[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Basically a pandemic, as we saw, has impact on the economic development of the world.
Does it mean that you'll react the same way? But 911 is we all have seen it, you know, so it's synchronised at the moment.
Covid, but they might differ. The shocks that were considered real shocks internal for the organisation.
Then what might be the global shocks. Welcome to Global Shocks, the podcast of the Oxford Martin program on changing global borders.
My name is John Icahn and I'm a research fellow in international relations.
And in this podcast we're going to explore how international organisations deal with global shocks.
Global shocks are all around us, from humanitarian emergencies to war, financial crises to pandemics.
So how can international organisations respond to them, adapt to them and survive such turbulent times?
To find out, we are entering the conversation with leading figures from these organisations to find out how they're affected by crisis and turbulence,
what lessons they draw from the past and what future prospects they have.
Today, let's talk about the European Union. Specifically, let's zoom in on the EU's External Action Service or EA's.
This is where EU foreign policy happens. Pictured as the Foreign Ministry of the European Union as the EU's diplomatic arm.
The eeaS is responsible for conducting the EU's foreign policy and representing the EU globally.
Established in 2010, it works to promote the EU's interests and values by means of diplomacy,
conflict resolution, crisis management and cooperation with other countries and international organisations.
LED by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
The eeaS operates through a network of EU delegations worldwide, as well as staff in Brussels,
working directly under the High Representative for Foreign Affairs.
Now, EU foreign policy faces both historical and ongoing challenges.
For one, relations with many countries are tainted by Europe's imperial past and so humanitarian interventions a delivery or political support for
democratisation in the EU's immediate neighbouring countries have led critics to denounce what they see as a kind of neo imperial attitude.
In 2022, for example, the EU's incumbent High Representative for foreign policy, Joseph Burrell,
caused controversy when comparing Europe to a garden and its neighbours to a jungle.
So the question is what EU foreign policy can learn from its experience so far,
in order to be a meaningful part of the EU's resilience in our turbulent world?
I spoke to someone with firsthand experience from the very foundation of the eeaS.
Nicholas Westcott,
a British diplomat who now works as professor of practice in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOS University of London.
Nick Westcott served as British High Commissioner to Ghana from 2008 to 2011 and as British Ambassador to Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo.
In 2011, he was appointed as the very first Managing Director for Africa at the eeaS, witnessing its founding year first hand.
In 2015, he was appointed Managing Director for the Middle East and North Africa and.
He returned to London in 2017 as director of the Royal African Society.
Today he's joining me for a conversation about what the eeaS does, exactly how its work is affected by global shocks and turbulence,
and how it can learn from its past to be prepared for the future.
Hi, and welcome to Global Shocks, Nick Westcott.
Could you just briefly introduce yourself, um, state your name for the record and tell us a little bit about your past experience.
My name is Nick Westcott. So I've been, uh, British diplomat for the last 36 years and served most recently as the EU's managing director,
first for Africa, then for the Middle East and North Africa, uh, based in Brussels, but covering those regions of the world.
Before that, at the Foreign Office, I served in many places, including Brussels, Washington DC,
and a couple of postings in Africa, including as the British High Commissioner to Ghana.
Based on your experience working for the European Union, why would you say this?
Thinking about global shocks matter. During that career, global shocks were constantly, uh, impinging on the everyday work.
And it seemed the response, uh, was as much a part of everyday work as planning for a more ordered global future.
In particular, I remember the Asian financial crisis, which blew up, uh, across the world in the late 1990s and required a very swift response.
I was at the time working in the foreign offices economic department,
working very closely with the Treasury on what how G7 should respond to these crisis, uh, crises in the Asian economies.
And that was a classic economic crisis where response was needed very quickly.
More recently, the Arab Spring, which then degenerated into wars in Libya, in Syria, uh,
to a coup counter coup in Egypt, were shocks that required a response in a rather different way.
They were geostrategic challenges to which Europe wanted to respond collectively.
Uh, those ones that I was directly involved in myself.
Likewise, the collapse of order in Somalia, um,
international efforts to try and rebuild some kind of coherent political structure in a security system.
Uh, the other one that particularly comes to mind is, uh, the crisis in the Sahel,
which began 2012, 2013, when I was dealing with that of the European Union.
Uh, but it has continued, in fact, escalated to this day and I think is increasingly, uh, of global impact.
Can we just zoom in on your past experience having worked at the EU's External Action Service, what exactly does the External Action Service do?
