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[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.

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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.

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Covid, but they might differ. The shocks that were considered real shocks internal for the organisation.

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Then what might be the global shocks. Welcome to Global Shocks, the podcast of the Oxford Martin program on changing global borders.

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My name is John Icahn and I'm a research fellow in international relations.

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And in this podcast we're going to explore how international organisations deal with global shocks.

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Global shocks are all around us, from humanitarian emergencies to war, financial crises to pandemics.

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So how can international organisations respond to them, adapt to them and survive such turbulent times?

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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,

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what lessons they draw from the past and what future prospects they have.

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Today, let's talk about the European Union. Specifically, let's zoom in on the EU's External Action Service or EA's.

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This is where EU foreign policy happens. Pictured as the Foreign Ministry of the European Union as the EU's diplomatic arm.

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The eeaS is responsible for conducting the EU's foreign policy and representing the EU globally.

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Established in 2010, it works to promote the EU's interests and values by means of diplomacy,

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conflict resolution, crisis management and cooperation with other countries and international organisations.

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LED by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

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The eeaS operates through a network of EU delegations worldwide, as well as staff in Brussels,

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working directly under the High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

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Now, EU foreign policy faces both historical and ongoing challenges.

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For one, relations with many countries are tainted by Europe's imperial past and so humanitarian interventions a delivery or political support for

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democratisation in the EU's immediate neighbouring countries have led critics to denounce what they see as a kind of neo imperial attitude.

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In 2022, for example, the EU's incumbent High Representative for foreign policy, Joseph Burrell,

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caused controversy when comparing Europe to a garden and its neighbours to a jungle.

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So the question is what EU foreign policy can learn from its experience so far,

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in order to be a meaningful part of the EU's resilience in our turbulent world?

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I spoke to someone with firsthand experience from the very foundation of the eeaS.

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Nicholas Westcott,

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a British diplomat who now works as professor of practice in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOS University of London.

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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.

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In 2011, he was appointed as the very first Managing Director for Africa at the eeaS, witnessing its founding year first hand.

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In 2015, he was appointed Managing Director for the Middle East and North Africa and.

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He returned to London in 2017 as director of the Royal African Society.

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Today he's joining me for a conversation about what the eeaS does, exactly how its work is affected by global shocks and turbulence,

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and how it can learn from its past to be prepared for the future.

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Hi, and welcome to Global Shocks, Nick Westcott.

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Could you just briefly introduce yourself, um, state your name for the record and tell us a little bit about your past experience.

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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,

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first for Africa, then for the Middle East and North Africa, uh, based in Brussels, but covering those regions of the world.

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Before that, at the Foreign Office, I served in many places, including Brussels, Washington DC,

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and a couple of postings in Africa, including as the British High Commissioner to Ghana.

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Based on your experience working for the European Union, why would you say this?

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Thinking about global shocks matter. During that career, global shocks were constantly, uh, impinging on the everyday work.

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And it seemed the response, uh, was as much a part of everyday work as planning for a more ordered global future.

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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.

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I was at the time working in the foreign offices economic department,

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working very closely with the Treasury on what how G7 should respond to these crisis, uh, crises in the Asian economies.

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And that was a classic economic crisis where response was needed very quickly.

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More recently, the Arab Spring, which then degenerated into wars in Libya, in Syria, uh,

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to a coup counter coup in Egypt, were shocks that required a response in a rather different way.

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They were geostrategic challenges to which Europe wanted to respond collectively.

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Uh, those ones that I was directly involved in myself.

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Likewise, the collapse of order in Somalia, um,

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international efforts to try and rebuild some kind of coherent political structure in a security system.

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Uh, the other one that particularly comes to mind is, uh, the crisis in the Sahel,

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which began 2012, 2013, when I was dealing with that of the European Union.

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Uh, but it has continued, in fact, escalated to this day and I think is increasingly, uh, of global impact.

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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?

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Let's talk a bit about, uh, the EU's response to the Arab Spring and particularly what then turned into the,

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uh, Syrian civil war, because that mattered to the European Union.

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North Africa and the Middle East are part of Europe's neighbourhood.

