The EU’s reputation in much of the rest of the world has a serious problem. Many political elites in emerging countries not only consider the EU and its member states a declining force in global politics but also accuse them of double standards for mobilizing support for Ukraine while ignoring crucial concerns of countries in the South. Resentments that accumulated over centuries of European domination are coming to the fore. To make matters worse, Russia and China have launched powerful disinformation campaigns that misrepresent and denigrate the EU’s policies. To counter these negative tendencies, the EU needs to adopt a humble but more active and engaged foreign policy, avoid the trap of binary worldviews, and position itself as a genuine force for reform of the international order.
Overcome Eurocentricity
Speaking in February 2023, Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said, “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but [that] the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” The criticism does not seem entirely fair, as countries across the globe perceive challenges that are close to home as more urgent than problems that are faraway. However, the minister rightly pointed to a problem of mindset.
EU foreign policy has always been marked by a set of somewhat contradictory ambitions. In declarations, EU Council conclusions, and the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the union projects the self-image of a global actor on a mission to promote a rules-based order across the globe. This image sometimes goes together with traces of an old sense of superiority shaped by centuries of Europe’s dominant position in the world.
But the EU’s concrete foreign policy work—with some important exceptions, such as trade, aid, and climate change—focuses primarily on the regions that surround the EU. Developments in Europe’s neighborhood take up by far the most space in foreign policy discussions in Brussels. Relations with more distant parts of the world are often handled through declarations and rare, ritualistic meetings.
These conflicting visions of the EU’s purpose in its external relations have always been there. They reflect the divergent worldviews of a heterogeneous group of countries, which include (former) world powers as well as small nations whose foreign policies mostly focus on their immediate neighbors. In recent years, one can detect a shift toward a regional perspective—a trend reinforced by the departure from the EU of the UK, which is a country with a highly developed global engagement.
Many in the European foreign policy community now believe that the EU needs to draw the conclusions of its declining influence, abandon its global ambitions, and focus its foreign policy even more on its immediate neighborhood. Incapable of shaping global developments, the EU should, observers argue, concentrate its efforts on the places where it can still hope to make a difference. This proposed downscaling of ambition may seem superficially plausible, but it would be just as mistaken as the global hubris of yesterday. The fact is that the EU’s fate is intimately entangled with developments across the world. The union can thrive only in an international system in which basic rules are respected. Globalization may have lost momentum, but it will not be reversed. The EU’s prosperity depends on worldwide trade, its security on intercontinental partnerships. And what people think of Europe and its policies will have an impact on both.
At the moment, the global battle of narratives does not look good for the EU and its member states. They are failing to persuade much of the rest of the world of their understanding of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. There have been severe setbacks for European influence in North and sub-Saharan Africa. Numerous coups have resulted in regimes sharply critical of the West. Several European military operations aiming to fight insurgencies have been expelled from the Sahel. And more recently, Western support for Israel in the Gaza war since October 2023 has triggered an avalanche of criticism in many parts of the world. A 2022 Carnegie report showed how Southern countries’ perceptions of the EU vary across regions and issues and have been shaped by difficult historical legacies.
Resentment toward the legacy of centuries of dominance by European countries has, of course, existed for a long time. But as long as the power of these countries was respected, it remained muted. Now, as the balance of global economic and political power is shifting away from Europe, frustration and anger are boiling up. And China and Russia are working hard to exploit these feelings to promote their own geopolitical objectives.
The EU now needs a foreign policy that is both more humble and more ambitious: humble in the sense not of doing less but of recognizing that one needs to do a great deal more to have an impact in the new global constellation; and ambitious in aiming for strong and well-managed partnerships with countries in other regions that are now essential for Europe to promote its interests and objectives.
Scale Up Engagement and Communicate Better
There cannot be one single, universally applicable approach to countering the decline of European influence. Instead, the EU should develop targeted strategies to upgrade its engagement with particular countries and regions. The union should devote special attention to middle powers, such as Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. In the context of growing rivalry between the United States and China, these countries are determined to be “at the table and not on the menu,” in the words of political scientist Ivan Krastev, and they have the power and ambition to shape the future of their regions. Geographic proximity and multiple interdependencies make Africa a top priority for enhancing the EU’s engagement. Pivotal regions, such as Central Asia and Southeast Asia, also deserve significant attention.
Of course, ramping up global diplomatic engagement requires considerable capacity. But the potential is already there. With twenty-seven foreign ministers and foreign ministries, the EU contains probably the greatest concentration of diplomatic capacity anywhere in the world. The notion that the EU should employ more national diplomatic resources to promote its foreign policy objectives is as old as the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. The EU Council has, at various points, endorsed the idea of giving national ministers EU mandates to work with third countries. In a few cases, this has taken place, but never systematically. Using this potential at scale would greatly upgrade the EU’s diplomatic outreach across the world. It would benefit the participating member states as much as the EU collectively, and it would also enable greater cohesion in EU foreign policy.
