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Why the EU fails

A couple of weeks ago, ECFR Senior Policy Fellow Nick Witney and Executive Director Mark Leonard spoke at a European conference in Helsinki on 'Why the EU fails'. 

The conference, hosted by the Finnish Institute for International Relations on 3-4 December, was attended by a number of prominent Europeans including Oxford Professor and ECFR Council Member Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila. In an effort to address the wider theme of ‘why the EU fails', the event's sessions dealt with the topics of euro-scepticism, lack of political leadership in the EU, supra-nationalism, the financial crisis, the Lisbon strategy, crisis management and the global role of the EU.

Nick Witney specifically spoke on transatlantic relations, describing the EU's current failure on this front as ‘spectacular'. Echoing Witney and Shapiro's recent report ‘Towards a Post-American Europe: A Power Audit of EU-US Relations', he stated that many EU Member States continue to hold on to the outdated belief in the existence of a privileged bilateral partnership with the US.

In the conference's closing speech, Mark Leonard portrayed the EU's current state as one of a ‘twenty year crisis'. Despite the success of the 1990s, the EU has done little to re-think its overall strategy, while other world powers have reconceptualised theirs and ultimately re-defined the global geo-political environment. He called on the EU to seize the opportunities presented by Lisbon to define Europe's power identity in an increasingly multi-polar world and offered specific recommendations for enhancing EU capacity as well as the EU's regional, global and normative powers.