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They go with a capital N, and there are a whole set of economic and political agreements that the European

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Union collectively has with these countries to define the economic trading,

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investment relations as well as political relations.

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And they have association agreements with most of the countries of North Africa.

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They have, uh, bilateral agreements in the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries in the Gulf.

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And uh, Turkey, obviously a candidate member, uh, for European Union membership.

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So there were quite complex, intricate and close relationships which required a collective response from the European Union,

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not just individual member states.

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So, uh, when the crisis broke out, uh, first of all, in Tunisia and spreading eastwards through Libya, Egypt, uh, up into, uh, Syria,

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the European Union tried to respond swiftly, largely in support of what they saw as a democratic movement,

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echoing what had happened 20 years before in Eastern Europe.

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Once the Berlin Wall fell and it was seen, this was a moment of opportunity to support the democratic forces,

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liberalise the economies a bit and, uh, provide a more amenable neighbourhood for the European Union where there was more to share.

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However, things didn't evolve quite the way that was seen.

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Uh, the European Union came forward with offers to support, but rather slowly,

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because changing trading relationships is not so simple, but a number of, uh,

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divergent interests within the European Union, whether you should, for example,

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accepted liberalisation of olive oil imports, uh, which would have been a huge benefit to a country like Tunisia.

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It was indeed offered, but a smaller quantity than perhaps the Tunisians might have liked, which would have helped boost their economy.

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But obviously there are olive oil producers in southern Europe who don't want too much, uh, increased import.

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So it was never quite as simple as it looks. And member states would also come in through in the UK, the Westminster.

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In Germany. There are very stiff tools to provide political support to opposition parties that were trying to promote democracy,

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free speech, human rights in the countries that were in political turmoil to try and encourage these kind of forces.

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So it was very directly involved, both politically in the evolution and in trying to build a broader,

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more fruitful economic partnership with these countries.

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What we found was that the internal political dynamics were often rather different from what we had anticipated,

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and unlike the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, was quite clear.

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They were getting rid of autocracy.

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It wanted to build in greater, stronger democratic institutions and aspire to join the EU across North Africa and the Middle East.

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Those were more complicated factors at play, which meant that there was not a single and clear direction of travel.

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And particularly in Libya, they saw that efforts to try and encourage democratisation were blown apart by the factional interests

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and the difficulty of creating any kind of political order after the demise of Colonel Gaddafi,

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who had held things together largely personally in his own idiosyncratic, autocratic way.

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Um, but with his departure, there were no institutions that could then start building a political structure that everybody would buy into.

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So the country fragmented, and that led to a great deal of chaos,

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continuing civil war and a division of the country that has not been resolved to this day,

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despite the efforts of the European Union, the United Nations, uh,

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other countries to try and broker an agreement between the different factions in Egypt.

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Again, we saw that, uh, elections were held, but it brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power,

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whose agenda was perhaps not quite as clearly democratic and beneficial to many of the people in the country as some had expected.

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And eventual curators that ousted Morsi and brought in.

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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.

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But the European Union found itself unable to control it could try and support and encourage,

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but the local political evolution was, uh, turned out to be more complex and more difficult to influence.

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Despite the efforts of then High Representative Cathy Ashton to be involved and encourage the forces of democracy to build a more resilient,

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more resilient and accountable political structure. But we are now where we are.

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Syria was the most difficult because here what began as protests against the autocratic rule of the Assad regime turned violent,

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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.

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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,

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Al Qaida or in due course, the Islamic State,

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and therefore were not the kind of democratic political forces that the European Union found easy to support.

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While they were happy to support a democratic opposition to Assad,

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they were not happy to support the armed factions that held allegiance to terrorist organisations that they were defined.

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So it became a lot more complicated.

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But in the short term, the EU was successful in avoiding other neighbouring countries being drawn into the civil war itself.

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And that to some extent was all the success that we could achieve.

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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.

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And it did. So it ran a succession of fundraising conferences in Brussels to raise humanitarian aid to support the refugee populations.

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So it was more a safety net than a effective intervention.

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But nobody in Europe was interested in responding to that shock by providing kinetic support to one factor or another.

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You provided political support to the civil society for humanitarian support.

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That's what the EU could do. And of course, that was not decisive.

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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.

