 And you're all very welcome. My name is Paulie Marcy. And I'm sure you will all wish to switch off your mobile phones before we begin. I'm very happy to have as our guest today Dr. Sven Biskup, who is the director of Europe and the World Programme in the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels. He's going to speak about EU-extended relations in an age of great powers. When you think of great powers as was today, you think of the United States and China. Russia probably doesn't figure among great powers any more except in the sense of having a large nuclear capacity and a permanent cease and discursive constant with the United Nations. But EU-extended relations have indeed become more, shall I say, topically on the agenda in the last couple of years with the rise of China and the greater consciousness that the rise of China is not unproblematic necessarily for all of us. And above all, with the election of Donald Trump and the uncertainty that he has brought to play in regard to the role that the United States will play as a great power in the world system. So Dr. Biskup, we look forward greatly to hearing what you have to say. And you have the floor. Thank you and thank you for the invitation. It's going to be a veritable Belgian week in Dublin because we will be hosting Baron Frans Van Dalle tomorrow and then on Thursday and Friday, my colleague, Alexander Matla, is speaking at an event at the Belgian Embassy organized. So I'm just the appetizer. Certainly vis-à-vis Frans Van Dalle, I can be no more than that. But I hope that if the appetizer is tempting enough that then you will enjoy the rest of the dinner even better. One word maybe about my employer, Egemont, the Royal Institute for International Relations, is one, the think tank with the longest name relative to the number of people who work there. Two, is the think tank that is associated with the Belgian foreign ministry, but it's not a part of the ministry. So I don't speak on behalf of the kingdom. The kingdom most of the time is good enough at creating trouble for itself, so I don't need to add to those troubles. So what I'm about to say, you can hold against me but should not hold against the kingdom and certainly not against our ambassador, who is sitting there to correct me whenever I'm wrong. I also teach at the University of Hent, and I do a lot of teaching for European diplomats and military officers from all member states. And it's these changing audiences, I think, that this is the fun in our line of work that we always get different inputs, different reactions to one's ideas, it allows them to sharpen and to improve them. So I look forward to what you will have to say about my proposals. All I want to do is say something very briefly about how I see the international context in which the EU has to operate and then address three sets of questions. How do we relate to the great powers? When I'm in an optimistic mode, I say the other great powers. What's the place of values in EU foreign policy and what is the place of the military instrument? So the context without being very theoretical because I'm more of a think-tanking academic than a university academic, I think we're sort of back to normal. When you look at the history of world politics, normal means multi-parity, there are various great powers. They cooperate yet at the same time they compete. I would say there are probably three and a half great powers today. As you said, without any doubt, there is the United States and China. I would still come Russia among them but though I agree they don't have global reach anymore, perhaps the regional power is somewhere in the middle and then there's us, the Europeans, who I think could be a great power in the sense that we could have influence on global politics if only we wanted to but we're not quite sure that that is what we want. So I think the key question that will shape world politics for some time to come is how these four great powers see the world. Perhaps in the future there will be more others. People often ask me what about India, for example, but I don't think anybody in this room would hold that India shapes world politics today. Perhaps if they wanted to, they could build up to that but not now. So for the moment it's these four. So do they see the world as a place where they can cooperate and share power or do they see the world as a place where they have to compete and grab more power at the expense of the others? That I think is the defining question. And that question I think leaves Europe more uncomfortable maybe than the others because we're no longer used to thinking in these terms even. And that's because of course inside the union this doesn't matter. All these old fashioned concepts, power, geopolitics, spheres of influence, we didn't have to care about it anymore. I don't know if my prime minister goes to a European council meeting and tries to make a point whether or not he will be hurt. Does not depend on how many tanks Belgium can put into the field which is just as well because the answer is no. The last Belgian tank cannot be admired for a small fee in the Royal Army Museum. There you go. But of course in the world around does these things still matter? And I'm definitely not going to argue that we should also again adopt classic great power politics but I'm going to argue we need to understand what's happening around us or we will forever be surprised. So within this context then what do we do? First of all, how do we relate to the other great powers? When you take the subway in Beijing they don't say mind the gap as they do in London but there's a nice voice that keeps saying stand firm and hold the handrail. Stand firm and hold the handrail. And I thought that's sort of good advice even in my field because you know with all the turbulence there is in international politics stand firm which also means don't immediately lie down and give up all your ideas and