Tag Archive for: Europe

The EU is punishing young Hungarians

The European Commission has decided to suspend funding to 21 Hungarian universities from its Horizon Europe initiative, which supports cross-border collaboration on research and development, and its Erasmus+ study-abroad program. The aim is to defend the rule of law: the universities in question are run by ‘public trust foundations’, which are not subject to EU public-procurement rules and include individuals with close ties to the government. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a more misguided and counterproductive decision.

To be sure, in the face of possible corruption and conflicts of interest, the European Union has the legal authority and obligation to take appropriate action, including freezing or withdrawing some funds. But cutting Hungarian universities off from Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe funding will do far more harm than good.

Erasmus+ funding enables students to spend time at foreign universities. Over the last three decades, more than 10 million young people—equivalent to the entire population of Hungary—have benefited from Erasmus+ (and its predecessor programs), making it one of Europe’s most powerful instruments for supporting integration. In 2020, more than 22,000 Hungarians participated in Erasmus+ exchanges.

The benefits of Erasmus+ extend far beyond the curriculum. The program enables young people to establish connections and form friendships with their European classmates at a time in their lives when they are developing their worldviews and planning their futures. There is abundant evidence that exposure to foreign cultures makes people—especially the young—more open and tolerant. How does preventing Hungarian students from gaining such exposure support European values like democracy and the rule of law? What good will it do Europe if its young people lack connections to their Hungarian peers?

The Horizon Europe program—which enables researchers from across the EU to work together to drive innovation that serves the public interest—is no different. Its predecessor, Horizon 2020, allocated some €80 billion ($122 billion) to research efforts involving not only EU countries, but also more than a dozen non-EU partners, such as Israel and Turkey. Horizon Europe’s budget is even bigger at €95.5 billion. Mandatory open access to research results amplifies the program’s impact.

Both Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe foster cooperation and bolster integration—the pillars of Europe’s strength and influence. Their beneficiaries are primarily open-minded, pro-European people who generally lack political influence, though some—particularly young people—may go on to challenge governments that are defying European values.

Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe do not benefit power-political players, in Hungary or elsewhere. Erasmus+ offers no major endowments, only individual grants for students. While Horizon Europe provides somewhat higher sums—about €1 million, on average—those grants are issued to teams of about five researchers and disbursed over several years. Billion-euro infrastructure projects may raise significant risks of corruption or conflicts of interest that must be tackled; Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe do not.

Some Hungarian institutions, such as Corvinus University of Budapest (of which one of the authors is rector), have instituted competitive procurement rules to ensure good governance. From 2014 to 2020, Corvinus won €3.6 million in Horizon 2020 research funding for 11 projects. Before the suspension decision, Corvinus had won €4 million in Horizon Europe funding in 2022 alone. Blocking further contributions from the university is clearly counterproductive.

After the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, it was excluded from Erasmus+ and Horizon 2020. But that decision was made by the British—and lamented by EU leaders. And the decision was soon partly reversed. Recognising the folly of cutting research ties to the EU, the UK negotiated access to Horizon Europe in late 2020.

Now, the EU is taking the lead in excluding partners from these critical programs, which support not only learning and innovation, but also the sharing of values and culture—the building blocks of a successful, unified Europe. In its bid to look like it is strengthening the EU, the European Commission is doing the opposite.

The EU should stand up to those who are destabilising it, but Erasmus+ students and Horizon Europe researchers are not those people. To punish them for the actions of their country’s leaders is to punish Europe itself. That is why the European Commission must urgently reverse its decision to halt funding to Hungarian institutions and reinstate all Hungarian students and researchers in EU programs.

Young people are our best hope for a better future. We should be giving them every opportunity to learn, grow and connect, not cutting them off from their own future.

The price of Europe’s expansion fatigue

The 19th-century English historian J.R. Seeley famously said Britain acquired its empire in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. The same could be said of the post–Cold War European Union. In some ways, the EU’s enlargement beyond its Western European core happened in a fit of distraction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, it is growing weary.

Europe’s boundaries have always been flexible in the minds of its leaders. To Charles de Gaulle, Europe included Russia as far as the Ural Mountains. In 2018, France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, proposed a more nuanced, if controversial, definition: a Europe of ‘concentric circles’, with each circle signifying a different level of identity. It is a vision of a two-tier Europe in which Eastern and Southeastern European countries are put in their place.

While Macron’s idea never became official EU policy, it reflects an entrenched mental map that devalues Europe’s periphery. According to the worldview currently prevailing in the EU, the fringes are only important when the core needs them, or when they become a threat to its security.

At the 2020 EU – Western Balkans summit, during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Europe’s leaders approved a large aid package for Eastern and Southeastern Europe. In separate interventions, Russia and China did, too. But the EU also lent its support to the accession of Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to the bloc. Then–German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the move responded to an ‘absolute geostrategic interest’.

Yet not even Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has brought these countries closer to membership. In June, the EU granted candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova, generating disillusionment among leaders in the Western Balkans, where accession negotiations have ground to a halt.

But why is Europe stalling? At the 2022 EU – Western Balkans summit, Europe’s leaders insisted that EU membership must be ‘based upon credible reforms, fair and rigorous conditionality and the principle of own merits’. In short, they said the region isn’t ready. But that isn’t the whole story.

