discouraged by the facts listed above should not lose hope, however; political change is never linear, and often violent. Whether in Germany or in Latin America, democracy was always achieved in small increments and after countless setbacks. In France, the path to universal suffrage between the French Revolution in 1789 and the country’s Fourth Republic was marked by phases in which the right to vote depended on class, income, and gender. Every concession was brought about by protests and crises. The elite never gave up power willingly.

So why is violence always a feature of progress, and why the setbacks? It would be preferable if democracies were born peacefully, as in Eastern Europe. But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution were historical anomalies, far removed from the tumultuous conditions that marked the emergence of most other democracies. Instead, it usually occurs as follows: a small elite controls resources and power until the majority of the population comes to the conclusion that they do not have enough resources to survive (this is relative, and cannot be measured – with an average income of $22,000, a citizen of Bahrain is wealthier than his or her Jordanian counterpart, but still earns a fraction of the incomes common among Bahraini elites). The dissatisfied majority then employs mass demonstrations and other methods of civil disobedience to air its grievances.

If the ruling class can employ neither of the aforementioned strategies, and can resort to neither economic nor repressive measures, it is forced to cede power. This is usually done in a piecemeal manner, and because it has no other choice.

This democratic game of ping pong is reflected in data. Of the 90 countries that have embarked on the road to democracy over the past five decades, 39 percent relapsed into authoritarianism, 46 percent became democracies, and 15 percent became democracies after following a tumultuous path. To a certain degree, this pattern can also be seen in the Arab world, with a third of the six countries that saw mass demonstrations in 2011 returning to autocracy. One of the countries is on the path to democracy (17 percent), and half of them could still go either way. Though Syria, Yemen, and Libya do not currently seem to be on the path to democracy, autocratic systems have not yet stabilized in these countries either.

Demonstrations and violence are not always a precondition for concessions by the elite, however. If they recognize the potential for unrest, reforms can sometimes prevent unrest before it begins. Such an attempt is currently underway in Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman is implementing reforms in an effort to circumvent unrest within his own population. Half of Saudi Arabia’s population is under the age of 25. Youth unemployment stands at 33.5 percent and is set to increase, according to estimates, to 42 percent by 2030. The Saudi population has grown significantly in recent years, the absolute number of people out of work is set to double by 2030, and the number of people who use oil instead of selling it will also double.

Though the proverbial iceberg is years in the future, the Saudi crown prince is already anticipating it by attempting to change course. And while some may deride his eagerness to pass reforms, the prince’s strategy is sure to bear fruit. Decision-makers in other Arab countries are likely to come to the same conclusions, but under greater duress.

A Second Spring?

It remains to be seen when the next wave of mass demonstrations in the Arab world will begin. If reforms are passed in time, perhaps it can be avoided altogether.

If there is a second Arab Spring, there are two areas in which leaders should try to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2011. One is a country’s electoral system. In Egypt, the introduction of a presidential system meant that 51 percent of the vote granted the victor 100 percent of the power. While this is democratic, it sows further seeds of division in already-polarized societies. A political system that promotes coalition-building (such as Germany or Lebanon) is preferable in countries undergoing transition.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary system with a weak executive, like in Libya, can paralyze decision-making. The choice of system should depend on the political context – it is, after all, a reflection of the society in which it operates. After the Arab Spring, political systems were simply imposed on countries without a consideration of the potential consequences.

Second, there should be a focus on reforms that make a tangible difference to the lives of citizens–and quickly. The International Monetary Fund’s focus on the budget deficit and debt reduction may be well-intentioned, but citizens of the Arab world are interested primarily in three things: bread, freedom, and social justice. If these are not granted, the game will begin anew and spring will once again be followed by winter.

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Artwork: © Dominik Herrmann

When Salvador Sobral won the Eurovision Song Contest representing Portugal last year with the song Amar Pelos Dois, a lot of people were caught off guard.

For one thing, Sobral’s gentle jazz waltz about unrequited love was not your usual Eurovision fare. At the grand finale in Kiev, an uncharacteristic hush fell over the arena when the Portuguese singer took to the stage. It may be that the song’s uniqueness is the reason it won—it stood out in a year in which the bookies’ favorites gave forgettable performances.

But Sobral’s win was also surprising because it was sung in Portuguese. Since 1999 countries have been allowed to sing in any language they like, and only one non-English song had won since then—Serbia’s Molitva in 2007. Many thought it was now impossible for a non-English song to win. Sobral proved them wrong.

Portugal is hosting this year’s contest in Lisbon on May 12. As expected, Sobral’s shock win has prompted a record number of non-English songs to be fielded in this year’s contest―14 out of the 43 entries. This is the highest number of non-English songs in the contest since countries were no longer forced to sing in their official national language 20 years ago. This development has delighted France, where politicians and broadcast executives have railed against the predominance of English in the modern contest.

Only France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal can be counted on to sing in their native language regularly. Curiously, it is only small countries that have dared to join them, generally two or three every year. Russia has never sung in Russian, and Germany has never sung in German since they were allowed to start singing in English in 2007—a track record that has drawn heavy criticism from Paris.

For France, this is about far more than just music. That countries have been so quick to abandon their native tongues after the rules were loosened, in the interest of doing well in the contest, is seen by some to be American cultural imperialism infecting a European contest. And it’s a long-standing grudge. It was at France’s insistence that countries were forced for decades to sing in their native language―even if they didn’t want to.

A Swedish-French Linguistic War

When the Eurovision Song Contest began in 1956, organizers did not think to specify a policy on languages. It was just assumed that each country would sing in its own language. That changed in 1965, when Sweden showed up to the contest with an entry in English. France was not amused. It convinced the Geneva-based European Broadcasting Union, which runs the contest, to impose a rule in 1966 requiring entries to be in an official language of the competing country.

Sweden, which wanted to continue singing in English, did not like the change. And so Stockholm immediately went to work trying to convince the other broadcasters in the EBU to scrap the rule. In 1973 it was successful, and the EBU decided to get rid of the native language requirement. One year later, Sweden fielded ABBA’s now-iconic song Waterloo, which won the contest. Whether it would have won if ABBA had sung it in Swedish, we can only conjecture.

In 1975 a song in English called Ding-a-Dong won for the Netherlands. In 1976, Brotherhood of Man’s song Save Your Kisses For Me won for the United Kingdom. By 1977, France was fed up. Three consecutive wins in English was more than some could take. After heavy pressure from Paris and others, the EBU re-introduced the language restriction in 1977. Directly after the rule change, France won with L’Oiseau et l’Enfant. The language restriction, which came to be derisively known as the “English ban,” would stay in place for more than two decades.

The rule stated that a country could sing only in an official national language, and that gave some countries more options than others. Switzerland could sing in German, French, Italian, or Romansh―though they usually chose French. Iceland could only sing in Icelandic. Spain, which had only recently thrown off the dictatorship that repressed all languages other than Castilian Spanish, was now forbidden from fielding a Eurovision entry in Catalan not by Madrid―but by the EBU. Only Malta, Ireland, and the UK were allowed to sing in English.

Tear Down This Linguistic Wall!

So what finally convinced France and the EBU to cave in? It was a string of almost uninterrupted wins ping-ponging between Ireland and the UK from 1992 to 1997. The only country to break the six-year English streak was Norway in 1995, with an instrumental song that had no lyrics.

The contest started to feel like an exclusively British Isles affair, and ratings were going down the toilet. Eurovision was feeling old and boring, completely out of touch with the modern pop music tastes of the day. The EBU realized it had to relax the rules if it wanted to revive the contest.

In 1999 France finally had to face its Waterloo. Countries were allowed to sing in whatever language they wanted. Not missing a beat, the first country to win after the rule change was Sweden with Take Me To Your Heaven, sung in English, which has become a Eurovision favorite.

