The European Council on Foreign Relations

The Scorecard tour: Stockholm

Date: 15th February 2012  |  Author: Mark Leonard,

Categories: Europe and the world, Scorecard,
Tags: None

This blog post by Mark Leonard is one of a series (mainly by lead author Hans Kundnani) on the debates in a series of events on ECFR's Foreign Policy Scorecard 2012 across Europe and beyond.

I have just got back from Stockholm where Anna Jardfelt, the dynamic director of the Swedish Institute for international relations, organised a fantastic event to launch our Scorecard. The speakers included Gunilla Carlsson (minister for development), Björn Fägersten, and Olof Ehrenkrona, and the chair was Mark Rhinard.

Sweden’s performance was one of the headlines of this year’s Scorecard. We looked at the performance of individual member states across 30 issues and were quite surprised with the results. At any time over the last few decades I would have expected to find France and the UK way out ahead, a more passive Germany coming in much further down, and no smaller countries in the top echelons of the leader-board. Instead we found some surprises:

•          Germany has become more much powerful on foreign policy– leading in more areas than any other member state - and though it was not always a leader; it was never a follower. Rather than deferring to France and the UK it was not afraid to upset the apple cart on Libya, MENA and other areas.

•          France retained a hyper-active policy but it was sometimes a leader without followers, sometimes failing to build lasting coalitions because of its unilateralism

•          The UK was increasingly passive and marginal, failing to unite its natural allies behind policy drive

•          Because of the challenges in Brussels and unilateralism and mercantilism of the big member states, Poland and Sweden moved into the vacuum to punch above their weight, assuming leadership on many issues in spite of their medium sizes and their absence from the euro.

In fact, Sweden was a “leader” on 11 components of European foreign policy – more than Italy and Spain combined. It built on historic strengths on multilateral issues, making disproportionately large aid contributions, and speaking with a forceful voice on human rights. But it went beyond the Olaf Palme era comfort zone with a substantial increase of annual aid to North Africa and strong support for UN resolutions on the uprising in Libya.

Leadership is a combination of resources, projects and alliance-building and Sweden and Poland were very good at focusing resources on projects. Of course, personalities matter as well.  But I think that the euro crisis could make it more difficult for countries such as Poland and Sweden to play a role like this in the future if they find themselves in the slow lane of a two-speed Europe.

We had a really good debate about all these issues with the development minister setting out a vision of European foreign policy; Olof Ehrenkrona pointing out that Sweden is perhaps able to play a leading role because it has so far not been affected by the euro crisis, its strength in soft security is becoming increasingly central to Europe’s foreign policy, and because of the silence of other member states on human rights in an economic crisis. Björn Fägersten gave a brilliantly cynical response asking the government representatives if Sweden should not be more of a slacker rather than indulging in all of this leadership.

For the record, here are the lists of the top ‘leaders’ and ‘slackers’ among the EU member states:

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