The EU’s foreign policy high representative currently has the impossible job of juggling multiple roles and conflicting commitments. In addition to mobilizing support from the member states, one easy way of alleviating this problem would be to double-hat several European commissioners as the high representative’s deputies and task them to work on certain regions or topics. Involving the member states and the European Commission systematically in the implementation of EU foreign policy would require planning and coordination. The European External Action Service seems well placed to function as a coordinating platform and ensure that these outreach activities follow a coherent strategy.
The EU is a notoriously bad communicator. To some extent, this is due to the commission’s preference for a technocratic mode of communication, which results partly from bureaucratic caution and partly from the complexity of the EU’s procedures and regulations. An anonymous African official was once quoted as saying that while “some countries make us offers we can’t refuse, [the EU] makes us offers we do not understand.” The EU has achieved some progress in recent years in making its messaging clearer and more comprehensible, but there is still much room for improvement.
The EU member states’ natural interest in cultivating the highest possible national profile in third countries also makes it difficult to get the EU’s collective message across. Sometimes, member states perceive EU communication more as competition than as a common concern.
Finally, the EU and its member states are today targets of vast and highly sophisticated disinformation campaigns. Much of this activity is aimed at destabilizing and disrupting democratic processes in the EU, but it is also employed as a potent weapon in the global battle of narratives to misrepresent and malign the EU’s policies in third countries. The EU institutions have begun to address these attacks on the union’s international reputation, including by setting up a task force for sub-Saharan Africa and a communication hub in Beirut. But if the EU wants to counter the spread of false or misleading information about the union and its policies and, at the same time, make sure that its own messages are heard and understood, it will have to do a great deal more to upgrade its communication efforts in third countries.
Avoid the Trap of Binary Choices
The current global situation clearly has a bipolar dimension. Relations between the two most powerful countries, the United States and China, are likely to dominate international politics in the coming years. Together with Russia, China is trying to turn the BRICS group, which earlier this year was expanded to five additional countries, into a counterpart of the G7 to propagate a worldview of the West against the rest. As a close partner of the United States, the EU cannot escape the logic of bipolarity altogether, but it should avoid the trap of looking at global politics primarily through this lens.
Rather, the union should contain the space of bipolar competition as much as possible and engage with other parts of the world on the basis of interests and values, not in terms of belonging to different camps. In its transatlantic relationship, the EU should also promote a nonbinary approach to foreign policy. Looking at middle powers as hedging or fence sitting and pressuring them to choose sides is likely to be counterproductive. Most of them will just continue to pursue their own interests in a complex and volatile international situation.
The tendency of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to divide the world into democracies and autocracies is also likely to alienate many countries in the South. As the invitation lists of the democracy summits convened by Washington have shown, this framing inevitably leads to double standards when it is employed in the context of geopolitical rivalry. Geopolitical interests usually trump concerns over the quality of governance. There are many shades of democracy and authoritarian rule in today’s world. A binary approach is as counterproductive in terms of geopolitics as it is harmful for democracy promotion.
The EU’s way of promoting its values also needs updating. There is a profound mismatch between the union’s self-image as a bastion of democracy and human rights and the way other countries perceive the bloc. Democratic backsliding and rule-of-law deficits in EU countries have further weakened its credibility. The era of preaching values and crude conditionality is clearly over. To the extent that the EU can still make a difference, it is probably by working closely with civil society and supporting local actors.
In the EU’s engagement with the world, labels matter, too. Coined by American activist Carl Oglesby in 1969, the concept of the “Global South” was initially used mainly by nongovernmental organizations and development agencies after the term “third world” had become obsolete with the end of the Cold War. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the Global South broadly comprises Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania minus Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. In the last two years, the use of the term has shot up as a catch-all for countries that prefer to remain neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war.
But today’s Global South cannot be compared with the Cold War–era Non-Aligned Movement, which had an organizational structure and a distinct political orientation. By contrast, the countries of the Global South have hardly anything in common. Most current conflicts happen between countries in this group. Some of them are not even in the southern hemisphere. The term is therefore little more than a rhetorical device, usually employed to express grievances against the North—or, rather, the West. European countries should not shy away from dealing with the dark legacy of empires and colonial exploitation and the continuing reality of gross inequality. But they need to do so while addressing concrete issues and on the basis of genuine partnerships. In this context, the concept of the Global South is unlikely to be helpful.
The European counterpart of the Global South is the concept of Fortress Europe promoted by populist-right forces in EU countries. It is the most dangerous frame of all, as it goes together with antimigration, anti-Islam, and nativist attitudes that aggravate the South’s mistrust of and hostility toward Europe. The EU is surrounded by heavily populated regions, with which it is connected through a dense network of ties. Were a Fortress Europe mindset to prevail, this would greatly damage Europe’s economic, cultural, and human relations with its neighbors as well as harm economic development, exacerbate governance problems, and undermine stability in neighboring regions. Both the EU and its surrounding regions would be much worse off, and Europe’s relations with other parts of the world would take another downward turn.