Let's talk a bit about, uh, the EU's response to the Arab Spring and particularly what then turned into the,
uh, Syrian civil war, because that mattered to the European Union.
North Africa and the Middle East are part of Europe's neighbourhood.
They go with a capital N, and there are a whole set of economic and political agreements that the European
Union collectively has with these countries to define the economic trading,
investment relations as well as political relations.
And they have association agreements with most of the countries of North Africa.
They have, uh, bilateral agreements in the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries in the Gulf.
And uh, Turkey, obviously a candidate member, uh, for European Union membership.
So there were quite complex, intricate and close relationships which required a collective response from the European Union,
not just individual member states.
So, uh, when the crisis broke out, uh, first of all, in Tunisia and spreading eastwards through Libya, Egypt, uh, up into, uh, Syria,
the European Union tried to respond swiftly, largely in support of what they saw as a democratic movement,
echoing what had happened 20 years before in Eastern Europe.
Once the Berlin Wall fell and it was seen, this was a moment of opportunity to support the democratic forces,
liberalise the economies a bit and, uh, provide a more amenable neighbourhood for the European Union where there was more to share.
However, things didn't evolve quite the way that was seen.
Uh, the European Union came forward with offers to support, but rather slowly,
because changing trading relationships is not so simple, but a number of, uh,
divergent interests within the European Union, whether you should, for example,
accepted liberalisation of olive oil imports, uh, which would have been a huge benefit to a country like Tunisia.
It was indeed offered, but a smaller quantity than perhaps the Tunisians might have liked, which would have helped boost their economy.
But obviously there are olive oil producers in southern Europe who don't want too much, uh, increased import.
So it was never quite as simple as it looks. And member states would also come in through in the UK, the Westminster.
In Germany. There are very stiff tools to provide political support to opposition parties that were trying to promote democracy,
free speech, human rights in the countries that were in political turmoil to try and encourage these kind of forces.
So it was very directly involved, both politically in the evolution and in trying to build a broader,
more fruitful economic partnership with these countries.
What we found was that the internal political dynamics were often rather different from what we had anticipated,
and unlike the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, was quite clear.
They were getting rid of autocracy.
It wanted to build in greater, stronger democratic institutions and aspire to join the EU across North Africa and the Middle East.
Those were more complicated factors at play, which meant that there was not a single and clear direction of travel.
And particularly in Libya, they saw that efforts to try and encourage democratisation were blown apart by the factional interests
and the difficulty of creating any kind of political order after the demise of Colonel Gaddafi,
who had held things together largely personally in his own idiosyncratic, autocratic way.
Um, but with his departure, there were no institutions that could then start building a political structure that everybody would buy into.
So the country fragmented, and that led to a great deal of chaos,
continuing civil war and a division of the country that has not been resolved to this day,
despite the efforts of the European Union, the United Nations, uh,
other countries to try and broker an agreement between the different factions in Egypt.
Again, we saw that, uh, elections were held, but it brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power,
whose agenda was perhaps not quite as clearly democratic and beneficial to many of the people in the country as some had expected.
And eventual curators that ousted Morsi and brought in.
al-Sisi had a good degree of public support, even if developments since then might not have been what people wanted at that time either.
But the European Union found itself unable to control it could try and support and encourage,
but the local political evolution was, uh, turned out to be more complex and more difficult to influence.
Despite the efforts of then High Representative Cathy Ashton to be involved and encourage the forces of democracy to build a more resilient,
more resilient and accountable political structure. But we are now where we are.
Syria was the most difficult because here what began as protests against the autocratic rule of the Assad regime turned violent,
not least because of the response of the Assad regime, whose tradition, you might say, from father to son, was to repress any political opposition.
And that provoked a violent response from groups who were keen to promote a more radical Islamic agenda and groups who began to ally with, uh,
Al Qaida or in due course, the Islamic State,
and therefore were not the kind of democratic political forces that the European Union found easy to support.
While they were happy to support a democratic opposition to Assad,
they were not happy to support the armed factions that held allegiance to terrorist organisations that they were defined.
So it became a lot more complicated.
But in the short term, the EU was successful in avoiding other neighbouring countries being drawn into the civil war itself.
And that to some extent was all the success that we could achieve.
But but it was a success. But that's where the EU ultimately had money, could provide these kind of resources through the UN agencies and the rest.
And it did. So it ran a succession of fundraising conferences in Brussels to raise humanitarian aid to support the refugee populations.
So it was more a safety net than a effective intervention.
But nobody in Europe was interested in responding to that shock by providing kinetic support to one factor or another.