values and hold the handrail. And Europeans have a handrail because we have our alliance with the United States. I mean that broadly not just NATO for those who are in NATO but our overall strategic partnership with the United States except that the fittings seem to have loosened. And so we're probably again more uncomfortable than the others. So how should we position ourselves in this new great power game? I think there's some risk here precisely because we have been allied with the United States for so long and for a long time we didn't really have to think all too much about strategy and certainly Washington did not recommend us to think for ourselves. We were there to implement strategy as it was fashioned in America and I think the risk is that unwittingly perhaps we still adopt the American worldview for lack of our own if we don't come up with our own thinking and for me this relates specifically to China. In the American debate the predominant view is that China is an adversary or even the enemy and if you're an American strategist and your aim is to remain the undisputed number one one can understand where that comes from but if you're European is that necessarily true? Must China necessarily be our enemy? I'm not convinced at least not yet. It is not my feeling that China is trying to undo the world order because they've benefited greatly from it. They became very rich and powerful under the current system. They're of course trying to gain more mach de manoeuvre within the system but I don't think they are trying to overthrow them. It would seem to be quite foolish on their part if you ask me. I think China is doing what great powers do. It's pursuing its interests. That can cause friction with our own interests but sometimes the interests also overlap but I do not think that China is necessarily a revisionist power as some like to say and is trying to undo the world order. Therefore I think we Europeans would be better placed to engage with China and try to fit it into the existing world order of multilateral organizations and a set of rules that we try to convince everybody to abide to. Of course China is not a democracy. And engaging China doesn't mean justifying all of its actions nor does it mean subscribing to Chinese values or to its domestic politics. But I think here again is a certain risk that comes from past practice. Of course we've been ally with the United States mainly but that doesn't mean I think that you can only ally with other democracies. I mean NATO and Brussels they like to say we're an alliance of democracies and today that's true of course but it wasn't always true. When NATO was created in 1949 we included the Portugal of Salazar. Not because we thought Salazar was on the way to democratize Portugal but because we needed the Asaurus for the military bases and before that during the war in the UK and the US of course allied with the USSR because they were objective allies against Nazi Germany. If you go back in history before the First World War Republican France allied with Tsarist Russia not because they subscribed to each other's values but because they saw themselves as allies against the triple entals. So I think we should be careful that we don't begin to see the world through a true ideological lens and even EU documents are tempted by that. You very often can read even in EU documents that somehow world politics is about a confrontation between the democracies and the others. And I'm thinking is that really true? And are we really, is it really smart to encourage this perception? Because I don't think that the fact that another state is not a democracy Ipsofacto makes it impossible for us to partner with it. Let alone that it Ipsofacto becomes an adversary of that. I don't think that that is true. I fear that it's very difficult for us to democratize others even though it might be desirable and that we have to work with other countries. I don't think that to make a partnership or even an alliance in foreign policy you need to agree about values or you need to agree about your domestic political system. You need to agree about the number of foreign policy objectives and of course what are legitimate ways of pursuing those. And then you can build a very deep partnership in my view, including with China. And I think as a EU, this is exactly what we should try to do. And also in the future, hopefully again with Russia. Again, we should be careful not to see this through a too ideological lens. I was very surprised last time I was in the US that all my American colleagues were talking about Putinism. And I was thinking, what is that Putinism? The way they describe it, it sounded a lot like Trumpism to me at some point. But I mean, the guy is in power, Putin. He wants to stay in power. I'm not sure there is a lot more ideology to it in domestic politics, I mean. The danger is that once you convince yourself that Putinism exists, then the next step in the thing is of course it must be defeated. It must be destroyed. And I'm thinking, but is it really ought to be our foreign policy objective to bring down the government of Vladimir Putin? I'm not sure that it is. I think our objective should be to, for Russia to sort of play by the rules. If that can be done with Vladimir Putin, fine with me. It's up to the Russians to decide which kind of government that they want. Of course, for the moment, it's very difficult to cooperate because the Russians very often are their own worst enemy. Just when you think there might be a moment to slowly find a compromise, then things aren't being made impossible. For example, most recently by the Salisbury incident, but we don't have sanctions against Russia for the further sanctions. We have sanctions for the purpose of reverting to, let's say normal good neighborly relations. So my feeling is, as Europeans, our position is in this great power game that we should not choose sides. And the worst that could happen