It wasn’t just the language restriction that was ended that year. The EBU also got rid of the requirement for each song to have a live orchestra. This paved the way for modern-sounding pop songs. Ratings for the song contest shot up over the following decade, and it is now the most-watched live television event in the world―beaten only by the World Cup every four years.

But the boost in popularity wasn’t only because of the rule changes. It was also thanks to the new infusion of energy as Eastern European countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain eagerly joined. They brought with them a burst of enthusiasm that fundamentally changed the contest, throwing off its stuffy, old-fashioned image of the 1990s. Eurovision entries now sounded more like what is heard on European radio. And the reality is that songs on European radio are largely in English. Audiences wanted to vote for a song they could understand. By 2016, English accounted for 93 percent of Eurovision entries.

Linguistic Backlash

The ratings-watchers of national broadcasters may have liked the developments, but many linguistic purists have not. Many feel that Eurovision songs have become carbon copies of each other, without any cultural connection to the country that field them.

But does linguistic diversity automatically equal cultural diversity? The EBU has been keen to stress that this isn’t a folk music contest; it’s a pop song contest. And the reality is that even when Eurovision entries were sung in many different languages, they still sounded mostly the same.

Nevertheless, those who have bristled at the predominance of English in the modern contest will be pleased to see so many native-language entries this year. Aside from the usual culprits, the 14 countries that have chosen to take the plunge this year with non-English songs include Greece, Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Hungary. Estonia will be singing in Italian.

For a non-English win, the odds have never been greater since 1999. Yet with 31 wins―just under half of the total―English will still be hard to beat. France has 14 wins, but the last French winner was in 1988, and a song in French has never won in a contest where linguistic freedom was allowed. So don’t hold your breath―the bookies’ top three favorites to win―Israel, Czech Republic, and Bulgaria―are all in English.

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© REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

Many in Europe see this as a sweep of Viktor Orbán and his illiberal democratic order in Hungary. How did he pull that off? I think there were plenty of reasons. The election presented a Catch-22 for the very fragmented opposition. For many years, there has been a leadership crisis on the opposition’s side, namely that there was no leader who had enough appeal and strength to convince other parties to follow him or her. Also, the election system was significantly manipulated when it was modified in 2013. It’s very difficult now to get into parliament because of the five percent threshold. It’s a badly constructed election law, intentionally so because it serves the strongest party, which right now is Fidesz. Also, the media did not allow any alternative coverage of Fidesz’ omnipresent anti-immigrant campaign. Only the government had the opportunity to appear in large public media and dominate the narrative on the issue.

So you’re saying it wasn’t a fair election? No, it wasn’t and we’re actually questioning whether it was free or not because if citizens don’t have the right to make a judgement on parties running with equal opportunities, they no longer have the right to choose.

At the same time, we have seen mass demonstrations on the streets of Budapest to protest Orbán’s victory. What is the state of Hungary now, after the vote? There have been huge demonstrations since the election, with 100,000 people in streets of Budapest every week. It’s really a significant mass of people. These are frustrated and angry people who believe this unfair election didn’t serve Hungary. The problem is that this is a civilian movement. There is no party representation of this mass of people. So it demonstrates that Hungarian voters feel somewhat abandoned by the political parties. The task in the next few years, and ahead of next year’s European elections, is to capture the attention and passion of this disappointed mass of people. They represent 52 percent of voters. These are students, people from countryside, (the far-right) Jobbik and its supporters—it’s a very diverse group. It will be a big challenge for any political force to pull these people towards believing in their platform. In the fall of 2019, there will be municipal elections, so that gives parties a year and a half to reorganize themselves to run again. But the situation is very dire and it’s not just because the parties are seriously hit. Orbán announced during a rally in March that he would take revenge on anyone who did not support Fidesz. Nobody knows what this revenge means.

Given that the Hungarian economy is doing quite well, why did Orbán resort to an anti-Western, anti-migrant, anti-Soros, anti-UN, racist campaign platform to attract voters, especially when there are not even many migrants in Hungary? It’s symbolic. You don’t need migrants to be anti-migration. It’s a very important learning point for European countries because non-European migrants mean a cultural threat. You don’t have to have any within your country, you just have to highlight the fact that there are people in Europe who are non-Europeans, who have different churches, religions, habits, attitudes. This is enough—at least in a country where you have no history of multiculturalism. It’s beyond the natural political discourse. It’s about the existence of European culture and it’s about identity. With that approach, you can gather voter support from people who are actually very different from each other. This is why Orban’s voting base is also very diverse.

What does his victory mean for Europe going forward? This is a threatening victory. Orbán received a huge boost confirming that he is a clearly illiberal leader and is still supported by people. We are afraid he will now attack the judiciary and take over further media. We worry he will target NGOs, civil society—specifically because he believes the political opposition may not threaten his power, but civil society can. So with the new mandate, he can produce more and more legislation that go against European norms. And what’s more, judging from the strange and incompetent response we have seen from the European Union’s institutions and other European countries, he can go ahead with his illiberal state.

What would a competent answer look like? I think the Europeans need to look at this systematically. It’s not one step or another; not one infringement process or another. The entire legal system is now filled with—in European terms—undemocratic, unlawful networks. It should be regarded as one whole package. And don’t wait for what Orbán is going to do because we know what his plans are. In one month he’ll have a government and a whole summer to implement his platform.
Still, I think it’s very important that Hungary is well integrated into the European economic system as well, that we see a lot of funds and investment not translated in any way into European values. The EU institutions and also large companies active in Hungary should do something on the financial question because at the moment, they are actually financially supporting the base of an illiberal state that is undermining European values and European cohesion.

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© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

When Prime Minister Theresa May sent her Brexit notification to Brussels in March of last year, she was celebrated by parts of the British press as the country’s “new Iron Lady.” In her speech at Lancaster House, May set a course for a clean break with the EU. She interpreted the Brexit vote as a mandate not only to leave the EU, but also to curtail freedom of movement, to stop implementing European regulations, to cease contributing “significant” sums to the EU budget, and to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

According to the red lines set out by May, a close relationship similar to the one between Norway and Brussels would not be an option. Instead, she declared it the UK’s goal to create a “deep and special relationship” with the EU. Despite the desired hard Brexit, there would be no barriers to trade. At the same time, the country would seek to negotiate its own trade agreements with the rest of the world. Such was May’s Brexit utopia.

A Fragile Government

At the half-way mark of the two-year Brexit negotiations, the reality is starkly different. The political context has undergone a fundamental transformation. May has not managed to create a consensus within her Conservative party—let alone within the country as a whole—about the desired goals for Brexit. Her decision to call unnecessary snap elections at the start of negotiations caused her Conservatives to lose their parliamentary majority, meaning that May now heads a minority government. In the coming months, she will face the difficult task of getting a Brexit deal and a number of other agreements through both houses of parliament which will require full support from her own faction as well as the leading Northern Irish unionist party DUP.

There are five influential groups pulling her in different directions. The euroskeptics within her parliamentary faction are pushing for the hardest-possible version of Brexit. Loosely organized under the leadership of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the backbench European Research Group comprises 60 or so lawmakers that have included members of May’s own cabinet. Given its numbers, the group has the ability not only to deprive the prime minister of her parliamentary majority, but also to force a vote of confidence, which requires a minimum of 48 lawmakers. On the other side of the spectrum, there are between 15 and 20 Conservative lawmakers pushing for a close relationship with the EU that would include remaining in the customs union and the single market. Their number also qualifies them to rob May of her majority. The pressure has meant that May has repeatedly postponed tough Brexit decisions, such as questions over the customs union; however, she will have no choice but to face these in the coming year.