There’s little doubt that Western Balkan instability, compounded by weakly established democratic institutions, underlies Europe’s hesitancy. Today, Serbia and Kosovo are at loggerheads over territorial and cultural issues. While Kosovo has made progress in implementing the rule of law and fighting corruption, tensions between ethnic Serbs and the Albanian majority keep the territory divided. Several EU members—Spain, Romania, Greece, Slovakia and Cyprus—don’t even recognise Kosovo’s sovereignty.

Likewise, Macedonia struggled with EU members’ demands. In 2019, it changed its name to North Macedonia under Greek pressure. And even though Bulgaria lifted its veto on North Macedonia’s EU accession in June, it insists that Macedonian cannot be recognised as an official language.

But none of these issues should block EU membership. The truth is that Europe is suffering from enlargement fatigue, particularly when it comes to countries that wouldn’t contribute to the EU budget if they joined.

The EU is also wary of authoritarianism. Tellingly, Slovenia’s then prime minister, Janez Jansa, himself a target of EU criticism, complained: ‘The problem is that 90% of the topics in the EU institutions are not dedicated to the strategic goal of enlargement. The topic is how to expel some members and thus not expand the EU, but reduce it.’

In a sense, Jansa was right. At a time when EU leaders struggle to confront illiberal governments in Hungary and Poland, admitting Serbia under autocratic President Aleksandar Vucic probably seems as worrying as it is exhausting. Likewise, EU leaders balk at pro-Russia sentiment. Since the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine, both Vucic and Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, the Serbian federal entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have refused to support EU sanctions against Russia.

Serbian nationalists have long allied with Russia. But Russia’s military setbacks in Ukraine have cost it support in the region. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin understands the limits of his influence there. That became evident when, against all predictions, Russia didn’t veto the UN Security Council resolution extending the mandate of EUFOR—the European military force deployed in Bosnia to oversee the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian War. Vucic and Dodik even advised against a veto.

Russia fears that the alternative to EUFOR is a robust NATO, and that an end to it could resurrect a Bosnian mission for the alliance. Given this European military presence and US President Joe Biden’s intention to re-engage with the region, EU leaders likely think that Western Balkan accession can continue to wait.

Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia are already NATO members, and Bosnia wants to join. This, too, permits a fatigued EU to keep the Western Balkan countries’ candidacies on hold. Macron’s Europe of concentric circles might not be official EU policy—but it surely seems like it.

Peak Atlantic unity?

European leaders are breathing a huge sigh of relief following the Republicans’ failure to achieve a ‘red wave’ in the US midterm elections. While the final composition of the House of Representatives remains unknown, the Democrats have held on to the Senate, and it is already clear that Congress will not be flooded with isolationist supporters of former president Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But rather than using this time to celebrate, Europeans need to prepare for the next potential storm.

Europe, after all, has benefited from an extraordinary moment of transatlantic unity over the last year. The US-European partnership has responded seamlessly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with coordinated sanctions, and with the US consulting European governments before pursuing any conversations about the future of European security with the Kremlin. NATO, the alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron called ‘brain dead’ in 2019, is now thriving and poised to welcome Finland and Sweden as new members. And Europeans are finally spending more on defence, with even Germany hitting the long-promised target of 2% of GDP.

Americans and Europeans also generally agree about the strategic challenge that China poses, especially now that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has ruled with economic threats and belligerent foreign policies, has extended and consolidated his power. There is a strong sense that ‘the West is back’. The US and Europe are channelling a newfound political unity in support of shared values and a common vision of the kind of world they want.

But storm clouds are already gathering. In the short term, a Republican-controlled house may still try to push back on the idea that America should cover a disproportionately large share of the costs for Ukraine’s defence. As my European Council on Foreign Relations colleague Jeremy Shapiro notes in a recent commentary, the US has pledged US$24 billion in military aid for Ukraine, whereas Europe has committed only half that. Why should Americans pay more than Ukraine’s own neighbours?

And in the longer term, debates about how to define a Ukrainian victory could create new tensions. While the Biden administration, France and Germany note that there will need to be peace negotiations at some point, Poland and the Baltic states have made clear that they want to see Russia humbled. Meanwhile, Trump has nominated himself to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine.

There are also tensions bubbling beneath the surface when it comes to China. While the transatlantic allies are all moving in the same direction, that does not mean they are aiming for the same destination. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for example, recently visited Beijing, where he showed little interest in decoupling the European and Chinese economies (though he does fully acknowledge the dangers of excessive dependence).

Europeans have also been spooked by the protectionist considerations underpinning the US CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act and Commerce Department’s decision to restrict cooperation in high-tech sectors. The Inflation Reduction Act all but closes the American electric-vehicle market even to companies from allies such as Europe, Japan and South Korea. Europeans are rightly worried that they will become collateral damage in America’s economic war on China—and they have yet to be called on for diplomatic support regarding Taiwan.

But the biggest dangers still come from US domestic politics. Many commentators have asked if the Republicans’ relatively weak midterm performance signals the end of Trump’s control of the party. Not only did many Trump-endorsed candidates fail, but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, won re-election in a landslide. DeSantis is popular, but if he challenges Trump, he may end up sharing the same fate as Jeb Bush and all the others whom Republican primary voters rejected in 2016.