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On the one hand, the EU tries to act as a united institution with a coherent diplomatic position,

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despite being made up of many different member states.

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And on the other hand, it's not necessarily obvious which actors to engage with in these countries.

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As you mentioned, in every conflict there are many different factions, right?

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So can you give us an example based on your role at the External Action Service, where you faced that kind of challenge?

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Two examples. One is. In relation to a country where EU member states had no divergent interests, and that was Somalia.

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And when Somalia effectively disintegrated, it endured about 20 years with no effective central government.

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al-Shabab took over, but not popular, certainly not to the outside world.

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The forced out, but re-establishing a legitimate and accountable government took a long time during that period of chaos.

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Piracy took off like wildfire in the Gulf of Aden,

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and it became a very lucrative economic model for groups of people who otherwise had no effective source of income.

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Beyond fishing and taking boats and holding them to ransom was far more lucrative than any fishing could be.

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So as it seemed easy to do, it caught on big way.

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The European Union collectively responded by setting up a naval force unit for Atalanta,

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which, in cooperation with the US and cooperation with the Chinese,

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effectively began patrolling the Gulf of Aden, protecting convoys of ships as they pass through and taking.

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In the end, sufficiently robust action against the pirates that the economic viability of the model of hijacking ships evaporated,

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and effectively the piracy problem stopped due to European Union intervention.

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Collectively putting together a naval force that was willing and able to take the necessary action.

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The second example, though, is in Libya, where different member states of the European Union had different interests and it was increasingly hard

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to maintain a common European position and therefore increasingly hard to have a decisive influence.

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And at the outset, I think there was a belief that, you know, as in Eastern Europe,

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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.

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But as Libya then fragmented itself into different factions, political factions and armed groups,

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the French and Italians had different interests in different parts of the country and therefore were not wholly aligned and would pursue

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a direct policy because it was quite close to the more historic links with this either of big economic interests in relation to France,

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uh, in the oil industry. And they saw their national interests as protecting these interests rather than a single collective European position.

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Both sides wanted the Europeans come in behind their position, but as they didn't coincide, it was hard to do that.

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Right. So let's think about the practical day to day business of the External Action Service.

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What is your job? Trying to reconcile divergent national interests in order to identify a common position?

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Or what was the procedure for formulating an adequate policy response or a position?

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What did that look like, practically speaking?

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The EAF only came into existence in 2011, so I was one of the founding members as the managing director for Africa.

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So it was quite clear what its role was to be. Uh, although obviously the EU had been involved, uh, through Solana,

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the Foreign Affairs Council and the European Council had taken positions on international issues.

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But the act was meant to bring more, uh, greater weight and coherence to that external policy.

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My view was always that we should do this by trying to define common strategies in relation to

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particular geostrategic areas and challenges to which you get the member states to sign up,

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and which would then be a basis for responding to global shocks, challenges that arose.

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So the strategy would define a direction of travel in our key interests, not necessarily what policy we should adopt in relation to everything.

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That's the mistake to think that's what strategies are.

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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,

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because you'd say, look, these we've defined already, these are our broad objectives in this area.

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Let's follow that. So we we had a strategy for the Horn of Africa.

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Uh, we defined a strategy for the Sahel.

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We tried but did not succeed to define a strategy for the Great Lakes region.

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That was again, there were some member states with particular interests that proved harder to corral together.

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And it did prove quite difficult in the Middle East.

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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.

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So in the Sahel is quite a good example where we were able to get common approach,

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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.

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It had a lot of influence at that stage, quite a lot of interests in the region,

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but we were able to get them to a place where the EU took proactive measures to encourage the settlement of the jihadists,

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uh, challenges and uh, separatist movements in Mali in particular, and supported other countries to try and avoid the same happening there.

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As we can see, in the long run, that strategy has not succeeded.

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There is good question whether was it strategy that was wrong or was it implementation?

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Was it was wrong, or was it just that France was too visibly in the lead of all this process in seeking,

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if you like, a military solution to the jihadist threat rather than a more political one.

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And so how does the EU's External Action Service build resilience and preparedness?

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Is it about trying to predict or anticipate future scenarios,

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or is it more about past lessons and longer term trajectories within each region that you're looking at?

