Europe’s Pathetic Lack of Foreign Policy Ambition

Europe’s Pathetic Lack of Foreign Policy Ambition

Posted by: Judy Dempsey Friday, August 7, 2015 | http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=60952&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonvKXNZKXonjHpfsX57uQsW6Sg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIGRcR0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D

Each week over the past seven months, Carnegie Europe has been posting a letter from one of the 28 EU capitals. All the authors were given the same brief: to assess the level of foreign policy ambition of their country.
The assessments were fascinating but also depressing. It was argued that Germany, which is discovering foreign policy under Chancellor Angela Merkel, has a high level of ambition. So too have other big countries such as France, Italy, and Poland, according to those letters’ authors. But Britain’s ambitions and strategic culture are in fast decline.

The level of ambition among the smaller countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, was miserable. A reread of the letters from Bratislava or Ljubljana, Zagreb or Bucharest, Vienna or Budapest shows an indifference to foreign policy ambition—not to be confused with personal ambition, of which there is plenty in the region.