More important, Trumpism is not dead. Republican candidates will continue to pursue scorched-earth culture wars and embrace Trumpian positions against free trade, immigration, foreign intervention and Europe. And given the deteriorating state of the global economy, the conditions may be ripe for the Republicans to fare better in the next election, especially if they learn from their mistakes in 2022.

For all these reasons, Europeans need to use the next two years to reduce their dependence on the US. If Biden runs again and wins, a more self-sufficient Europe can serve as a much better partner to the US. But if Trump or some other Eurosceptic figure is elected, Europeans at least will be better positioned to weather the storm. With just two years to erect effective defences against a future red wave, it’s time for Europeans to build their own kind of wall.

Is Ukraine rejecting its natural allies?

Immediately after World War II, the Paris-exiled Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyc (of Lithuanian origins, born in Minsk) coined a phrase that would come to define Poland’s foreign policy towards its eastern neighbours: ‘There will be no independent Poland without an independent Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine.’

Since the fall of communism, it has been an article of diplomatic faith in Warsaw. Ukrainian patriots, who inspired current Ukrainian policies, have thought similarly. Even if Ukraine fully liberates its Russian-occupied territories, Poles and Ukrainians will not feel truly secure as long as Belarus’s longtime dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, continues his misrule. An alliance between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration and the Belarusian opposition therefore seems natural. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind has emerged.

Instead, some Ukrainian leaders have spurned potential partners. Consider the reaction from Mykhailo Podolyak, an important adviser to Zelensky, following news that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize would be shared by the Belarusian human-rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the Russian NGO Memorial, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties. He tweeted: ‘Nobel Committee has an interesting understanding of word ‘peace’ if representatives of two countries that attacked a third one receive @NobelPrize together. Neither Russian nor Belarusian organizations were able to organize resistance to the war.’

Such nonsense can only damage Ukraine’s cause. Far from being a ‘representative’ of Putin’s Russia, Memorial—which was founded to unearth the crimes of the communist era—was shut down by the Kremlin last year. And Bialiatski’s organisation, Viasna, has been fighting the Lukashenko dictatorship’s human-rights abuses for more than two decades. Bialiatski himself has been locked away in a Belarusian prison for more than a year. Was he supposed to have organised his cell block to oppose Russia’s invasion?

Podolyak’s divisive statement illustrates a broader phenomenon that could have far-reaching consequences: the growing tensions between Ukrainians and Belarusians, two peoples who have long been subjected to Russian oppression. At issue is the Ukrainians’ growing sense of superiority. While Ukrainians ousted a Russian-aligned president in 2014, Belarusians failed to topple Lukashenko following the fraudulent election there in 2020; and protests at the beginning of the war were quickly shut down by security forces.

But this criticism is unfair. Unlike in Ukraine, the Belarusian opposition never had half the country in its hands, nor any kind of control over local governments or parliament. Belarusian democracy has been a sham for more than a quarter of a century. Lukashenko has built a totalitarian state in its place. It was a miracle that Belarusians managed to stage mass protests in 2020.

Instead of honouring that courageous moment and motivating Belarusians to survive and rise again when the circumstances become more favourable, some Ukrainians like Podolyak accuse them of being wimps or conformists. Abroad, refugees from Belarus are being treated like Russians, in what amounts to a repression of the repressed.

Such disdain for Belarusians is not only immoral, it is politically stupid. Ukrainians, Poles and others across the region should be standing with the Belarusian opposition and advocating the country’s liberation.

As the Belarusian opposition politician Pavel Latushka points out, three regiments of Belarusian volunteers have been fighting the Russians in Ukraine, and some have died there. Belarusians have also been sabotaging their country’s rail lines to disrupt resupply shipments to the Russian army. When captured, they receive sentences of up to 16 years in prison. Why alienate these allies?

Before Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian government did not want to irritate Lukashenko, because Belarus had yet to recognise the Kremlin-backed separatist ‘people’s republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk. That was why Ukraine did not join the sanctions imposed on Lukashenko’s regime after it hijacked a passenger plane to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich.

Neither country wanted open hostility. But those days are long gone, and one must ask why Zelensky’s team has not invited the real winner of the 2020 Belarusian election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to stand in solidarity with them in Kyiv.

Now that Lukashenko is preparing a covert mobilisation and letting Russia use his military bases and airfields to launch attacks on Ukraine, the Zelensky government should consider ending diplomatic relations with him and recognising Tikhanovskaya’s recently formed government-in-exile. That would set an example for other governments and strike a major blow to Lukashenko, who is effectively starting his own full-scale war with Ukraine. Zelensky wants the rest of the world to declare Russia a terrorist state; he should demand the same for Lukashenko’s dictatorship. If Lukashenko sends troops into Ukraine, the Belarusian opposition’s pleas to them to surrender will be very important.

Fortunately, voices in the Ukrainian press are pushing for the Ukrainian government to change its incomprehensible position. ‘Will Kyiv start communicating with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya at least sometimes?’ asks an editorial by European Pravda. ‘She has become a symbol of the Belarusian opposition to the whole world, and Kyiv conspicuously ignores her.’ Similarly, Bohdan Yaremenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, writes, ‘In front of us is a window of opportunity to protect ourselves and help restore freedom to our brotherly people, whose representatives defend the Ukrainian will in the same order of battle as the Ukrainians.’

