To summit or not to summit?
Macron is holding another Ukraine defence 'coalition of the willing' leaders meeting in Paris today. That these are not happening in Brussels shows how broken the EU's institutional infrastructure is.
After a week which witnessed the dramatic collapse of the transatlantic alliance as we’ve known it for the past 75 years, European leaders have been left scrambling to react. Zooming out, they need to have some kind of coordinated response that would say, however unconvincingly, that Europe can make itself relevant without the US protectorate. Zooming in, they urgently need to answer the question of whether they are willing to commit ground troops to defend a bilateral US-Russia ‘peace’ deal for Ukraine, and how to leverage that commitment unto giving Europe a seat at the negotiating table (and also insisting on one for Ukraine).
Following the shock announcement last Wednesday that Trump has bilaterally started negotiations with Putin over Ukraine’s fate and already conceded no NATO membership and a loss of territory, here in Brussels people were immediately asking why European Council chair Antonio Costa wasn’t convening an emergency summit of EU prime ministers and presidents in Brussels to react. He didn’t, and still hasn’t (as of the writing this, Costa’s team are still saying there are no plans for an emergency EU summit). So French President Emmanuel Macron convened an emergency summit of his own in Paris, with the leaders of Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Britain, Netherlands and Denmark. But a lot of feathers were ruffled in the EU’s East over not being invited. So today, following yesterday’s start of bilateral US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, he’s assembled the B-team.
It’s unclear at this point which countries’ leaders were invited to this hybrid meeting but declined and which just weren’t invited. It is obvious why pro-Putin Orban (Hungary) and Fico (Slovakia) weren’t invited. It is also somewhat understandable why the neutral non-NATO countries (Austria, Switzerland, Cyprus and Malta - Ireland announced this afternoon they’re participating virtually) wouldn’t attend. But I’m struggling to understand why NATO members Portugal, Iceland and Luxembourg won’t be there.
The bigger question, however, is why these summits are happening in Paris and not Brussels. The next European Council summit is scheduled for 20 March, by which point there may have been several rounds of US-Russia talks that shut out the Europeans. Who knows, maybe Trump and Putin will have already decided Ukraine’s fate between them by then, and by 20 March they will be demanding that the Europeans enforce the deal. There is in theory an obvious reason why the EU is not having a reaction summit - foreign policy is still an issue that requires unanimity in Council, and Viktor Orban can veto any decisions. But this argument would be more convincing if the summit on Monday had decided anything without him. It is virtually certain that today’s B-team summit will also end with no decisions - how can they when the A-team isn’t there? This is, in short, a mess. Costa’s insistence that his summits will be drama-free and informal is colliding with the reality that these times are anything but drama-free. And it shows just how broken the EU’s institutional architecture is that the union is incapable of responding to this crisis. For the reasons outlined below, the Council is just too fundamentally broken to lead the union in a time like this. So, who can?