Meanwhile, the ten lawmakers for DUP—also part of May’s hoped-for majority—are rejecting any “special status” for their region in the EU. The DUP, a proponent of a hard Brexit, is threatening to topple May’s government if she cedes to EU demands for the regulatory alignment of Northern Ireland with the EU. The regional governments of Wales and Scotland, meanwhile, are pushing for close alignment with the single market and the customs union. Though Scottish independence seems to be off the table in the medium-term, May still requires the approval of Edinburgh and Cardiff in order to get a Brexit deal through.

The fifth and final group that wields influence over May is British industry, which is pushing for a lengthy transition period after Brexit that would include remaining in the single market and the customs union. However, so far neither Britain’s business sector nor its public administration have readied themselves to deal with new trade barriers between the closely integrated British and EU economies even in the medium term.

More United Than the UK Cabinet

Paradoxically, the Brexit negotiations are actually keeping the weakened prime minister in office against this complicated backdrop. For one, there is no other Conservative leader who would be able to unite these disparate groups. All involved are aware that Britain cannot afford another election with an uncertain outcome in the short time that remains to negotiate Brexit. And pro-European Conservatives have no interest in paving the way for a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party to enter 10 Downing Street.

In short, the British government finds itself in a state of perpetual fragility while it is mired in the most complex and difficult negotiations in decades. There is no majority against leaving the EU, but there also is no majority in favor for any particular form of Brexit.

On the other side of the divide, the EU’s 27 remaining members are displaying an unusual state of unity. The European Council has come up with a set of principles based on a common goal: to make sure that Britain will not benefit from unfettered access to the single market if it does not deliver on the corresponding obligations. The member states have unanimously placed the integrity of the single market—which seeks to guarantee the free movement of goods, capital, services and labor—at the center of negotiations. Remarkably, the 27 member states have seemed more united than May’s 22-member British cabinet.

A central part of the EU-27’s strategy is based on the sequencing of Brexit negotiations. The British government initially pushed to negotiate the divorce agreement and the agreement on the future relationship at the same time. Due to the complexity of the issue, but also due to Britain’s lack of leverage, the remaining member states successfully insisted on concluding negotiations on the former before engaging in the latter. Considering Britain’s difficult state of domestic politics, it is remarkable how much progress has been made on the transition period.

As such, the British government agreed to meet all of its financial and other membership obligations until 2020—the end of the current EU budget. This means London will continue to contribute to the budget far beyond its official exit date. According to estimates, the total amount could reach about 40 billion euros. The UK and the EU-27 have also fundamentally agreed to secure the rights of the roughly 3 million EU citizens living in Britain and their 1.2 million British counterparts on the continent. This is intended to create certainty both for individuals and businesses.

The Northern Ireland Question

Progress on one of the most difficult Brexit-related questions, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, has been less certain. Not only is it the only land boundary between UK and the EU, it also holds a strong political significance for the peace process in Northern Ireland. If Britain leaves the single market and the customs union—as May has stated as her aim—border controls will become necessary. Yet in an act of solidarity with fellow member state Ireland, the EU-27 have agreed in principle with Britain to prevent the necessity of border controls. The way this agreement will be implemented is still subject to fierce debate, however. Britain wants Northern Ireland to be part of the larger Brexit deal, but the EU is pushing for a fallback proposal for Northern Ireland that would ensure its remainder in the customs union and regulatory alignment with the EU. This is considered completely unacceptable by both the DUP and May. The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier has in turn rejected May’s proposals on implementing technical solutions at the border as unrealistic. Difficult negotiations to resolve the issue are inevitable.

Reaching agreement on a transition deal for the period after Britain’s formal departure was straight-forward by comparison. Even London concluded that the future relationship will not have been fully negotiated by March 29, 2019, nor will Britain be equipped to take on all the tasks currently handled by the EU. Therefore, London and Brussels agreed in principle that Britain will remain a full member of the single market and the customs union until the end of 2020. The EU was almost completely successful in its negotiation of the transition deal, with the UK now obligated to enforce all EU rules including freedom of movement and implement new EU legislation. As a third-party state, however, it will no longer be entitled to voting rights, nor will it be represented in EU institutions. This means that Britain will – albeit for a limited time – hand over sovereignty to Brussels in order to protect its economy.

Despite the progress, the guiding principle “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” remains. The Brexit deal, including the transitional period, citizens’ rights, financial obligations, and the border issue, have yet to become legally binding. While implementation would not require the border issue to be completely ironed out, it would need ratification by the EU-27 and Britain, as well the British parliament.

Three extreme scenarios that once seemed to be a possibility have become unrealistic. The so-called “exit from Brexit” demanded by former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major is no longer viable given the strength of the Brexit mandate. There hasn’t been a major shift in public opinion in the country, nor is the opposition Labour party willing to fundamentally question the Brexit decision.

A so-called “no deal Brexit,” which would see the UK leave the EU without a divorce agreement, has become similarly unrealistic. Under this scenario, the rights of EU citizens would be in limbo, British contributions to the EU budget would cease, trade between Britain and the bloc would default to WTO agreements, and customs obligations and other trade barriers would resurface with disastrous results, particularly for the British economy. This prospect is what led the British government to make significant concessions in recent months. These concessions have become acceptable even to Brexit hardliners, who have shifted gears to focus on the core goal of implementing Brexit. The “no deal” option would only have been viable if the UK had had a long period of preparation.

The third scenario, a continuation of the recently-agreed transition deal after 2020, has been ruled out by both sides. Though it is highly doubtful that the UK and the EU will have ironed out all the details of their future economic and political relationship by that time (or that the deal will have received ratification from all 28 national parliaments), the transition agreement currently on the table does not include a clause that would allow it to remain in place beyond 2020. In order to protect its economy, Britain has agreed to almost all conditions imposed by the EU—a bitter pill to swallow for proud Brexiteers. According to the EU, the transition agreement must be strictly time-limited to conform with withdrawal under Article 50. Its continuation beyond 2020 is therefore a political and legal non-starter.

Strategic Decisions

What lies ahead are bitter negotiations between the UK and the EU-27 that look set to continue way beyond the end of the transitional period. This summer, however, must bring a solution regarding Northern Ireland so that Ireland and the EU-27 as a whole can ratify the Brexit agreement and the transition deal. Navigating the legal ins and outs of the deal and getting it ratified will require considerable efforts on both sides.

Parallel to this, the parties will have to negotiate three main aspects of the future relationship between Britain and the EU: Britain’s access to the single market and the customs union, future cooperation on internal and external security, and the future interaction between Britain and EU institutions.

The current political path continues to point to a hard Brexit. May is insisting on departure from the single market and the customs union. The EU-27 say that in that case, Britain’s only option will be to negotiate a free trade deal similar to the one Canada and South Korea have with the EU. In this case, Britain would not need to reintroduce customs duties, but would be faced with significant non-tariff barriers in particular for closely-integrated supply chains and the financial services industry that is so important to the country. London could remain an EU partner on foreign policy and security, but would have to align itself with the bloc’s rules for instance on data sharing.

This path is not yet set in stone, however. Considering the political instability in London, closer alignment between Britain and the EU may still be negotiable—particularly in relation to the customs union, which would not only help solve the Northern Ireland dilemma but also simplify the conditions for trade with both the EU and the rest of the world. The House of Lords is pushing May on this issue, yet the price of such an arrangement would be similar to the one paid for the transitional agreement: Britain, the world’s fifth-largest economy, would be subject to EU trade rules without formal voting rights. Even with regards to the single market, the consensus in London is increasingly shifting towards keeping the country aligned with EU standards in almost all major sectors of the economy for the forseeable future. Here, too, the EU-27 will insist that, in line with its “no cherry-picking” and “autonomy of EU decision making” principles, Britain can only have unfettered access to the single market if it sticks to EU rules, even without voting rights and beyond the 2020 deadline.