Perhaps Podolyak’s unfair words will shock someone in Zelensky’s government into recognising the harm being done to Ukraine’s own cause by disdaining the Belarusian opposition. So long as Belarus remains subservient to Russia, Ukraine will be at risk, even if it succeeds in expelling the Russians from its territory. By spurning Tikhanovskaya, Zelensky’s government risks damaging Ukraine’s relationship with a future free Belarus. No one needs such divisions between natural allies—except the Kremlin, of course.

Adding ambition to Europe’s unity

The European Union has reacted faster, more decisively and with greater unity to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than to any previous crisis. Together with its allies, the EU and its member states have provided important military, economic and humanitarian support to the Ukrainian government and put severe economic pressure on the Kremlin to stop its atrocities. But the difficulties the EU faced in imposing a common oil embargo against Russia reveal differences among national governments that also reflect diverging views on how to deal with the Zeitenwende we’ve been experiencing since 24 February.

This is no moment for disunity. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has opened a new chapter in Europe’s seemingly permanent crisis and represents a structural break with the past, profoundly disrupting the continent’s security architecture and undermining fundamental assumptions in most areas of EU policymaking.

EU leaders must have the political will and stamina to prepare the union for a new era—with no taboos when it comes to implementing major policy innovations and establishing more effective governance structures. To do so, they should continue to demonstrate both unity and ambition along a concrete reform path.

At next week’s EU summit, therefore, the European Council should agree to establish a ‘Wise Wo|men Group’ tasked with identifying core policy priorities and governance reforms that reflect current imperatives, as well as the outcome of the Conference on the Future of Europe. Substantial measures require more than well-intended speeches and declarations. The European Parliament responded to the conference by calling for a European Convention. Now, EU governments also have to commit to specific reforms.

A Wise Wo|men Group—including both experienced political heavyweights and representatives of younger generations—would help EU leaders to agree on a list of urgent policy innovations, identify ways to improve the union’s governance structure, and forge an ambitious reform roadmap.

Several areas demand attention. For starters, there’s the EU’s approach to its neighborhood and enlargement in light of the new situation after 24 February, as well as the union’s role in defence investments and the scope of its mutual-defence clause. There’s also the need to redefine radically the EU’s energy dependence and its efforts to counter climate change, which are related to the union’s economic resilience and strategic autonomy in core areas.

Then there are the institutional reforms needed to strengthen protection of basic values and principles such as the rule of law, and to improve decision-making capacity through extended use of qualified majority voting. Finally, the group should consider how to deepen EU democracy by balancing the benefits of representative institutions with the need to enhance citizens’ participation in the union’s policymaking processes.

To link its work to the input provided by citizens during the Conference on the Future of Europe, the Wise Wo|men Group should present and discuss its proposals with the ‘ambassadors’ who represented the randomly selected members of the European citizens’ panels in the conference plenary. The group should submit its final report in the second half of 2022 to the European Council and the European Parliament, which should then commit to a detailed follow-up process.

Many reform objectives can be accomplished under the existing EU treaties. But the Wise Wo|men Group might conclude that some innovations will also require treaty amendments to ensure that the EU will be structurally able to respond swiftly to current and future challenges. In this case, the group should compile a list of specific changes. Identifying such amendments could help ensure that future efforts to adapt the union’s primary law will differ from the experience of the Constitutional Convention in 2002–03, as these efforts would adhere to a more clearly defined mandate and limited timeframe.

For Europe merely to move towards some form of modification of the status quo ante would be not only naive, but also dangerous. We should avoid finding ourselves in a situation where we will regret not having acted earlier and more decisively, especially when issues of war and peace are at stake.

The crisis in Ukraine has shown that only by acting together can the EU hope to remain an effective player. But this is by no means a foregone conclusion. The EU27 must respond to today’s transformative times by paving the way for an ambitious joint future. That means showing the political readiness and determination needed for a substantial reform of EU policies and governance.

Europe’s self-destructive identity crisis

The Ukraine crisis shows that the European Union has a problem with power. While its hard-power deficit has recently moved to the centre of attention, its philosophical and political shortcomings are an even bigger concern. After all, given Germany’s Zeitenwende (foreign policy ‘turning point’), Finland’s and Sweden’s debates over NATO membership and the size of European rearmament spending pledges, Europe likely will have more military resources than anyone other than the United States before too long. But even then, it will have a soft-power problem.

Europe is home to two identity-building projects, both of which are deeply alienating to the rest of the world. Each was represented in the second round of the French presidential election, where the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, defeated the far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen to secure a second term.

Macron framed the campaign as a choice about what kind of civilisation France—and Europe—wants to be. He portrayed his country as the ultimate embodiment of enlightened civic virtue. For him (and for Europeans like me), the European project is an elaborate attempt to transcend the continent’s bloody history of nationalism, imperialism and genocide. The EU is meant to forge a new European identity based on civic principles such as international law (against ‘might makes right’), liberal democracy (against populist majoritarianism), privacy (against ‘surveillance capitalism’) and human rights (against the surveillance state).

This project implies a new kind of patriotism, and, insofar as it has succeeded, it has provoked a counterrevolution from those who believe that globalisation and European integration threaten their wealth, culture and status. Le Pen presents herself as the tribune of this new-old version of European identity. Describing Macron as a globalist agent of death who will lead France and Europe to cultural suicide, she claims to represent the forgotten farmers and workers whose interests have been sidelined for the benefit of economic elites and refugees.