You provided political support to the civil society for humanitarian support.
That's what the EU could do. And of course, that was not decisive.
It was a damage limitation exercise. It sounds like the EU faces a two fold challenge when confronting crises, whether in Libya, in Syria or in Egypt.
On the one hand, the EU tries to act as a united institution with a coherent diplomatic position,
despite being made up of many different member states.
And on the other hand, it's not necessarily obvious which actors to engage with in these countries.
As you mentioned, in every conflict there are many different factions, right?
So can you give us an example based on your role at the External Action Service, where you faced that kind of challenge?
Two examples. One is. In relation to a country where EU member states had no divergent interests, and that was Somalia.
And when Somalia effectively disintegrated, it endured about 20 years with no effective central government.
al-Shabab took over, but not popular, certainly not to the outside world.
The forced out, but re-establishing a legitimate and accountable government took a long time during that period of chaos.
Piracy took off like wildfire in the Gulf of Aden,
and it became a very lucrative economic model for groups of people who otherwise had no effective source of income.
Beyond fishing and taking boats and holding them to ransom was far more lucrative than any fishing could be.
So as it seemed easy to do, it caught on big way.
The European Union collectively responded by setting up a naval force unit for Atalanta,
which, in cooperation with the US and cooperation with the Chinese,
effectively began patrolling the Gulf of Aden, protecting convoys of ships as they pass through and taking.
In the end, sufficiently robust action against the pirates that the economic viability of the model of hijacking ships evaporated,
and effectively the piracy problem stopped due to European Union intervention.
Collectively putting together a naval force that was willing and able to take the necessary action.
The second example, though, is in Libya, where different member states of the European Union had different interests and it was increasingly hard
to maintain a common European position and therefore increasingly hard to have a decisive influence.
And at the outset, I think there was a belief that, you know, as in Eastern Europe,
you just bring down the dictator and civil society will spontaneously rise up and establish democratic norms, which, as I said before, didn't happen.
But as Libya then fragmented itself into different factions, political factions and armed groups,
the French and Italians had different interests in different parts of the country and therefore were not wholly aligned and would pursue
a direct policy because it was quite close to the more historic links with this either of big economic interests in relation to France,
uh, in the oil industry. And they saw their national interests as protecting these interests rather than a single collective European position.
Both sides wanted the Europeans come in behind their position, but as they didn't coincide, it was hard to do that.
Right. So let's think about the practical day to day business of the External Action Service.
What is your job? Trying to reconcile divergent national interests in order to identify a common position?
Or what was the procedure for formulating an adequate policy response or a position?
What did that look like, practically speaking?
The EAF only came into existence in 2011, so I was one of the founding members as the managing director for Africa.
So it was quite clear what its role was to be. Uh, although obviously the EU had been involved, uh, through Solana,
the Foreign Affairs Council and the European Council had taken positions on international issues.
But the act was meant to bring more, uh, greater weight and coherence to that external policy.
My view was always that we should do this by trying to define common strategies in relation to
particular geostrategic areas and challenges to which you get the member states to sign up,
and which would then be a basis for responding to global shocks, challenges that arose.
So the strategy would define a direction of travel in our key interests, not necessarily what policy we should adopt in relation to everything.
That's the mistake to think that's what strategies are.
And it was usually possible to get EU member states to sign up to a broad strategy that then made the crisis response a lot easier,
because you'd say, look, these we've defined already, these are our broad objectives in this area.
Let's follow that. So we we had a strategy for the Horn of Africa.
Uh, we defined a strategy for the Sahel.
We tried but did not succeed to define a strategy for the Great Lakes region.
That was again, there were some member states with particular interests that proved harder to corral together.
And it did prove quite difficult in the Middle East.
We agreed a strategy for Syria in the end, but it was the strategy I've described to you the best we could do in these circumstances.
So in the Sahel is quite a good example where we were able to get common approach,
but this tended to reflect perhaps rather more than was desirable, the position of France, as if you like the dominant member state in that region.
It had a lot of influence at that stage, quite a lot of interests in the region,
but we were able to get them to a place where the EU took proactive measures to encourage the settlement of the jihadists,
uh, challenges and uh, separatist movements in Mali in particular, and supported other countries to try and avoid the same happening there.
As we can see, in the long run, that strategy has not succeeded.
There is good question whether was it strategy that was wrong or was it implementation?
Was it was wrong, or was it just that France was too visibly in the lead of all this process in seeking,
if you like, a military solution to the jihadist threat rather than a more political one.