The great paradox of the negotiations is the fact that Brussels is increasingly determining the shape that Britain’s departure will take in the end. Given its own internal divisions, London is currently incapable of agreeing on a clear agenda for Brexit. As a result, the strategic burden is on the EU and its more powerful capitals, such as Berlin and Paris, to forge the path forward. To what degree can a third country have access to the EU single market, its foreign policy and security platform, and EU programs without blurring the line to membership? How high is the price that must be paid, both economically and politically? Brussels will now be tasked with finding solutions to the remaining Brexit questions.

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Artwork: © Dominik Herrmann

A committed liberal and a firm believer in free and fair trade, Cecilia Malmström is the first woman to serve a full term as the European commissioner for trade. For many years, this strategic post, which grants the exclusive power to carry out EU trade policy on behalf of member states, was occupied by men, including such heavyweights as France’s Pascal Lamy and Britain’s Peter Mandelson. The 2014 appointment of Malmström―an ambitious 46-years-old politician from Sweden―was a game changer.

Those who hoped for an easy ride were soon disappointed. With her principled stance on trade, Malmström has quickly proven to be a tough negotiator vis-à-vis such large trading powers as the United States and Japan. She has stood firm not only for European economic interests but also for social, labor, and environmental standards. As a strong human rights advocate, Malmström has included special clauses in trade deals that obligate third countries to fight child labor and other forms of abuse.

At the same time, Malmström has a natural inclination for compromise that helped her steer the EU away from a collision course with China last year over its demand for market economy status. Some, however, have accused her of letting Beijing off the hook by failing to challenge it more aggressively on trade and investment barriers and unfair practices such as dumping and illegal export subsides.

Those who know Malmström well argue that this is because, as a liberal, “she simply doesn’t like imposing tariffs or other trade restrictions.” “Free and open trade is good,” she used to say early in her term. But faced with the 2016 steel crisis in Europe, which was caused mainly by cheap Chinese imports, she had to embrace a more pragmatic approach and put more emphasis on the need for reciprocity. “We stand for open trade based on fair rules, but we must ensure that others do not take advantage of our openness,” she said in 2017, and has repeated on many occasions since.

But it appears China is no longer Malmström’s main challenge. What keeps her awake at night these days is instead the prospect of a trade war with the US, a country she has always seen as a close and reliable allay. Faced with global steel overcapacity, US President Donald Trump ordered the country’s trade department to impose hefty tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum in early March, including from the EU, to protect American markets.

Trump’s Bully Approach

Malmström immediately condemned this move as highly “protectionist” and demanded a full exemption from the US measures. She proposed a three-pronged plan to hit back should the US refuse to back down. “Nobody has an interest in escalating this situation, but if we have to, we will protect our industries,” she said.

Following a series of talks, the White House agreed to postpone the application of duties by 40 days but asked the EU for trade concessions in exchange for a permanent waiver. Malmström insists that she will only open talks with the US once the EU has received a permanent and unconditional exemption from metal tariffs. “Under no circumstances we are negotiating anything under pressure and under threats [sic],” Malmström said.

The bitter spat with the US marks an important moment in Malmström’s career. Trump, who is known for his impulsive policy style and zero-sum thinking about trade, is not an easy opponent. “For us, trade is something where both sides win,” she said. The unwritten rule the EU follows is that any trade deal must be based on compromise. “Trump’s bully approach is totally new for all of us,” an EU official said.

But as a born optimist―which she underlines often―Malmström hopes the US will eventually drop the tariffs. “When that is confirmed by the US president, we can continue to talk about any other things they want to discuss,” she said.

Failure to reach a deal with Trump and a potential tit-for-tat trade war with the US could overshadow the last year of Malmström’s term in office and deal a blow to her political legacy. It is not clear if she will be re-appointed as a commissioner next year. If not, “she can always return to university teaching, what she enjoys a lot,” according to one of her colleagues. Yet she is one of the few EU officials with a truly global profile.

A Believer in Transparency

Malmström was 19, when she left Gothenburg, a city founded primarily as a Dutch trading colony, to study literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. She returned to Sweden to finish her studies and was awarded a Ph.D. in political science from Gothenburg University. At the age of 29, Malmström joined the Swedish Liberal Party Board, and a mere two years later, in 1999, won election to the European Parliament. There she made her name for herself as a strong defender of human rights in Russia and one of the first advocates of making Brussels the permanent seat of the European Parliament.

Her liberal stance and openness have prompted Malmström to inject more transparency into trade negotiations―a move that helped defuse strong public distrust toward trade policy, which for many years was carried out behind closed doors. “She is very open and good at listening to people. She believes in transparency and is not afraid of being challenged by her opponents,” one EU official said. In 2015 and 2016 Malmström took part in many public discussions across Europe on the pros and cons of free trade deals.

As a boss, Malmström is “straightforward and easy to work with,” according to her colleagues, who call her by first name. “She actually seeks advice and listens,” one member of her cabinet said. People who have seen her lead negotiations that are often technical and complex say Malmström is well prepared and open for compromise. “To be heard, you must be taken seriously,” she said in an interview with Swedish media in 2012. “And to be taken seriously in this European, quite funky environment, it is important to show knowledge.”

Humor is what helps her in stressful situations, Malmström’s close aides say. This is where her Gothenburg nature kicks in. “We in Gothenburg don’t take things too seriously,” she said in that same interview in 2012. In politics, she added, “humor is my survival strategy.”

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© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Pro-Europeans” in Brussels and elsewhere tend to think of European integration in a somewhat linear way: Integration is good, and disintegration is bad. So they also see the European Commission’s proposal to create a common finance minister and budget and turn the European Stability Mechanism into a European Monetary Fund as a step forward.

There are two quite different ways of thinking about the Commission’s proposals, however. For Macron, they are part of a vision for a “Europe qui protege” (Europe that protects) with greater solidarity between citizens and member states. In this context, the new European Monetary Fund would be a kind of embryonic treasury for the eurozone. But many in Germany, including former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, seem to support the same idea for entirely different reasons. They see it as a way to increase control over EU member states’ budgets and more strictly enforce the eurozone’s fiscal rules, thus increasing European competitiveness. If that vision were to prevail, more Europe would mean more Germany―as in many of the steps already taken in the last seven years since the euro crisis began.

These different visions illustrate how deepening European integration is not automatically or inherently a good thing. In fact, turning the ESM into a European Monetary Fund may be part of a troubling transformation of the EU that was rooted in the euro crisis. Although integration has continued since then and EU member states have agreed to pool sovereignty in ways that would have been almost unthinkable otherwise, there are reasons to think that this integration is qualitatively different from previous phases of the European project. In the name of more Europe, it may well be that a very different EU will emerge.

Mirroring the IMF

As well as becoming more German, the EU has also grown more coercive since the beginning of the euro crisis in 2010: Further integration has fallen somewhere on the spectrum between voluntary and forced. As Chancellor Angela Merkel put it during the debate over the first Greek bailout in 2010: “There is no alternative.” Instead, Brussels has put in place a more domineering system of rules and enforcement of those rules―particularly in the eurozone. The “Maastricht III” system that emerged from the crisis is based on the series of measures taken since 2010; it is more intrusive and imposes stricter conditionality and greater homogeneity than its two predecessors.