The structural dynamics of the French electoral system have intensified the dialectical relationship between these two versions of European identity, with the traditional contest between the centre-left and the centre-right giving way to a showdown between Christian ethnic nationalism and civic internationalist patriotism. But France is hardly alone. One finds similar divisions across Europe. Movements to ‘take back control’ have mobilised voters against the openness and internationalism that underpin the new European identity.

Europe’s internal culture war has undermined its soft power. The EU would like to think that it’s an exponent of democracy, yet many of the world’s largest democracies—Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa—have been reluctant to stand with it on Ukraine. Europe’s warring identities have each contributed to this lack of global appeal.

The problem with the European far right is obvious. Despite her appeals to religion and traditional values, Le Pen’s xenophobia, Islamophobia and implicit white supremacy have alienated a large share of the global population, not least the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims. What’s more surprising is that attempts by internationalists such as Macron to develop a civic identity have sometimes also reduced Europe’s appeal in many parts of the world. His version of Europe supports gender parity, minority rights and environmental action, but it has also been increasingly willing to subordinate sovereign power to the imperatives of markets and supranational principles and institutions.

These new priorities have naturally been met with charges of hypocrisy. Many European countries that slammed their doors during the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis are now offering a warm, open-ended welcome to the blonde, blue-eyed refugees fleeing from Ukraine. And, as many attendees at this year’s Doha Forum noted, the West’s commitment to the principle of sovereignty in Ukraine rings somewhat hollow after years of Western drones patrolling the skies above Pakistan and Afghanistan. Weren’t these the same countries that changed international borders in Kosovo, overthrew Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and invaded Iraq? Moreover, after raping the planet for centuries, Europe has now decided to present itself as a champion of climate-change mitigation and environmental protection.

What is most off-putting is the way that Europeans tend to universalise their own experience, often assuming that what is right for them is right for others (closer to home, an EU enlargement model requiring other countries to adopt an 80,000-page rule book is a case in point). For various historical reasons, most European societies have embraced a balance between majoritarian democracy, minority rights and private property, and we now take this package of principles as a given. But as the Arab Spring showed, people elsewhere might opt for the right to vote without demanding the full package. Those who rebelled against authoritarian regimes sought to emancipate themselves, not to mimic the West.

As my European Council on Foreign Relations colleague Ivan Krastev and I have argued, the world seems to be moving from an era of imperialism to one of decolonisation. In the former, the success of the capitalist economic model and new communication technologies helped spread Western ideas and values worldwide; now, countries and societies increasingly want to celebrate their own values and culture.

This paradigm shift has profound implications for everyone, but especially for Europe. Powers that want to prosper will need to embrace a ‘sovereignty-friendly’ idea of soft power. Failing that, we Europeans will always be accused of using our norms and standards to defend white privilege. We will remain at odds with the new project of decolonisation, and thus out of step with much of the international community.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine killed Europe’s hot peace

The debate about whether we’re in a new cold war has a decisive, brutal answer.

For Europe, the lines of cold war 2.0 are drawn, no matter how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ends.

NATO doubles its military presence near Ukraine and prepares for chemical, biological or even nuclear threats. An economic and financial iron curtain is lowered. Europe and the US wage proxy war by arming Ukraine. The ideological contest is joined. Refugees flee. The European Union, a great project for peace, unites to face war on its border.

The globalisation built since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 is a victim of 2.0; a world used to networks must adjust to barriers and blocs.

For Europe, geopolitics and geoeconomics have been hit by the equivalent of Covid-19. Vladimir Putin launches his military pandemic and there’s no going back. The dawning era of confrontation and great-power rivalry reaches an all-change moment in Ukraine.

Back in 2018, I wrote a series of columns arguing that we hadn’t yet entered cold war 2.0 (‘Not the new cold war’, ‘Hitler’s cold war, Stalin’s cold war, today’s … ?’ and ‘Big power decathlon in a hot peace’). What we had at that point was a hot peace. If we were smart and lucky, the hot peace could run for decades. Badly bungled and dumbly driven, the hot peace could create opposed blocs that resembled a cold war line-up. But, I pronounced, it was going to need a lot more bad policy and stupidity to reach cold war 2.0.

Tragically, stupidity has delivered.

Churchill’s words from 1930 hang around the neck of Russia’s president:

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

The former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov reports a new Russian joke that gets its sharp point from the way the key number mounts each day. Thus, today the Russians would whisper the sly heresy: ‘We are now entering day 33 of the special military operation to take Kyiv in two days.’

All the changes provoked by that ‘special operation’—with many more to come—set the agenda for US President Joe Biden’s trip to Brussels last week for meetings of NATO, the G7 and the European Council.

Biden replayed a cold war script familiar to Harry Truman and John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—unite the allies, affirm US commitment, and tread gently in the vicinity of the escalation steps going from military conflict to nuclear conflagration. (Ah, Dr Strangelove, you’re back—we prayed never to see you again.)

In Poland, Biden could channel Kennedy’s famous Berlin speech with his version of ‘I am a Ukrainian’. Warsaw heard the greatest foreign policy speech of Biden’s career; even the characteristic Biden stumbles worked, underlining the emotion felt and the strength of the words. But the president’s plea for peace couldn’t include a Reagan-style demand to ‘tear down this wall’. Today’s sudden need is for new walls.