And so how does the EU's External Action Service build resilience and preparedness?
Is it about trying to predict or anticipate future scenarios,
or is it more about past lessons and longer term trajectories within each region that you're looking at?
Yeah. For example, on the Sahel, we spend quite a lot of effort designing a strategy for the self.
Firstly, you define what are the underlying factors that are driving political economic development of that region.
And the answer was it's being increasingly impacted by climate change.
Demographic growth continues to accelerate.
And therefore you have governments that face huge challenges of diminishing resources and growing population.
Therefore, the EU's response to this should be helping legitimate governments accelerate economic development by building trading relations that work,
finding alternative means of development than just relying on agriculture, which is under pressure.
Improving education so that you have a workforce with a wider range of options.
The one element of that that might have helped,
but was not likely to fly in the European Union was supporting outward migration because that is, on the contrary, what the EU wanted to avoid.
But that increased the emphasis then, which we now see through the global gateway program of increasing investment in the Sahel.
But it has not delivered fast enough results that it's been able to change the political
dynamics that are increasingly trending towards authoritarian solutions to the challenges,
rather than democratically supported or accountable solutions to the challenges that this country did.
We all accept that they're facing challenges. We know that the EU should be doing what it can to encourage productive solutions,
but we have not been able to make those productive solutions sufficiently available to enough people that they have predominated.
And therefore, we see an increasing trend towards authoritarian government across the Sahel.
So that's that's what our strategy was. So it was.
Identify what the challenges are. What we thought was going to be a desirable outcome,
and therefore the actions that we need to take to try and support the trends going in the right direction.
So it was definitely forward looking,
I guess the idea there were sort of five year strategies or what have we got to do in the next five years to try and avoid these challenges?
There's a risk management, avoid these challenges, derailing the process and supporting positive evolution,
where those strategies drawn up in response to a particular crisis in real time as it erupted.
Or did you try to take a longer term view to be prepared for future crises?
There had been thinking about the strategy before the crisis erupted in Mali in 2012,
but it hadn't been finalised at that stage, and the crisis in Mali accelerated the need to agree the strategy.
And therefore, you know, once we knew that this crisis, we're going to have to deploy resources we were looking at,
for example, could we set up a peacekeeping mission of the kind that had worked in Somalia?
Could we do that for Mali? And the answer was no,
because the local governments and echoes could not mobilise the troops necessary to deliver a peacekeeping force that we could support.
And therefore, ultimately, it was the UN that came in and set up Minusma as a peacekeeping mission.
But, you know, in the long run that didn't work either for a range of reasons.
And French remained president first through Operation Serval and Operation on.
And as we see, that hasn't ended particularly well either.
They killed a lot of jihadists, but they didn't resolve the political problem so that now we have greater difficulty.
So those those are the strategies.
Sometimes they accelerate in the Horn of Africa, again, because of the challenges we had faced in Somalia but successfully dealt with.
Right. So of course, there's debate as to what counts as a crisis when a crisis.
Maritain EU response and what kind of response it ought to pursue.
I can imagine that that complicates the external action service as work working for it.
Was that actually a recurring debate, in your view? Uh, that it did happen, but it tends to be very that, as you say there, of what is a crisis.
There are many different ones. While I was involved, we had the Ebola crisis, and that was quite clearly a crisis.
It was one for which member states were very ill prepared. The degree of medical cooperation amongst member states was very weak.
Um, and we saw that the External Action Service, together with Eko,
which is the humanitarian office who were providing medical support to the country's most affected,
uh, by the Ebola outbreak, um, set up a coordination mechanism with other, uh, EU services.
You know, health services are basically a decentralised responsibility within the EU.
So, you know, national health ministries will take in different decisions and the rest,
which, you know, made no sense where you had free movement, uh, within.
So there had to be then some coordination on this magical crisis.
Uh, and the EU was the body that could do that by bringing together the relevant people of member states.
It took quite a lot of time, but the experience of doing that in Ebola certainly helped the response to the Covid crisis.
Um, it was after my time. But, uh, again, you could well, many people said the EU response was rather slow and clunky.
Nevertheless, there was a coordinated response, and that was helpful in the circumstances.
Uh, and, you know, did enable the epidemic to be contained in geopolitical terms, global shocks,
which includes something like the spread of jihadism following the fall of Libya and the reinforcement of the Islamic State in West Africa.
