So Slow on the Uptake, that they only just Noticed

Taking a break from lionizing themselves for either thinking they have a serious position in the world, to lionizing themselves for never taking a position on anything of mortal importance. We find a kind of lost capability to even just do anything at all.

If another crisis hits eastern Europe in the summer, the US is likely to respond faster than the European Union.

What we’re talking about here, is that central governments will be too understaffed to even do the ‘feigned shock’ routine that European now think of a having international policy positions.

When the people who run the western world go on holiday, bad things happen in eastern Europe. Last August Russia invaded Georgia. Over Christmas its gas spat with Ukraine left millions of European consumers shivering (at least from nerves, if not real cold). Easter (on the western Christian calendar) brought protests against ballot-rigging in Moldova.
What the coming summer may bring as new upsets can only be guessed at. Another war in Georgia is always possible. Crimea remains a flammable mixture of incompatible military and ethnic interests. The Kremlin's relations with the once-docile regime in Minsk are uncommonly icy. Your columnist will be keeping his BlackBerry fully charged and close by the poolside.

Somebody please tell this idiot that the EU-3 do not ‘run the western world’. If they can’t even support a problem within the EU that happens to their east, where do they get the idea that they do anything substantive in the interest of ‘the western world’ when they can barely manage the ugly business of securing their own interests?

An insightful new paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think-tank, shows how the EU is complacently frittering away its advantages and losing out to Russia in the countries of the new Eastern Partnership – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. On paper, the EU's position should be invincible. For five of these countries (Belarus is the exception), it is a bigger trading partner than Russia is. That is a big shift from the days when the Kremlin dominated the ex-Soviet economic space. The EU's freedom and prosperity gives it a lot of soft power too: even a distant prospect of membership counts for a lot more than the tangled embrace of Kremlin-run projects such as the still embryonic Eurasian Economic Community or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Belarus has flounced away from an important CSTO summit meeting amid a bitter row about new Russian barriers to its food exports.

Yet the Eastern Partnership is faring poorly. Launched by the crippled Czech presidency at the Prague summit, the new programme is struggling to make an impact. From the big EU countries, only German Chancellor Angela Merkel bothered to show up at its birth. And Germany was among the countries that insisted that the most vital ingredient in the package – liberalisation of visas – was diluted almost to the point of meaninglessness.

In case you were not about to ask, the ‘eastern partnership’ is basically an internal matter of the EU which seems to be fizzling under natural apathy, while the Russians doing one of those make-believe organization things that ends up with an acronym, a large staff of unproductive people with PhDs, and a large building – that thing that Europeans are so good at, seem to be able to manage it fairly well. They might even be able to pretend that it’s a UN agency for the management of something internal.

Either way, what we’re looking at is an inability to even demonstrate an awareness of where there are borders between dimwitted prestige projects and operating a government, about meets-and-greets and diplomacy, or much of anything else. They’ve been feeding themselves a diet of so much speciousness, conferences with names of cities that result in implausible declarations named after cities, and press-releases as a salve to the problem of no-one being in to pick up the damn phone.

Besides that, what is it exactly that they’ve been calling “taking action” lately anyway? Floating a canned press release containing the phrase “deeply concerned”? A trained chimpanzee could manage that routine.

Look if “another crisis hits eastern Europe,” the EU, which is to say Western Europe would let Eastern Europe hang, and they know it. It isn’t a sense of obligation that will change that, it will be a sense of individual humiliation or Russian threats of sphere-expansion that might get the EU’s “boldest and brightest” to so much as cut their vacation short.