Cold war 2.0 is born in Europe, as was cold war 1.0. So far, so distressingly familiar. What’s not clear on day 33 of Europe’s new cold war is how this will play in Asia.

In cold war 1.0, the proxy wars were fought in Asia. One of the many unknowables yet to unfold is Asia’s response to Europe’s struggle. The caution of India and ASEAN in commenting on Ukraine is a replay of the old non-aligned instinct and interest.

In the 20th century, the global balance was set by Europe and the US. In this century, the global balance will be set in the Indo-Pacific. China’s decisions about Putin and Ukraine will shape much. Cold war 1.0 was global. Perhaps cold war 2.0 will be more about Europe, if China holds back from Russia.

Xi Jinping is going to have to define the limited liability elements of the ‘no limits’ partnership he announced with Putin on 4 February. The ‘no limits’ sentence in the China–Russia communiqué went on to pledge there were ‘no “forbidden” areas of cooperation’. Oh, how the Chinese apparatchiks who approved those words must be rethinking their career trajectory.

Within two months of that extravagant blandishment, Beijing confronts what must be limited and how much will be forbidden to its weaker partner. It’s an exquisite cold war dilemma: for the sake of the alliance, how much does the major power, China, tie itself to the choices and caprices of the minor power?

The Strategist’s national security editor, Anastasia Kapetas, has written a series of fine pieces this month probing the emerging limits to China’s help and Russia’s worth as a strategic partner. Her judgement is that ‘the costs of underwriting the economy of a malevolent nuclear-weapon power in rapid decay could outweigh any gains. Russia may be too big, too nativist and too chaotic to become a useful, quiescent client state for China in the long term.’

The purpose of holding hands with Putin is to weaken the US, not to bind China to a Russia that daily demonstrates the dimensions of its blunder and the extent of Putin’s blindness.

The world looked different back on 4 February when Xi signed up to the ‘no limits’ bit of blandiloquence. What Putin and Xi thought they knew back then is being confounded, as Kapetas notes:

At the crux of China’s dilemmas is a deeper issue. Russia and Beijing have enjoyed the benefits of the global political and economic order while undermining it under the cover of the grey zone, believing that the status quo powers would be reactive, risk-averse and divided and would continue to focus on damage minimisation rather than coordinated deterrence.

Wars change much, and they can do it quickly. The grey zone needs the cover of the hot peace for its work of misinformation, calibrated shoves and calculated nastiness.

Cold war 2.0 has swept aside the grey, giving Europe a sharp black–white reality.

China havers and Asia holds its breath. Europe confronts its new war—both hot and cold—while the Indo-Pacific ponders what comes next.

Australian LNG won’t fix Europe’s gas crisis

Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, but when it was still constraining gas supplies to Europe amid soaring demand and prices, Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested Australia could step in and help, given its huge liquefied natural gas export industry. The flexibility of LNG cargo compared with fixed-direction pipelines is one of its selling points, especially for an island nation with a vast surplus of gas.

Record-high and volatile oil and gas prices, a running problem that was given a shot in the arm when Russia invaded Ukraine, have convinced oil bulls that their product has a crucial role to play for decades yet. While renewables proponents suggest that wind, solar and battery technologies are crucial to energy independence, there remains a place for some oil and gas in the medium term.

In 2020, oil fell to US$20 per barrel, its lowest price in decades; two years later, it is at record highs of over US$100 a barrel. The European gas benchmark, the Titles Transfer Facility, spiked with news of the invasion given that Russia supplies more than 30% of the continent’s natural gas.

Over the past two weeks, first the US and now the UK and Australia have banned Russian crude exports (although it’s essentially a non-issue for Australia; last year Russian crude made up only 1.2% of its imports).

Australia stands to benefit from the fuel crisis in the short to medium term, but based more on prices than on any agile ability to supply tight, high-priced markets.

Australia is the world’s largest LNG exporter at around 80 million tonnes in 2021, but the US is breathing hard down its neck. Last year, Australia’s share of the Chinese market slipped by a few percentage points even as actual volumes grew.

Meanwhile, US volumes increased three-fold and it overtook Qatar as the second largest exporter to China. The US signed six contracts with Chinese buyers last year and Australia signed none. The government’s 2017 trade white paper explicitly suggested that the US was a threat to Australia’s market share, even as world gas demand was expected to shift slightly from legacy buyers going green to developing nations with rising energy demand.

China receives some LNG from Russia, but the gas giant has only an 8% share of the global LNG market. That could grow next year if the Arctic LNG 2 project, led by Russia’s Novatek, comes online as planned; however, last week French partner TotalEnergies committed to not spending any more cash on the project and said it would wind down its activities with Russia. This week it said it would comply with any sanctions but would not offload its assets. It did, however, say development of the project would be difficult with technology sanctions in place.

China’s gas imports from Russia come through the Power of Siberia pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 38 billion cubic metres. Volumes are set to increase with the Sakhalin gas deal announced at the Beijing Winter Olympics, but it will need to replace partner Shell.

BP and Shell pulled quickly out of Russia in the first days of the invasion, with the British company walking away from a 20% stake in Rosneft worth billions of dollars and a difficult 30-year history in the country.

There will likely be buyers for these assets, but some analysts have noted that there could be intellectual-property issues, and LNG projects have typically been underpinned by some international oil company know-how.