West Africa Province is warp, uh, and and sorry,
various other jihadist groups across the Sahel whose objective was explicitly to overturn the states and establish,
uh, caliphate in that particular region that was seen as a global shocked,
which we needed, uh, a European response because instability in the Sahel would have immediate knock on effects for Europe,
at least through the movements of people north across the Atlantic.
So, again, there was a recognition that we needed to respond collectively to this because we were collectively at risk.
So yes, the EU can respond. And at top level, where a global shock seemed to have, uh, direct impact.
And we saw that again in a response to the Ukraine invasion, the second Ukraine invasion, Russia.
And so there's a huge and very swift, uh, solidarity amongst the European response in a world where crises multiply,
overlap and touch upon divergent issue areas.
Arguably, cooperation with other organisations is. Crucial.
Is that part of the agenda for the EU's External Action service as well?
Yes.
It's, uh, an explicit objective to try and work together with other regional and international multilateral organisations to resolve these issues,
that if you like,
it's, uh, one of the cornerstones of the post-war, uh, settlements that you actually put in place multilateral institutions that can deal with crises.
So on the Libyan crisis, for example,
to then High Representative Federica mogherini explicitly tried to set up a quartette of the European Union, the United Nations,
the Arab League and the African Union, who you would think would be the four international organisations that were relevant
and should be so enabled to corral the relevant forces to reach a settlement.
It didn't work. It didn't work because the EU did have coordination and money, but no military, uh, engagement.
The UN could play the role of the UN, but that depended on its member states backing it.
But neither the Arab Union, uh,
Arab League nor the African Union could actually impose any discipline on its members to take a particular approach on this one,
and therefore trying to get a multilateral,
uh, system in place that would deal with it did not work in Libya,
but the EU and the African Union have pursued a fairly consistent policy of trying to work together, particularly in resolving crises.
But while in the eeaS, I would consistently maintain very close liaison with UN and the UN actors.
Uh, the Arab League, an African Union where they were involved, but also with the US.
So I'd have a monthly, uh, video conference call with the Assistant secretary for Africa in the US.
Didn't work quite well on the Middle East, but, um, on African policy.
So there was, uh, a big effort to coordinate. So you say that you had a regular conference call with the United States.
Did you have a regular line of communication with Geneva as well?
Would you be going around member states representatives to gauge their positions, or how did that work?
There a monthly foreign affairs councils, and they look at the most important issues.
But in both, uh, jobs responsible for Africa and then Middle East and North Africa,
I would chair a monthly meeting of the directors from all member states concerned.
And these were the opportunity then to talk about the whole range of issues.
And that was where we negotiated the various strategies that we were putting in place, which we would then get blessed by the ministers up above.
The Foreign Affairs Council itself would look at Africa maybe once or twice a year, but it looked at the Middle East every single month.
So there was then constant engagement at the ministerial level on Middle Eastern issues.
And, you know, much the same with, uh, Eastern European issues that had to go along with coordinating within the EU institutions
because the External Action Service was only one we had to work with the European Parliament,
the European Commission, the European Council, to try and make sure all the institutions were pointing in the same direction.
And then we were dealing with our external partners ones. Um, but their most would accept that I was speaking with the collective voice.
They would the Americans would still talk to the Brits and the French and the Germans, of course, bilaterally and what their opinion were.
But for them it was useful to talk to me, particularly on Africa, because the seen as having clout and influence and in many cases a single position.
But again, in the Middle East it was also more fragmented and individual member states would have their own relationship with Saudi Arabia.
I had that influence on the relationship with Saudi Arabia as managing director for the Middle East going forward.
What's the biggest challenge for EU foreign policy in the future?
Dealing with Russia, which is an imminent threat on its border?
At the same time, it needs to present, uh, a more coherent approach to tackling climate change.
It has been one of the leaders in UN climate change negotiations.
But to keep the Cop process going, that will only work if we are able to reduce conflict in the world while conflict is going on.
Nobody will care about climate change. This is the immediate against the inevitable, but longer term.
So it needs to keep a focus on climate change because that will drastically change the way the world works,
how people are able to survive, live and be safe.
But in the short term, I've got to deal with Russia. And that means also the relations with the US and with the other neighbours are going to be.
So there'll be plenty of challenges for the new commission when it's appointed.
Well, on that note, Nick Westcott, thank you ever so much for joining us today at Global Shocks.
And it's been a great pleasure talking to you and hearing from all your fascinating experiences at the EU's External Action Service.
Thank you. Not all. You've been listening to Global Shocks, the podcast of the Oxford Martin programme on changing global orders.
My name is Yannick. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in international relations.
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