Juncker said that the EU should become ‘weltpolitikfähig‘. Merkel and Macron backed this call to bolster the EU’s capacity to act on the global stage in their Meseberg Declaration. How aligned are Berlin and Paris really when it comes to implementation and what could a compromise look like?
In this paper, Nicole Koenig evaluates the four paths towards EU ‘Weltpolitikfähigkeit’ that the Declaration of Meseberg sketches:
- Qualified majority voting in the Common Foreign and Security Policy
- An EU Security Council
- A stronger EU voice in the United Nations Security Council
- Flexible and mini-lateral cooperation
The analysis shows that (a) France and Germany are not always aligned on following these paths and that (b) each of the options raises tensions across a trilemma between internal legitimacy, effectiveness and efficiency/speed.
The paper proposes a ‘flexi-structured’ compromise that strikes a balance between these aims with a view to implementation by the Sibiu Summit in May 2019. This compromise should be upgraded to a more ambitious version in the medium-term.