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Yeah. For example, on the Sahel, we spend quite a lot of effort designing a strategy for the self.

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Firstly, you define what are the underlying factors that are driving political economic development of that region.

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And the answer was it's being increasingly impacted by climate change.

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Demographic growth continues to accelerate.

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And therefore you have governments that face huge challenges of diminishing resources and growing population.

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Therefore, the EU's response to this should be helping legitimate governments accelerate economic development by building trading relations that work,

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finding alternative means of development than just relying on agriculture, which is under pressure.

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Improving education so that you have a workforce with a wider range of options.

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The one element of that that might have helped,

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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.

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But that increased the emphasis then, which we now see through the global gateway program of increasing investment in the Sahel.

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But it has not delivered fast enough results that it's been able to change the political

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dynamics that are increasingly trending towards authoritarian solutions to the challenges,

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rather than democratically supported or accountable solutions to the challenges that this country did.

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We all accept that they're facing challenges. We know that the EU should be doing what it can to encourage productive solutions,

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but we have not been able to make those productive solutions sufficiently available to enough people that they have predominated.

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And therefore, we see an increasing trend towards authoritarian government across the Sahel.

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So that's that's what our strategy was. So it was.

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Identify what the challenges are. What we thought was going to be a desirable outcome,

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and therefore the actions that we need to take to try and support the trends going in the right direction.

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So it was definitely forward looking,

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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?

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There's a risk management, avoid these challenges, derailing the process and supporting positive evolution,

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where those strategies drawn up in response to a particular crisis in real time as it erupted.

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Or did you try to take a longer term view to be prepared for future crises?

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There had been thinking about the strategy before the crisis erupted in Mali in 2012,

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but it hadn't been finalised at that stage, and the crisis in Mali accelerated the need to agree the strategy.

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And therefore, you know, once we knew that this crisis, we're going to have to deploy resources we were looking at,

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for example, could we set up a peacekeeping mission of the kind that had worked in Somalia?

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Could we do that for Mali? And the answer was no,

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because the local governments and echoes could not mobilise the troops necessary to deliver a peacekeeping force that we could support.

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And therefore, ultimately, it was the UN that came in and set up Minusma as a peacekeeping mission.

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But, you know, in the long run that didn't work either for a range of reasons.

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And French remained president first through Operation Serval and Operation on.

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And as we see, that hasn't ended particularly well either.

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They killed a lot of jihadists, but they didn't resolve the political problem so that now we have greater difficulty.

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So those those are the strategies.

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Sometimes they accelerate in the Horn of Africa, again, because of the challenges we had faced in Somalia but successfully dealt with.

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Right. So of course, there's debate as to what counts as a crisis when a crisis.

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Maritain EU response and what kind of response it ought to pursue.

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I can imagine that that complicates the external action service as work working for it.

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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.

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There are many different ones. While I was involved, we had the Ebola crisis, and that was quite clearly a crisis.

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It was one for which member states were very ill prepared. The degree of medical cooperation amongst member states was very weak.

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Um, and we saw that the External Action Service, together with Eko,

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which is the humanitarian office who were providing medical support to the country's most affected,

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uh, by the Ebola outbreak, um, set up a coordination mechanism with other, uh, EU services.

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You know, health services are basically a decentralised responsibility within the EU.

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So, you know, national health ministries will take in different decisions and the rest,

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which, you know, made no sense where you had free movement, uh, within.

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So there had to be then some coordination on this magical crisis.

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Uh, and the EU was the body that could do that by bringing together the relevant people of member states.

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It took quite a lot of time, but the experience of doing that in Ebola certainly helped the response to the Covid crisis.

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Um, it was after my time. But, uh, again, you could well, many people said the EU response was rather slow and clunky.

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Nevertheless, there was a coordinated response, and that was helpful in the circumstances.

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Uh, and, you know, did enable the epidemic to be contained in geopolitical terms, global shocks,

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which includes something like the spread of jihadism following the fall of Libya and the reinforcement of the Islamic State in West Africa.