is that you crystallize a new bipolar confrontation between us and the Americans on the one hand and the Russians and the Chinese on the other hand. I think our foreign policy should be more Bismarckian in a way that we say we try to have close relations with all of the other powers. With the US, but also with the Chinese and in the future, hopefully again with the Russians. This is not a new Cold War. If countries join China's Belt and Road Initiative, they don't disappear behind an iron curtain and become inaccessible to us. We can also still have close relations with countries that join that. Whether they will be interested depends on us. Do we put an offer on the table? That's interesting enough for them or not. You could even say that from a third country perspective, the fact that they can now choose between relations with the Americans, with us and with the Chinese, is positive. They have more options, right? And we should also be careful not to become too hypocritical that we criticize the Chinese because they're now better at what we used to do ourselves, right? And very often if the Chinese do something, we look at it negatively. If the Americans do the same, then that's normal. Then it's a contribution to peace. So I would say engage with everybody, including with the Chinese, even try to build security partnership with China. Because I think to some extent, our security interests overlap. On the one hand, there's of course the South China Sea and that's the one big item that disturbs the more benign view that one could have of China. But at the same time, you can feel that they are the Chinese, I think are still somewhat uncomfortable with their role as a global security actor. They know that the principle of non-intervention that they held no longer applies because I mean that's easy to say if you don't have interests anywhere, but now there are Chinese citizens and investments everywhere. So they may have to act as they did in the Libyan war just to protect their nationals. But you can feel that they're still uncomfortable to do that alone, that they would rather act with partners under multilateral cover. I would say let's position ourselves as that partner. China is not going to go away. They are becoming a global military actor, whether we like it or not. Let's engage with them rather than sort of build up our defenses against them our priority. At the same time, of course, we should invest in our alliance with the United States. So this is definitely not a plea to distance ourselves from the United States. My argument is just that our partnership and alliance with the US alone in this multipolar setting is just no longer sufficient to defend our interests because Americans in this context logically have other priorities than Europeans. And sometimes even the interests can be contradictory. So we need our alliance with the Americans, but it is not sufficient to defend our interests. We also need to find partnerships and good relations with the other great powers and hopefully also with the original powers. Before anybody in the room now thinks that somehow I'm on the payroll of China, my husband actually is a Taiwanese. So there are strong, I do have strong reservations on certain aspects of Chinese policy, but I try to look at this especially from the point of view of interest, even though we often do discuss this at the dinner table. I always lose out since he can cook and I cannot cook. So it's in my interest to compromise. We're a bit like the EU and United States. He cooks and I do the dishes. So the great power relations and then this brings me to the second point because I'm sure by now some people have in the audience. I think, yeah, but what of our values then? If you're just cooperating with the powers that be. Here again, I think we must be more pragmatic in a way in the sense that I do not think that we have the power to democratize the rest of the world. I do think that democratization, if and when it happens, is always in our interest because role-functioning democracies create stability internally and among each other. And when democratization happens, I think we can try to support it, to amplify it, but I don't think that outside the continent of Europe we can trigger it. I think more often than not, we create more problems than we solve. And also if you say that the purpose of our foreign policies to democratize the world, and you're actually saying to more than half of the world's governments that you don't really like them, right? I mean, Kissinger says this in his book, World Order, that you're somehow behaving as if those governments for you are not really fully legitimate. And you're only talking with them, pending them being overthrown by someone whom hopefully you will like better and that that's hardly a good basis to build partnership on. So I think we should be honest with ourselves and say it is not our purpose to democratize the rest of the world. And it's tricky because you feel that the EU got cold feet. We had this debate to some extent when the EU was drafting the global strategy in 2016. But in the end it's as if we know that we cannot democratize the rest of the world but we're not quite ready to say it yet. And now the EU, the new buzzword is resilience. And I'm very critical of this term because it means everything and nothing. And then there's an EU communication on what resilience means. So it takes 15 pages to explain it which already is probably not such a good idea. And interesting, at one point they say, well, a resilient society is a democratic society. Which is probably true, but then we're back to square one because the EU only brought up the notion of resilience because it sort of realized we cannot democratize others. And now we're back to it. So here I find this rather fuzzy. I would say be more forthright, admit that you cannot democratize others. But at the same time, stay true to your human rights in