It is particularly striking how, in the process of taking these measures, terms such as “budgetary surveillance” and “fiscal discipline” have become increasingly central to the functioning of the EU. As one typical German finance ministry document proudly put it: “European countries have created a powerful fiscal surveillance system by introducing the enhanced Stability and Growth Pact, the fiscal compact and the European semester. The new system will improve budgetary discipline in the individual countries and help to ensure that public finances remain healthy.” Following the European summit in December 2011 at which the fiscal compact was agreed, the late journalist Ian Traynor―hardly a euroskeptic―wrote that what was emerging from the euro crisis was “a joyless union of penalties, punishments, disciplines and seething resentments.”

Developments since then have only confirmed and advanced this transformation. The emergency summit held in Brussels in July 2015 to discuss the Greek debt situation may turn out to be a critical juncture in the history of the EU. Just before the summit, Wolfgang Schäuble proposed to place €50 billion of Greek assets in a trust in Luxembourg before being privatized, and to temporarily eject Greece from the eurozone if it did not agree to the creditors’ terms. Greece eventually capitulated and received another bailout. But Brussels’ heavy-handed approach may have had a transformative effect on the EU.

The use of conditionality is a central part of that transformation. Conditionality, or attaching conditions to benefits, was originally used in the context of the accession process. EU member states that wanted to adopt the euro were also subject to conditionality through the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact. After the euro crisis began, internal conditionality on eurozone countries was tightened, but it still seemed softer than “external conditionality” because threats against EU member states lacked credibility. That changed, however, with the threat to eject Greece from the euro in July 2015.

This increased use of internal conditionality has transformed the meaning of solidarity within the EU. During the euro crisis, debtor countries demanded solidarity but felt abandoned when creditor countries resisted further debt relief. Meanwhile creditor countries felt they had shown solidarity by agreeing to bailouts in the first place. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: There has indeed been some solidarity in the eurozone since the crisis began, but it is the kind of solidarity that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) preaches―that is, loans in exchange for structural reform. This is not how solidarity was previously understood in the EU.

It is as if the EU is in the process of being remade in the image of the IMF. It increasingly seems to be a vehicle for imposing market discipline on member states—something quite different from the project that the founding fathers and indeed today’s “pro-Europeans” envisioned. In discussions about debt relief for crisis countries, the European Commission has often been even more unyielding than the IMF. As Luigi Zingales put it in July 2015: “If Europe is nothing but a bad version of the IMF, what is left of the European integration project?”

The Core and the Peripheries

The tough approach to member states is also being applied in other policy areas. When central European partners resisted pressure from Germany and the European Commission to accept a mandatory quota of asylum seekers in the autumn of 2015, then-German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière threatened to cut EU cohesion funds. There is also now discussion of using the same approach to punish Hungary and Poland for violations of EU norms on democracy and the rule of law; when the rules governing structural and investment funds are revised ahead of the next budget cycle, it is likely they will include what Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger has called “reinforced conditionality.”

It may well be that this approach is necessary―again, there appears to be no alternative. It is even easier to make the case for applying tough conditionality on respecting the rule of law because one can argue that it is being done in the name of European values. But it is nevertheless part of a wider trend of expanding coercion in the EU. The prospect of conditionality has sparked resentment in eastern European member states. Even EU member states, who worry about democratic deconsolidation in countries like Hungary and Poland wonder if it could also be turned on them.

Conditionality here is particularly problematic because of the political dynamic. Whether in the case of eurozone or refugee policy or the rule of law, it is a “core” Europe that is using conditionality to discipline a “periphery.” In the case of the eurozone, the periphery consists of the debtor countries. In the case of refugee policy and the rule of law, the periphery is represented by central and eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. In each case, however, Germany is at the heart of the core. And the danger is that the EU is increasingly seen as a vehicle for the imposition of German preferences.

Many “pro-Europeans” still think of the core as a continuation of the idea of a “Kerneuropa” that goes back to the 1994 paper published by Wolfgang Schäuble and Karl Lamers. At a time when the EU still had only twelve member states, Schäuble and Lamers argued that some should be able to move ahead with integration even if others were unwilling to do so. Member states such as Denmark and the United Kingdom, which had negotiated opt-outs on various issues, would be outside this core of a multi-speed Europe. But Schäuble and Lamers hoped that the core would act as a kind of magnet, and other member states would eventually follow.

However, a different core has emerged. In the case of the eurozone, it consists not of countries prepared to go furthest in terms of integration but rather of creditor countries within the eurozone, including Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the debtor countries within the eurozone are now commonly referred to as the periphery―a term that, until the crisis began, was mostly used to describe countries that were located on the geographic edges of the EU. In this new Europe where the core is based on competitiveness rather than willingness to integrate, Italy – a founding member and, at least until the crisis began, one of the most “pro-European”―is part of the periphery.

A Competitive Europe

Chancellor Merkel embodies this transformation of the EU more than any other European leader―and has done more than anyone else to make the case for it. She has spoken repeatedly of making Europe competitive economically, and perhaps also geopolitically, with other regions in the world. But in the process, “pro-Europeans” are now increasingly thinking of the EU in terms of competition. Supporters of this approach will argue that in order to be a model, the EU needs to be competitive. But in order to become competitive, the EU may be hollowing out the values it once represented.

In particular, Merkel believes that Europe needs to revisit its spending habits: She likes to say that Europe has seven percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 50 percent of its social spending, suggesting that “it cannot continue to be so generous.” This logic is behind the imposition of harsh austerity measures on crisis countries. However, this competitive Europe bears little resemblance to the one “pro-Europeans” imagined, with their emphasis on the social market economy.

Perhaps the most striking―and disturbing―image for the new, emerging EU comes from Mark Leonard’s book, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. In it, he evokes the Panopticon―a circular building and system of control designed by Jeremy Bentham―as a metaphor for the EU. The idea was to illustrate how the EU used power in such an efficient way that rules ultimately become internalized. But the idea of the EU as panopticon may turn out to have been prescient in a somewhat darker sense. What seems now to be emerging is not so much a “Europe qui protege” as―to quote Michel Foucault―a “Europe qui surveille et punit.”

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© REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

When Germany in early April declined to take part in air strikes against suspected chemical weapons facilities in Syria, nobody was surprised. Chancellor Angela Merkel, now into her fourth term, is known to be highly skeptical of military intervention. But even if she had wanted German forces to join the United States, France, and the United Kingdom in their operation against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, they may not have managed.

The Bundeswehr is dramatically short-staffed, underequipped, and overstretched. Even with 185,000 troops (after France and Italy, the Bundeswehr is the third largest army in the EU), its fire power is woeful. And to make things even more complicated, after the experiences of two world wars started by Germany in the 20th century, this country’s public is overwhelmingly pacifist. Convincing German voters to spend substantially more on modernizing the Bundeswehr is a difficult task.

Yet the world is becoming less secure, and not just in the Middle East. The US, long the guarantor of peace in Europe, has lost interest in the old continent. French President Emmanuel Macron and the European Commission are pushing for steps towards a real European Defense Union. Politically, Germany supports that goal. But given the weakness of the Bundeswehr, dreams of a European army would seem to be just that.

In principle, the new German government is committed to strengthening the Bundeswehr. After many years of decline in real terms, the defense budget is scheduled to increase from €37 billion in 2017 to €42.4 billion in 2021. Yet this only amounts to about 1.2 percent of GDP, far below NATO’s target of two percent. Further, too much of the budget is spent on personnel and maintenance. According to NATO statistics, less than 15 percent of the German defense budget goes toward new equipment, far less than the 20 percent the alliance considers advisable.

“We will breathe life into the European Defense Union,” Merkel’s conservative bloc and her junior partner, the Social Democrats, promised in their coalition agreement. The new government would push forward with the projects agreed under PESCO, the Permanent Structured Cooperation, which brings together 25 EU countries on military cooperation and armaments.