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West Africa Province is warp, uh, and and sorry,

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various other jihadist groups across the Sahel whose objective was explicitly to overturn the states and establish,

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uh, caliphate in that particular region that was seen as a global shocked,

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which we needed, uh, a European response because instability in the Sahel would have immediate knock on effects for Europe,

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at least through the movements of people north across the Atlantic.

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So, again, there was a recognition that we needed to respond collectively to this because we were collectively at risk.

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So yes, the EU can respond. And at top level, where a global shock seemed to have, uh, direct impact.

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And we saw that again in a response to the Ukraine invasion, the second Ukraine invasion, Russia.

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And so there's a huge and very swift, uh, solidarity amongst the European response in a world where crises multiply,

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overlap and touch upon divergent issue areas.

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Arguably, cooperation with other organisations is. Crucial.

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Is that part of the agenda for the EU's External Action service as well?

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Yes.

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It's, uh, an explicit objective to try and work together with other regional and international multilateral organisations to resolve these issues,

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that if you like,

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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.

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So on the Libyan crisis, for example,

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to then High Representative Federica mogherini explicitly tried to set up a quartette of the European Union, the United Nations,

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the Arab League and the African Union, who you would think would be the four international organisations that were relevant

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and should be so enabled to corral the relevant forces to reach a settlement.

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It didn't work. It didn't work because the EU did have coordination and money, but no military, uh, engagement.

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The UN could play the role of the UN, but that depended on its member states backing it.

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But neither the Arab Union, uh,

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Arab League nor the African Union could actually impose any discipline on its members to take a particular approach on this one,

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and therefore trying to get a multilateral,

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uh, system in place that would deal with it did not work in Libya,

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but the EU and the African Union have pursued a fairly consistent policy of trying to work together, particularly in resolving crises.

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But while in the eeaS, I would consistently maintain very close liaison with UN and the UN actors.

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Uh, the Arab League, an African Union where they were involved, but also with the US.

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So I'd have a monthly, uh, video conference call with the Assistant secretary for Africa in the US.

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Didn't work quite well on the Middle East, but, um, on African policy.

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So there was, uh, a big effort to coordinate. So you say that you had a regular conference call with the United States.

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Did you have a regular line of communication with Geneva as well?

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Would you be going around member states representatives to gauge their positions, or how did that work?

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There a monthly foreign affairs councils, and they look at the most important issues.

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But in both, uh, jobs responsible for Africa and then Middle East and North Africa,

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I would chair a monthly meeting of the directors from all member states concerned.

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And these were the opportunity then to talk about the whole range of issues.

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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.

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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.

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So there was then constant engagement at the ministerial level on Middle Eastern issues.

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And, you know, much the same with, uh, Eastern European issues that had to go along with coordinating within the EU institutions

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because the External Action Service was only one we had to work with the European Parliament,

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the European Commission, the European Council, to try and make sure all the institutions were pointing in the same direction.

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And then we were dealing with our external partners ones. Um, but their most would accept that I was speaking with the collective voice.

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They would the Americans would still talk to the Brits and the French and the Germans, of course, bilaterally and what their opinion were.

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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.

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But again, in the Middle East it was also more fragmented and individual member states would have their own relationship with Saudi Arabia.

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I had that influence on the relationship with Saudi Arabia as managing director for the Middle East going forward.

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What's the biggest challenge for EU foreign policy in the future?

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Dealing with Russia, which is an imminent threat on its border?

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At the same time, it needs to present, uh, a more coherent approach to tackling climate change.

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It has been one of the leaders in UN climate change negotiations.

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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.

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Nobody will care about climate change. This is the immediate against the inevitable, but longer term.

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So it needs to keep a focus on climate change because that will drastically change the way the world works,

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how people are able to survive, live and be safe.

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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.

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So there'll be plenty of challenges for the new commission when it's appointed.

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Well, on that note, Nick Westcott, thank you ever so much for joining us today at Global Shocks.

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And it's been a great pleasure talking to you and hearing from all your fascinating experiences at the EU's External Action Service.

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Thank you. Not all. You've been listening to Global Shocks, the podcast of the Oxford Martin programme on changing global orders.

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My name is Yannick. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in international relations.

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And I'm the host and producer of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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Do have a look at the show notes for further reading on today's topic, as well as links to our website and social media channel.