general. Of course, in the end democracy and human rights have to come together. But I would say in practice you can sequence them. I do think we can legitimately maintain a critical human rights dialogue with all our partners because if we believe in human rights we have to believe in the universality. They're not universal rights, they're not human rights, but they are Irish rights or Belgian rights or whatever you want, or Flemish rights according to some of my compatriots. So I do think we can build on that. Of course, you cannot expect that everywhere you will create short-term results, but at least you put yourself on the good side. So to say, at least you provide moral support to people in countries such as China who are activists for human rights and you keep up the pressure, the pressure to some extent. So I would say we as Europeans must be able to cooperate with everybody, with every other actor, regardless of their domestic political system. You don't have to like them to cooperate with them. You have to have shared interests and agree on the way of pursuing them. The only red line that I would see is that by cooperating with regimes who are not democratic, that we cannot, by cooperating, ourselves violate our own values, right? They may do so. And unfortunately, we have to cooperate with actors that violate our values. The red line should be that we ourselves thus do not begin to violate our values. I like this line from George Kennan where he says at some point, something like in foreign policy, sometimes things are so complicated that it's very difficult to come up with a strategy or even to know what you want. But the ultimate guidance is always, don't violate your own values, sort of don't violate who you are. And there is a great zone always, of course, right? I mean, we cooperate, many of our intelligence services cooperate willingly with intelligence services from North Africa and the Middle East whom we know very well, do not respect our values. Our great ally in the war against Islamic State is Saudi Arabia, not precisely a great democracy. But I think it's sort of general guiding principle that would be my line. If we do have to say try and, I would not say export our values, but promote our values, the notion I would put forward rather than democracy is equality. On the one hand, because I think equality is central, is really central to what makes our societies the societies that they are, the idea that it's up to the state to ensure the equality of its citizens in terms of their security, in terms of their same political decision-making, but also in terms of their prosperity. I think that is very distinctive for the European way of life to use an American term that we think it's a responsibility of the government to make sure that everybody has a fair standard of living, even if true misfortune or even if your own folly, you don't reach it, then the state should make sure that you guarantee it. But also equality on the other hand is multifaceted. As I said, there's a political, security and economic dimension to it, so it gives you more flexibility to engage with other partners. That's a more pragmatic approach, but I think an approach that still allows us to remain true to our own values that doesn't force us to betray our own values, because that you can't do, I think. As an actor, you cannot long sustain a policy that violates your own values because it will cause frictions and in the end, our publics will not allow it. Final point, what is the role of the military then in all of this? And here too, we should be realistic. You have to say, one of my friends puts it like this, there isn't no hard power or soft power, there's only power. If you want to be powerful, you need to have military and economic and political power. The question is then, of course, for what level of ambition? And the global strategy introduced the notion of strategic autonomy into the European debate, but then we didn't exactly define it. And so on the one hand, there is a strong realization that we need to improve our military capabilities and we have now lots of initiatives that have been launched, permanent structured cooperation, the European Defense Fund, which have great potential. It's yet to be seen whether they will be successful because these initiatives will not produce results out of themselves. It will take sustained leadership and commitment to make them work. So they can still work. They can work, but it's not guaranteed. But the question is, but why do we actually want all of these military forces? And on that debate, I think it's not so profound that we have in Europe. The official line as well, we need to protect Europe. We need to respond to external crisis and we need to build the capacity of our partners. The last one is clearly, I have to say a task at the lower level than the others, right? But then the question is also, which partners were in the world? Responding to external crisis, the global strategy says yes, mostly in our own neighborhood, but is it then our responsibility to act in each and every crisis in Europe's neighborhood? Or not? And then why do we intervene and why not? Protecting Europe is that only against sort of non-classic threats because for a classic military threat of invasion, most EU member states are members of NATO. Or does strategic autonomy also extend to collective territorial defense? I think there's a lot of unknowns here that we haven't defined, which means that to some extent, initiatives like PESCO and everything that goes on in terms of capability building is taking place in a void. There's no clear link between the capability development and the actual strategic purpose. Personally, I see three tasks that we should set for our military. One protection of Europe indeed, and there's one part that falls below the Article V threshold of NATO that the EU is better placed to deal with. And in which the armed forces, I think, have