In responding to the pressures of a geopolitical world, the EU has to become more resilient, but it can never be isolationist. It has to become more protective of its interests but not protectionist. And it cannot become a fortress but should, on the contrary, act as a hub for a broad coalition of countries interested in preserving an orderly world.
Be a Force for Reform, not a Defender of the Status Quo
Several decades of globalization have resulted in a dense network of ties and multiple interdependencies that can only be abandoned at huge cost. The vast majority of governments understand that the future prosperity of their countries requires a high level of international cooperation, which needs a functioning institutional and legal framework. Few governments can be called true revisionists in the sense that they are committed to upsetting the organizing principles of the existing international order. At the same time, much of the political elite, particularly in the South, considers the current international order deeply flawed and in need of repair. As long as the EU is perceived as a staunch defender of the status quo, the gap that has opened up in recent years between the union and much of the rest of the world will continue to widen. It will begin to close if the EU succeeds in positioning itself as a force for reform.
Multilateral diplomacy, for instance, is an area in which the EU remains influential, although it has lost some ground over recent years. Multiparty negotiations that seek outcomes on which all sides agree are the EU’s daily bread in Brussels and therefore constitute one of the bloc’s comparative advantages as an international actor. But the UN system and the Bretton Woods institutions feature several Western privileges in terms of representation and voting rights that reflect the world of the late 1940s and are at odds with the power constellation of today. The EU and its member states should therefore support reforms to make international decisionmaking processes more equitable to ensure the continued legitimacy of these institutions and prevent alternative institutional arrangements sponsored by Russia and China from gaining support.
Another important area for reform is trade. The EU remains the world’s largest trading power. It is currently the top trading partner of eighty countries—fewer than for China but almost four times as many as for the United States—and is by far the most open bloc for imports from developing countries. Excluding fuels, the EU imports more from these countries than do the United States, Canada, Japan, and China combined. However, some of the EU’s recent policy changes aimed at ensuring greater resilience, security, and autonomy and protecting the union’s competitiveness are perceived in Southern countries as protectionist steps that hinder their economic development. The EU therefore needs to ensure that adjusting its trade policy to the harsh realities of geopolitical competition does not come at a cost to the union’s openness toward its partners in the South.
The same is true for several measures taken in the context of the EU’s climate policies, in particular the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a tariff on carbon-intensive imports into the EU. It will be crucial to avoid the impression that after damaging the climate in the process of their own economic development, European countries now use arguments of climate policy to deny emerging countries the opportunity to rise to prosperity. To the extent that the EU’s efforts to achieve greater resilience or prevent carbon leakage have adverse effects on Southern countries, the union needs to offer effective compensation using its various instruments, including the Global Gateway initiative for infrastructure investment, climate funds, and development banks.
Together with its member states, the EU continues to be by far the biggest provider of development aid, accounting for 43 percent of global official development assistance in 2021. Much of the EU’s aid is locked into multiannual programs that are drawn up and implemented separately from the bloc’s foreign policy. In earlier decades, there might have been some justification for keeping longer-term development objectives free from contamination by short-term foreign policy interests. However, at a time of the weaponization of everything, it might be time to review this approach. Making development funding more flexible and integrating it more efficiently into other strands of the EU’s external policies would enable the union not only to protect its interests better but also to respond more rapidly and effectively to its partners’ needs.
Finally, Europe’s migration policies are a crucial factor in the EU’s relations with other parts of the world. Irregular entries into the bloc remain a toxic issue, but unlike during the so-called refugee crisis in 2014–2016, most European governments now understand that significant legal immigration will be necessary to alleviate their countries’ rapid demographic declines. This realization opens the space for a new understanding with migrants’ countries of origin. Through fair offers, including arrangements for work visas, circular migration, and the financing of training in these countries, the EU should aim at replacing irregular with regular migration. In parallel, EU countries should expand resettlement schemes to provide asylum seekers with legal access to the EU and, in so doing, reduce irregular entries and disrupt the business model of people smugglers.
Conclusion
The global battle of narratives goes only so far. Ultimately, the EU’s reputation and credibility will depend on whether the union avoids the traps of binary choices and simplistic framings and—most critically—whether it is ready to seriously address the legitimate concerns of countries in the South.
Positioning the EU as a force for reform will not be easy. The uncomfortable reality of Europe’s declining weight on the global scale triggers in many Europeans a defensive and conservative reaction and a sense of acute vulnerability. The temptation to scale back the EU’s international engagement to concentrate on protecting core interests is strong. But if this attitude prevails in shaping the EU’s policies, it will only accelerate Europe’s decline.
The truth is that the EU still has enormous potential, and many countries across the world look at the union as a crucial ally in safeguarding and strengthening an orderly world. The EU can only exploit this potential, however, if instead of retrenching, it seriously enhances its international engagement. And this, in turn, will require considerable leadership and political will. The work on turning the tide of global opinion starts at home.