Germany would also make use of the new European Defense Fund and work toward establishing an EU headquarters for civilian and military missions. Berlin doesn’t intend to stop there, either. “We will take further steps on the way to an ‘army of Europeans,’” the coalition agreement says.

Good Intentions

Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen is a passionate European—she was even born in Brussels, where her father worked at the European Commission. Von der Leyen has pushed hard for PESCO and the network of bilateral military cooperation that has allowed German soldiers to train and work together with their French, Dutch, Danish, or Polish colleagues, forming the nucleus of a common army.

But how good are good intentions if the German army is so short of everything? The German public has gotten used to reading about planes, ships, and tanks that don’t work, but the latest yearly report issued by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, Hans-Peter Bartels, was particularly shocking. In late 2017, not a single German submarine worked. Meanwhile, the country’s fighter jets, the Tornadoes, are so ancient―roughly half a century old―that there are doubts about the security of their communications within NATO.

Nor does newer equipment necessarily work better. After enormous delays and cost overruns, the Bundeswehr finally took possession of 14 A400M transport planes. At times, not a single one of them was operable, the report said. German soldiers also don’t have enough gloves, winter hats, or protective vests. Some of their barracks have been so badly maintained that only two out of twelve showers work. In others, soldiers are asked to buy their own cleaning materials for the toilets.

No wonder that the Bundeswehr is woefully short of personnel, too. Who would want to work under such conditions, especially in economic boom times when better paid jobs are plentiful? According to Bartels’ report, Germany’s armed forces are lacking a staggering 21,000 officers and non-commissioned officers, creating critical shortages in several fields. While the navy’s Sea King helicopters actually seem to be working, only three of the eleven required eleven pilots are available.

“Since reunification (in 1990), all reforms of the Bundeswehr aimed not to make the Bundeswehr better, but to shrink the armed forces and make them cheaper,” retired General Erich Vad, now a professor at Munich University, explained in an interview with the magazine Cicero. “And then there is always a concentration on the missions abroad. They need to run smoothly because they are highly visible in the media. Everything is made possible for them. The result is a lack of material and finances for the rank-and-file.”

Currently, the Bundeswehr is engaged in 14 small international missions, adding up to fewer than 4,000 troops altogether. Nevertheless, resources are stretched very thin. “When there is a mission abroad, the equipment and personnel get collected from hundreds of locations,” Vad said. “When we had a NATO mission with a reinforced battalion of 700 troops three years ago, we needed to pull together more than 10,000 pieces of equipment from different locations.”

Trend Reversal

It was 2014 when the political elite finally realized that the days of the peace dividend were over. At the Munich Security Conference, then-president Joachim Gauck declared that Germany needed to take on more international responsibility, also at a military level. That same year, territorial defense―which had been neglected for decades—was catapulted back onto the agenda when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

Von der Leyen, then serving her first term as defense minister, began to reform Germany’s chaotic and inefficient military procurement system. She landed a coup when she convinced one of McKinsey’s leading consultants, Katrin Suder, to enter public service as state secretary. Together, von der Leyen and Suder redrew the entire procedure of planning and ordering armaments systems.

Two years later, in 2016, von der Leyen announced a “trend reversal” for equipment and personnel―a substantial increase in numbers amounting to no less than the promise to bring back a fighting army. Yet major defense contracts take decades to negotiate and implement. The timeline for achieving full results of the reforms has been fixed for 2030.

For now, things on the ground haven’t improved, and nor has troop morale. And while some defense experts believe that von der Leyen is doing a good job, she lacks visible success stories. To add to her woes, her chief aide Katrin Suder quit the Defense Ministry this spring for family-related reasons. Von der Leyen herself managed to hold on to her job as Merkel moved to replace most of her ministers. But she is no longer touted as a possible successor to the chancellor, however. Instead, rumors are circulating that she might move to Brussels as NATO’s next secretary general or as the EU’s head of defense.

But NATO is struggling to adjust to the erratic decisions of the Trump administration, and Europe is still far away from a proper defense of its own—not least due to Germany’s weaknesses. And so, von der Leyen soldiers on in Berlin with a new team of military and civilian leaders, and continues to appeal to parliament and the public for more money and more patience. In the meantime, Germany had better hope to be spared any major crisis.

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© REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

It happened in the blink of an eye: a seemingly mundane personnel decision in Brussels ballooned into a Europe-wide controversy. On February 21, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed his chief of staff, German lawyer Martin Selmayr, as secretary general of the Commission. All 28 European commissioners gathered at 9:35 a.m. to approve the promotion. By 9:39 a.m. the Brussels press corps found emails in their inboxes announcing that Juncker would hold a press conference to discuss the staffing decision. It did not take long for the questions to start swirling: Was this a backroom deal to catapult a deeply influential Brussels careerist into the Commission’s top civil servant position?

From a purely legal perspective, there was nothing wrong with Selmayr’s promotion. But it certainly did not look good, coming as it did one year ahead of important European Parliament elections. The hasty press conference looked no better, and it became clear that many in Brussels were well aware of the trouble Selmayr’s appointment presented.

“The perception was not overwhelmingly positive―it was more the opposite,” admitted Commissioner Günther Oettinger, who oversees budgets and personnel, to MEPs during a hearing on the matter. “The issue has also struck a chord with politically-interested citizens beyond Brussels.”

It has done more than strike a chord: it sparked a furious backlash across Brussels; the European Parliament itself has reproached the Commission for the opaque nature of its appointment process. The episode has also underlined a long-running complaint in Brussels―that Germany is disproportionately represented. After all, three of the four institutions now have German secretaries-general: Selmayr in the Commission, Klaus Welle in the Parliament, and Helga Maria Schmid in the European External Action Service. And if Uwe Corsepius had not returned to Berlin three years ago to oversee European policy in the chancellery, it would be―to put it bluntly―4-0 for Germany against the rest of Europe.

Germans hold other powerbroker positions as well. Four of the six largest parliamentary groups are headed by Germans: Manfred Weber chairs the European People’s Party, Udo Bullmann leads the Social Democrats, Ska Keller leads the Greens, and Gabi Zimmer is at the helm of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left. Klaus Regling serves as the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism―the agency that bails out struggling eurozone member states; Werner Hoyer is President of the European Investment Bank; Klaus-Heiner Lehne is President of the European Court of Auditors, which monitors EU budget management. And if Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, sees his mandate expire next year, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann could be asked to steer the ECB. So is Europe for all intents and purposes in German hands?

The cacophony of dissenting voices is no longer limited to southern Europe. English-language press have also jumped on the Selmayr affair: “Brussels’ Selmayr problem: Too many Germans in top jobs” was the headline in Politico the day of the appointment. But that assessment is questionable.

“I don’t believe these German EU officials are following the German government’s drumbeat, especially not Selmayr―he wasn’t Berlin’s candidate for the job,” commented a high-ranking diplomat from a Mediterranean member state who asked not to be named. “This is a temporary phenomenon. There will be a lot of changes in 2019.”

Doing the Math

That may be the case, but how does one actually measure too much power or influence? There are two approaches to that question, and both cast doubt on the Germany critics’ assumptions. The first is purely quantitative―counting the number of German officials working in the Commission and Parliament (the largest institutions by size). According to the Commission’s annual statistical report released in January, only 2,154 of its 32,196 employees were German nationals―6.7 percent. In comparison, Germany financed 20.6 percent of the union’s budget in 2017 and funds 27 percent of the European Stability Mechanism.