a supporting role to play, but certainly not the leading role, if you think about cybersecurity, border security, counter-terrorism, et cetera, where you need to coordinate mostly civilian agencies. But I think that in the longer term, we should also think about the degree of autonomy in classic territorial defense. Again, because of this multipolar context, if the priority number one of American Grand Strategy is the rise of China, what happens if an incident with China distracts the Americans from the European theater, is then our deterrence capacity sufficient? Will it be perceived as such or not? I would say that in the long term, my sort of ideal future for NATO would be to configure it much more as a two-pillar alliance between a collective European club as such, I would say the EU as such, on the one hand, and the North Americans on the other hand, rather than as alliance between the US and all these individual European allies and partners. To responding to crisis in the broad neighborhood, yes, but I would say not to each and every crisis. I would say in military terms, we already need to intervene in crisis if they directly threaten European interests. If they don't, then we should not intervene militarily, even though the humanitarian concern might be great. We have political instruments we can use, we have economic instruments we can use, but we have seen in Libya, we intervened on the one hand out of a humanitarian concern and for political reasons and the end result is disaster. And I say that in the full measure, I strongly supported the intervention at the time, but with hindsight, which is always very easy, I think it was a mistake. And another counter-argument is, had we not intervened in Libya, what would have happened to us, to the Libyans unfortunately, but to us, and I would posit nothing much. So why did we intervene then? So I would say we need a very credible power projection capability, which underpins your diplomacy, but we should be more reticent in using it than we have been. And the third task I would set is that we need to contribute to maintaining the free use of the global commons because that's a vital interest too, free access to the ocean and seas and to space, airspace and cyberspace. That seems to me to be the three areas in which we need a degree of strategic autonomy. To conclude, all of this, I have to say, in some way, this is just my mirage, right? But the fun thing of being academic of course is that, I don't actually need to get this through parliament or get the budget for it, I can just write it up and go and talk about it. But it is a mirage because I've spoken, I see for the EU where a real great power, a real strategic actor and it isn't, of course, because we don't really have a centralized system for foreign policy decision making. And the foreign policy of the EU is not what Federica Mogherini says that it is. It's what Mogherini might perhaps convince 28, soon, unfortunately, 27 foreign ministers off, who then even if they do agree to do something, do not necessarily act upon it afterwards. So of all the great powers, we're the only one who is systemically handicapped because we don't really have a centralized foreign policy decision making system. That probably is exacerbated by the fact that they put it very bluntly, we have traitors in our midst, right? Every foreign affairs council, there's one, two or more member states who block European decision making or water down European positions because they are pursuing a Russian or a Chinese enchantment or both. And thus, perhaps get some short-term gain out of that, but in the long term, undermine the collective interest of everybody, including themselves. And that makes it very difficult to wage a resolute European foreign policy. So I would say the idea that's in the air now to move to qualify majority voting in European foreign policy, not defense policy, foreign policy would be the absolute minimum, in my view, to circumvent this problem and to try and become a more decisive actor. It's not a panacea, of course. You would still need someone to take the lead, but in the current circumstances, if you have the lead, if someone does take the initiative, it's very difficult to get something through. You know, grand strategies ought to be simple to comprehend, right? Klausowitz says everything in war, grand strategy is very simple, doesn't mean it's easy, but ought to be simple to explain. So my slogan for sort of all of this would be something like the power to engage. I think Europe's role in international politics is to engage the others and to try and engage the others in the multilateral system. But you can't do that from a position of weakness. You need to do that from a position of strength. And strength, I don't mean in the first place, military strength, but I mean unity in Europe. If we would say now, today, to the Chinese from our current position, we will accommodate the rise of China. The Chinese would say, yeah, of course, what else do you propose to do? And they will see it as a sign of weakness that we say that. But if you could say from a position of strength that we want to give China its rightful place in an existing rule-based order, then you can hope to achieve a result. Otherwise, the problem with this is that time is against us and that if you're not in this great power game, if you're not a player, then you're the theater on which the game of the others is playing out, which you already see to some extent how China and Russia are trying to gain influence in Europe's neighbors, but also inside the EU and the United States, of course. Or as someone else has put it, if you're not an actor, then you're on the menu, the others. So I think this is relatively urgent for us, unfortunately, to try and overcome this. Voila, I rest my case here and I look forward to all your thoughts on my outlandish proposals. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.