With bans and a gas dearth amid unprecedented levels of demand in Europe, this is where the PM suggests Australia can come in.

The issue (apart from Morrison not consulting industry before making the proposal) is that there’s simply not much LNG available, and new supply is at least four years away. Santos plans to temporarily close down its Darwin LNG plant next year while it develops its new Barossa field for backfill in 2025, Woodside may do the same in one train at the North West Shelf LNG venture, and Shell’s floating LNG vessel remains closed after a fire last year.

As Europe comes to grips with the need to diversify its gas supply, Australia’s LNG producers may be able step up. That could include bringing on another LNG train or two in Darwin and development of Woodside’s Browse field, which has been close to seeing a final investment decision three times for three separate development iterations. The second train at Woodside’s Pluto and Scarborough fields will add 5 million tonnes per annum. These are longer term speculations, however.

The immediate problem, though, is that at least 75% of Australia’s LNG is sold via long-term contracts linked to the oil price, typically at a price slope of between 11% and 14% and on a three- to six-month lag. This means the record profits for 2021 reported by Australia’s largest oil and gas companies when oil ended the year at US$80 per barrel will be dwarfed if the price stays above US$100.

Australia can’t supply more to Europe without breaking contracts—or rather the project proponents can’t. The government can only intervene in gas exports when the local market doesn’t have enough supply, and that remains an issue only on the east coast since Western Australia, home to two-thirds of exports, has its own island market.

Buyers can elect to vary their contracts by 10%, but it’s unlikely they will when replacement ‘spot’ cargoes are more expensive.

Another issue is that there’s already a gas shortage on the east coast. Roughly a third of LNG is developed there via onshore coal-seam-gas wells and shipped, and some supply is sent from offshore Victoria to Queensland, so any gas we could supply would have to be taken from our own struggling system, and manufacturers. This may become feasible as renewable energy replaces gas in the electricity grid, but according to Rystad Energy that won’t be until the end of the decade.

At this week’s Australian Domestic Gas Outlook conference in Sydney, the head of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission said too much east coast gas was going to the LNG projects and there could be a shortage by 2024.

On the west coast, what is not exported via contract is kept in the state under its mandatory 15% domestic gas reservation policy.

The wholesale exodus of European majors with decades of history in Russia in less than a week is going to take a long time to unfold and energy markets are going to fundamentally change, but Australia is in no position to solve the problem anytime soon.

Explaining Europe’s reaction to Putin’s war

What explains Europe’s dramatic, costly and even revolutionary response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Germany’s newfound commitment to rearmament, which for decades would have caused an international outcry, has been widely applauded. And with traditionally neutral Finland and Sweden now considering joining NATO, the alliance suddenly looks anything but ‘brain dead’. Even Switzerland has abandoned 500 years of neutrality to impose financial sanctions against Russia. Most startling, perhaps, was the announcement by the Netherlands and other European states that they would send weapons to help Ukrainians kill Russian troops, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s snarling threat that any country intervening in his ‘special military operation’ would pay a grisly price.

European outrage at Putin’s war is not limited to governments. Four out of five German citizens support Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to help arm Ukrainians. The current surge of solidarity in European civil society has refuted the Putinistas’ bare-chested rhetoric that effete debauchery had incurably sapped Europe’s fighting spirit. Fundraising initiatives to help Ukraine are mushrooming everywhere. Countries often labelled as xenophobic, such as Poland and Hungary, are receiving Ukrainian refugees with open arms. The Ukrainian flag and its colours are now visible across the continent, from web pages to painted pets to soccer stadiums.

Europe has displayed more unity and resolution in the last 10 days than it has in the last 10 years. But why?

Democracies, as Alexis de Tocqueville argued almost two centuries ago, tend to be slow in reacting to aggression. Once provoked, however, they have a capacity to mobilise militarily that autocracies can only envy. For years, European capitals reacted indecisively to Putin’s maskirovka playbook of cyberattacks, fake news, assassinations, electoral manipulation and funding of extremist parties and populist candidates. Since 2007, Russia has worked assiduously to destabilise Europe and divide it against itself. Europe’s governments barked but failed to bite. Even the annexation of Crimea and the engineering of a violent separatist movement in eastern Ukraine—overt acts of war and violations of international law—ultimately met with grudging acquiescence.

The world’s failure to anticipate Europe’s fierce reaction to the invasion arguably stems from the assumption that a peace-loving European public could never perform a dramatic volte-face and renounce its tepid reaction to Putin’s previous assaults on the rules and norms of decent, civilised international behaviour. And yet that’s what it did.

Sheer horror at the stomach-churning images of the barbarism of the assault and the suffering of so many innocent civilians on European soil—evoking the trauma of World War II—no doubt helps explain the response. But it was Covid-19 that paved the way.

For starters, Europeans are now used to crisis government, huge public expenditures in response to emergency conditions, and the closure of international borders. Two years of extreme public-safety measures have readied the public for exactly the type of radical overnight shifts that governments are now making in response to Russian aggression.

On top of this, and somewhat at odds with the crisis factor, the European public has been nursing an intense craving for a return to normality. With the Covid-19 pandemic seemingly (although perhaps not) drawing to a close, Europeans were expecting that they could work, study and party the way they did in early 2020. But just as these hopes were taking root, Putin’s war of choice has plunged all of us back into a state of emergency. Unlike the pandemic, this latest shock to our lives was not a natural event, but instead the intentional plan of a twisted, vengeful and violent man who has replaced Europe’s thinning viral cloud with a gathering atomic one.