Other member states have far larger representation in the Commission, both in absolute and relative terms. With 5,060 employees and 15.7 percent of the staff, Belgium holds the record―understandable, as the EU’s power structure is based in Brussels. Italy is next with 3,889 officials, or 12.1 percent, followed by France with 3,174, or 9.9 percent. There are also more Spaniards than Germans in the Commission, namely 2,403 (7.5 percent). In terms of population size, Greece is particularly successful in deploying its citizens to Brussels. Although there are about seven times fewer Greeks nationals than Germans, there are 1,296 Greek officials in the Commission.

The Parliament tells a similar story. The office of the EP reported that there are currently 7,698 staff in its service (excluding the MEPs and their staff). Belgium is once again at the top with 1,215 officials, followed by France with 960, Italy with 739, and Spain with 549. Germany has 492 officials in the Parliament, only 6.4 percent of all permanent parliamentary staff. Greece is also very strongly represented here with 306 women and men.

Yet this purely quantitative approach alone does not answer the question of whether German power has overextended its reach. After all, there is a big difference in the political momentum of a director general and that of a rank-and-file official.

The Commission’s statistical bulletin also includes a breakdown of all ranks, listed by member state. That bulletin shows, once again, that Germans are actually under-represented in the Commission. In fact, Germany does not field the most officials at any level. France leads in this category, followed by Italy and Belgium. In other words, the average Commission official is far less likely to be German than expected, and a German is far less likely to occupy higher ranks.

But what about the top layer―the directors general―where the institutional political power is consolidated? With the personnel decision taken on February 21 together with Martin Selmayr’s appointment as Secretary-General, the Commission now has five Directors-General from France, four each from Germany, Italy, and Spain, three from the United Kingdom, two each from Finland, Greece, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and one from Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and Cyprus, respectively.

Of the current German Directors-General, only Johannes Laitenberger has a politically important portfolio. Rudolf Strohmeier heads the Publications Office, Manfred Kraff the Internal Audit Service, and Ann Mettler the European Political Strategy Centre, the Commission’s internal think tank. They may have important positions, but they are political lightweights compared to domestic market, agriculture, regional policy, or business and finance departments. The statistics thus invalidate the argument that the institutions are in German hands.

Networking Power

Still, the tendency of member states to wave their national flags and stir emotions in Brussels is growing. Adriaan Schout, a Senior Research Fellow and Europe coordinator at Clingendael, a Dutch independent think tank on international relations, said: “The topic is coming back, and that is dangerous because it undermines the unity of EU institutions. People already have the impression that Germany and Italy are disproportionately represented.”

Schout believes European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is partly to blame because he dismantled an initiative by his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso, that would have overhauled personnel and management. Commissioners could no longer have a Director-General of the same nationality serve under them. „One of the few good things Barroso did was to eliminate this national flag problem,” Schout added. Yet the Juncker-Commission in January appointed a Greek Director-General to head the department for migration and home affairs despite the fact that the corresponding commissioner is Greek, too.

The debate is only likely to intensify as European elections approach in May 2019, particularly in the context of Draghi’s succession. If appointed, Jens Weidmann would be the first German to lead the ECB―and Draghi’s term already expires in October 2019. Karel Lannoo, CEO of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, questions Weidmann’s appeal, “not because he is German—he is simply a bit too talkative.”

“He has publicly taken clear positions. A central banker should not be a politician,” he said. So where does the perception of German political dominance stem from, if it is not reflected in the staff of the institutions or halls of power? France has not had a world-class president since François Mitterrand; Italy’s inconclusive election is likely to culminate in a government led either by the populist Five-Star Movement or reactionary right-wing Lega party, possibly even both; Spain was shipwrecked in the real estate and financial crisis; and Poland has been sidelined under the conservative PiS government.

Simply put, no one can dispute Germany’s leadership role. And with the institutional strengthening of the European Council under the Lisbon Treaty, European policy—both right and wrong—has become a top priority. Berlin is increasingly becoming a clearing house for all of Europe’s political issues. Since 2003, a research group from the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has regularly asked EU diplomats from all member states the following question: “Which member states do you cooperate with most in order to develop a common position?”

Based on anonymous responses and a scoring system, the group compiled a list of member states that have the most networking power. No surprise here: it’s Germany that is leading the list. And it is not a question of the positions Germans hold in Brussels.

The post The Über-Germans appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

The mood is changing in the Franco-German relationship. Spring has sprung in Berlin and Paris; in the elite Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood and on the Bastille square, the change of season is tempting residents outside to the café terraces. Senior government officials and diplomats sit among them. Warm feelings for one another could blossom, and President Macron’s seminal speech on Europe last autumn at the Sorbonne could finally prompt them to take joint action.

But the opposite seems to be the case. Bitterness and anguish are once again on the horizon. The elites of both capitals look back at a year of lofty statements and joint plans only to realize, with either glee or solemn acceptance, that nothing ended up happening at all. The naysayers already have the upper hand: “Didn’t I tell you guys? You can’t rely on Paris.” Or: “Je vous disais toujours, Germany was never going to take action.” Those in Paris and Berlin seem to prefer talking about new enemies—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Xi Jinping—than about their traditional remaining allies. There is little sign of the reaction these four villains ought to trigger: strengthening the countries’ respective national ranks and, subsequently, the Franco-German alliance.

The Return of Lethargy

Nothing better epitomizes the return of Franco-German lethargy than the reaction of both sides to Macron’s proposal to renew the 1963 Treaty of Friendship between Germany and France. The treaty is the historic, intergovernmental foundation for the reconciliation of France and Germany after the Second World War. It is a masterpiece of two great politicians: Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. Who would want to reformulate that legacy? Who can reconcile German soft power and French nuclear power? Who will forge German civilian-power thinking and French military-power thinking into a durable European alliance against the threats of the 21st century?

I raised these questions in April with Pascal Bruckner in the Café de la Poste, an establishment in the Parisian district of Marais. Bruckner is among France’s “new philosophers,” who have long since begun to age. He is one of the most-translated French authors in the world. Still, he’s never above polemics. So I suggested he write a new Élysée Treaty, France’s less cumbersome name for the historic document. Bruckner laughed—he barely knows Germany, he said. That’s irrelevant, I responded, since no one else seems to be leading the public debate, and someone has to kick it into gear with a bit of common sense. Bruckner squirmed. He had just, in our conversation, committed himself “fully and completely” to Macron, and probably sensed that he could indeed help his president if he picked up where Macron left off in the Sorbonne speech and got behind a new treaty with the Germans. But major Parisian intellectuals like Bruckner are vain and egotistical; they don’t allow others to dictate their topics. The fact that Bruckner had not immediately rejected my suggestion and wanted to think it over was already a great success.

On one point, however, Bruckner was very clear: Enemies form alliances, he said, naming Trump, Erdogan, and Putin, and this ought to prompt Macron and his German partner, Chancellor Angela Merkel, to do the same by standing firmly together. France’s new philosophers have always had a tendency to plow the great field of foreign policy with simple moral messages. During the Cold War they used sharp rhetoric to resist Germany’s Ostpolitik. Forget Wandel durch Handel, as Germany’s then-chancellor Willy Brandt put it. For Bruckner and his most famous comrades-in-arms, André Glucksmann and Henri Bernard-Lévy, it was all about resisting the “power of evil” in the form of the Soviet Union. Every military build-up was considered legitimate. They consistently took the side of eastern dissidents, from Lech Walesa to Vaclav Havel.
Courage and Humanity

To some extent, Macron has followed in their footsteps over the past year, but with a twist—he has unequivocally declared Germany a force for good in the face of the new global state of disorder. One may recall his appearance at Berlin’s Humboldt University on January 10, 2017. “I’ve already said it once, but I’ll repeat it here: German society has confronted the mass arrival of refugees with admirable clarity, with courage and humanity,” Macron said at the time, in the heat of France’s presidential election campaign.

