Europe's smart power in its region and the world - Europa

But outside the EU’s borders, even in our immediate neighbourhood to the South-
East and East, there is no such perpetual peace. It may not be an outright
Hobbesian world where the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest prevail –
at least if we bypass the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current worrying tensions
in the Caucasus. In any case, recent decades in the region have been marked by
cleavages of many kinds – cultural, religious, political and ideological – and often
violent tensions.
You may recall that straight after the Cold War, in the now nostalgic spirit of
optimism of my Oxford years, Francis Fukuyama predicted “the End of History” –
meaning the final global victory of liberal democracy and market economy as a
social order, prompted by the capitulation of state socialism. Liberty and democracy
and rules-based market economy certainly made advances in Europe and in the
wider world, but history did not end in terms of ideological and cultural confrontation.
Then came Samuel Huntington with his thesis on the clash of civilisations.
Huntington brought back to international relations the role of cultural identity and,
consequently, of ethnic nationalism. His original article was published in 1993, but
only after 11 September 2001 did the subsequent book (1996) gain fame because it
looked prophetic.
But Huntington's world is very static and one-dimensional. Mary Kaldor has
observed that "Huntington's thesis is a variant of the bloc system in which the
source of legitimacy is cultural identity – loyalty to what he defines as historic
civilisations" 1 . For Huntington, the West is Christian but only Catholic and
Protestant. He is adamantly against Turkey joining the EU because the country’s
population is predominantly Muslim. Huntington even considers the EU membership
of Greece a mistake because it is an Orthodox country. Such concepts as
globalisation or civil society do not figure in the Huntingtonian analysis.
I can’t obviously subscribe to either Fukuyama or Huntington as a leading
explanation of the evolution of international relations. Fukuyama is too idealistic,
Huntington too simplistic, and both are too deterministic. Both lead to distorted
policy prescriptions, if taken at face value.
What then is the predominant cleavage of contemporary international relations,
especially in our Eastern and South Eastern neighbourhood? In my view, it is the
tension between the forces of liberal democracy, which I’d call “the European way of
life”, and the forces of nationalist autocracy, which comes in different variants in the
Southeastern and Eastern arc of Europe and its neighbourhood.
The European model of liberal democracy has been successfully transferred
through the EU’s enlargement policy. But the other model of nationalist autocracy
competes with it in several European countries.
The other model has also been called “authoritarian capitalism”, which is based on
nationalism as its legitimising ideology, and on populism as its method of political
support. It is autocracy, as the political system lacks some of the key elements of
liberal democracies – political contestability, supremacy of law, legislative
accountability and a strong role for media and civil society. This is not totalitarian
capitalism, which is totally rigid, but allows some safety valves for criticism, such as
one free radio station or allowing citizens to leave the country. But fundamentally it
is a system in which elites can monopolise resources by using state powers which
are unchecked by the constitutional mechanisms in liberal democracies.
1 Mary Kaldor (2006), “New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era”, Polity
Press.
5