In this sense, Russia’s calculated crime of aggression was hopelessly ill-timed. Deliberately thwarting rising expectations, as Tocqueville would have predicted, is a sure recipe for enraging citizens of democracies and galvanising their will to fight.

These two factors, reinforced by sympathy for the victims, have created a public mood, and indeed public pressure, that has at least temporarily freed European governments from the fear of a pacifist backlash against their decision to respond uncompromisingly to Russian aggression. Overwhelming public support gave them the latitude they needed to act swiftly and with unprecedented tenacity.

But pandemic-related dynamics alone cannot explain why Europe’s leaders reacted in such a bold, decisive way in the face of credible Kremlin threats. The reason must be that they are profoundly shaken and afraid of what Russia might do next if it takes over Ukraine. Russia has already effectively annexed Belarus and strongly suggested that it will place nuclear-armed missiles on the Polish and Lithuanian borders, and perhaps in Kaliningrad, from where they could reach all European capitals within a few minutes. It now seems to be positioning itself to extract all manner of concessions from European governments faced with populations that, while eager to support Ukraine, would presumably baulk at the risk of nuclear war.

Governments’ reasonable fear of losing political support in case Putin resorts to unnerving the European public with nuclear brinkmanship may explain the alacrity with which they have been willing to supply weaponry to Ukraine, an undoubtedly hostile act that defies Russian warnings. The risk of provoking Putin now presumably is preferable to confronting Russia later, after it had successfully managed, in a worst-case scenario, to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders.

It is evidently in Europe’s interest to keep Russian troops tied down in a relentless insurgency—if not an open war—until the fierce sanctions now cratering Russia’s economy erode the invaders’ ability to sustain a prolonged occupation.

In the meantime, we can ask if the increasingly ill-fed, poorly supplied and unmotivated Russian soldiers will persist in slaughtering their brethren and razing their cities. Might not some of them at least be tempted to march back east to settle accounts with the bloody-minded autocrat who sent them to fight a senseless war?

EU looks to Australia to hold big tech to account and protect children online

For seven years, eSafety, Australia’s independent regulator for online safety, has led the world when it comes to keeping people safer online, especially the protection of children.

As a small agency, we know better than most the tremendous scale of the problem facing the world when it comes to the sexual exploitation of children online and the long-lasting damage it inflicts on its many young and innocent victims.

Global problems require global solutions and, of course, global cooperation.

So, when a European Parliament delegation touched down in Sydney to learn about Australia’s unique approach to online safety regulation and child online protection, it marked a watershed moment in this global battle.

The delegation included heavy hitters, such as the co-chairs of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights—Swedish member of the European Parliament and former Paralympic swimmer David Lega, Italian MEP and magistrate Caterina Chinnici—and the intergroup’s secretary-general, Emilio Puccio.

In their first three days in Sydney, the delegation took an in-depth look at the inner workings of eSafety.

We demonstrated our successful eSafety model, which focuses on three key pillars: protection through our four legislated complaint schemes, prevention through our education and training programs, and proactive and systemic change through our ‘Safety by Design’ and technology futures initiatives.

Safety By Design proved a key talking point, as we all agreed the industry must do more to protect the rights of children online and begin taking real and tangible steps to detect and remove child sexual exploitation material from its products and services.

There were robust and thoughtful discussions on issues including end-to-end encryption, age assurance and balancing a range of fundamental rights in the digital environment.

These important issues, and the development of Australia’s online safety regulatory framework, were also central in a roundtable discussion between the delegates and Australia’s minister for communications, urban infrastructure, cities and the arts, Paul Fletcher.

I also got a chance to talk safety, privacy and children’s rights alongside Australia’s information commissioner and privacy commissioner, Angelene Falk, and national children’s commissioner, Anne Hollonds.

The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on children in particular, and all the rewards, and risks, that the digital environment provides, were central topics in these discussions.

It was truly heartening to see that while we come from opposite ends of the globe, the delegates all shared our fundamental commitment to preventing and responding to child sexual abuse and exploitation. They are striving to create a safer and more positive digital environment for children.

Following our roundtables in Sydney, the delegation met representatives from the Australian Centre to Combat Child Exploitation in Brisbane, as the European Parliament considers establishing its own centre to prevent and counter child sexual abuse.

While the European delegates were here to learn from us, we also gained some valuable insights from them, particularly in relation to pivotal legislative changes taking place in the EU.

Indeed, the visit came at a critical moment, with the European Commission set to release new legislation to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation. Our talks will also help inform the development of the commission’s proposed digital services act, a key piece of legislation that will shape the future of online regulation across the EU and around the world.

It’s clear that we are not alone in this fight. Increased international cooperation will help create regulatory pincer moves that will make life extremely difficult for those who seek to share in and profit from the sexual exploitation of children.

Along with tectonic shifts in Europe, more online safety regulators are coming online around the world. Ireland has announced the establishment of its own online safety commissioner and the UK has announced tough new online safety legislation. We have also had positive conversations with Canada and the US about setting up their own national online safety regulators.

It is my sincere belief that in the next five to 10 years there will be an international network of online safety regulators working together, and sharing expertise and ideas, to create an online world that places the rights and safety of children above all else.

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