It was on that January day, if not earlier, that Macron declared his allegiance to the good Germany. He repeated it in every campaign speech. He never took the podium without his “German friends.” For Macron there were never any other allies, say, the Italians or the Spanish, who were quite as important. No, the good guys at his side were, above all others, “les amis allemands.”

Word got around. A new Franco-German impetus for the EU seemed possible. Macron’s electoral victory moved closer and, when the newly elected president took office and began courting the German chancellor more forcefully than ever before, the Franco-German pair seemed, at their summit meeting on July 13 in Paris, almost on par with the world’s greatest powers.

The German federal election in autumn 2017 did little to disturb the feeling of gentle euphoria on both sides of the Rhine. On the contrary, the fact that Germany was governed by a caretaker cabinet for months after the election explained perfectly why no action followed Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne shortly after the German election, where he had once again made the Franco-German awakening seem close enough to touch. After all, Macron was just waiting for Merkel, whose fourth term as chancellor was never really in doubt. In the spring, at Easter, they would really get going together.

Until Merkel’s re-inauguration on March 14, 2018, the optimists held onto hope. After that, however, the euphoria to the west and east of the Rhine began to evaporate. It is as if all participants suddenly realized, at the ring of an alarm clock, that they had been dreaming for a year. As if Merkel’s new term came with the understanding that the time for lofty speeches by the French president was over, and it was time to get back to the hard work of day-to-day business. In other words: enough with the chatter about a big eurozone budget!

Back Burner Thinking

Macron proposed a eurozone budget worth several per cent of eurozone GDP in August 2017. One per cent of eurozone GDP is 130 billion euros. Officials from the German Finance Ministry, who did not want to be named, responded immediately by stating that spending more than 25 billion on new measures for the eurozone was not on the cards. This sort of back burner thinking seems to be shared by the new German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. Macron has already dialled back his expectations. It will be “a few years” before a eurozone budget is devised, according to people close to Macron who have watched the beginning of Merkel’s fourth term unfold.

Evidently, the long winter, which for government-free Berlin was also a winter of political wrangling, drained Franco-German energy. But there was no rest for the wicked. Trump kicked off his trade war. Putin and Erdogan kept playing their games in Syria. Xi had himself elected president for life. And Paris and Berlin had no response. That called the doubters into action.

From the Hôtel Matignon in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, where the prime minister governs, one can already anticipate the backlash against the president’s German-friendly plan. The memories are still fresh; it was exactly the same during the refugee crisis in 2015. Francois Hollande, the lord of Elysée Palace at the time, did not hesitate to get behind Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees stranded on the Balkan route. But his prime minister, Manuel Valls, revolted. Valls would later visit a refugee camp in Munich to declare his opposition to Germany’s asylum policy. A coherent Franco-German position on refugees, one that every EU citizen could understand, remained elusive.

That could well be different in spring 2018. Paris and Berlin want to put forward a joint concept for a European refugee policy at the European Council summit in June. So far, however, it does not look like it will be well-received.

Scholz’ first appearance as German finance minister on the seventh floor of the French Finance Ministry—with a view of the Seine and the Notre Dame cathedral—was a humiliation for the French esprit. Before further decisions could be made, Scholz announced, expert groups had to meet and do the ministers’ homework. He was referring to the European banking union, introduced back in 2014. For years, the French have considered the completion of the banking union through a common European deposit insurance scheme the closest minimum target for the further integration of the eurozone.

So to the French, the issue had long been settled. Not for Scholz. The man quibbled, as if both sides hadn’t been negotiating this since 2009, as if most of the work had been left for the new German finance minister to do. Scholz held a lengthy press conference with his counterpart Bruno Le Maire. At its conclusion, a French journalist—who apparently had not understood Scholz’s message—asked if he, the German social democrat, would nevertheless be the man in the German cabinet to push for further integration of the eurozone. Scholz answered with one word: “Ja!” But at this stage hardly anyone present was buying it. If they had, the question wouldn’t have been necessary.

Gaining the Upper Hand

The Germany-skeptics in Paris are even stronger after lost opportunities like that. Macron had muzzled them for a year. He had installed only obvious friends of Germany at Elysée Palace. Above all there is Philippe Etienne, the former French ambassador in Berlin, whom Macron made his Sherpa for the G7 and the G20 and thus his most important foreign policy coordinator. This made it clear that Paris was seeking to close coordination with Berlin on every foreign policy decision. Etienne and the other advisors around Macron spoke fluent German—a novelty that needed no diplomatic explanation.

Macron’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe speaks good German too. But he comes from the political school of Alain Juppé, who wanted to run against Macron in the last presidential elections, though he lost in the conservative primaries and bowed out early. Juppé has a reputation as an exemplary pro-European, but he is a southern Frenchman through and through and Germany has always been foreign to him. Many of Juppé’s former employees are now in Philippe’s circle of advisors in the Hôtel Matignon. The fact that resistance to a seemingly naïve, pro-Berlin president is brewing there should not surprise anyone.

Macron’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian might also condone opposition to Macron’s German-friendly policy. In Paris one hears stories that he once enjoyed bashing Germany in his home province of Brittany. In the autumn of 2016, in the turbulence that followed the British vote to leave, Le Drian, then defence minister, held a press conference with his German counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen. He agreed to enhance Franco-German defence cooperation, but many military experts in Paris were reluctant to believe him. For he had previously, on a visit home to Brittany, aired his conviction that France’s military superiority over Germany was actually a blessing, and ought to be preserved.

So Le Drian is probably a Germany-skeptic—just as Scholz is presumably a France-skeptic, compared to the avowed Macron fans Sigmar Gabriel and Martin Schulz, who are no longer relevant within the SPD. The anti-French grumblers have a long tradition. They are a force to be reckoned with. The they inserted a Bundestag preamble to the 1963 Franco-German Treaty of Friendship that emphasized their country’s alliance with the United States. With that, the treaty was stillborn. De Gaulle announced France’s withdrawal from NATO shortly afterwards.

Today one wonders which preamble the German Bundestag would put before a new version of the treaty, which, according to current plans, the president and chancellor are to sign in January 2019. Will the Bundestag, at the request of the right-wing AfD and the pro-business FDP opposition parties, specify that a balanced German budget is a precondition for any increase in the eurozone budget? Or will it, at the request of the Greens and the Left, stipulate that Germany will take no responsibility for any future use of nuclear weapons by France?

Turning the Tide

There is still time to turn the tide. High time! Pascal Bruckner and Durs Grünbein, who most certainly read and esteem one another, should write a new Elysée Treaty together—and why not as a poem? Sigmar Gabriel and François Hollande should, as retired politicians, write a new Élysée Treaty—they have already teamed up to save Greece from Wolfgang Schäuble and his intention to toss the country out of the eurozone. But CEOs Joe Kaeser of Siemens and Henry Poupart-Lafarge of Alstom should also write a treaty of friendship—they are currently negotiating the merger of their respective companies and yet continue to compete for every contract.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of whether, after 1963, after German reunification, after the financial crisis of 2008, after the rise of China and Putin’s Russian renaissance, after Brexit and the Trump vote, there is wisdom in Franco-German unity. The Brit Gideon Rachman, columnist at the Financial Times, seems to believe there is. He sees the EU as the “only real mechanism for trying to find solutions to pan-European problems that are legal, humane and equitable.”

That is exactly what the Franco-German friendship should aim to do. With regards to how best to go about it, well, the elites in Prenzlauer Berg and on the Bastille ought to rack their brains this spring. There ought to be quarrels and sparring between Paris and Berlin. If that is the case, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel could soon reap the rewards. For that to happen, however, the German side may have to adopt some of France’s arrogance: the arrogance to say, we, Germany and France, are the force for good. That is something many Europeans would understand.

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