 Dr. Natali Tocci, who is the Director of the Instituto Atheri Internationale in Rome, and Special Advisor to the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and Vice President of the Commission Federica Mogherini. You know the talk is going to be about framing the EU's global strategy, a stronger Europe in a fragile world. Dr. Tocci will cover the global strategy of the EU, traces origins, and will follow it up with a discussion of her current work on implementing the strategy, especially in the field of security and defence. She will use the perspective of this strategy to discuss the impact of Brexit on the future of foreign and defence policy in Europe. The latter, of course, is of particular interest in this country, but not only in this country. So many thanks, and many thanks above all for the invitation here at the Institute. It's a real pleasure. I've been wanting to come here for quite some time, and I'm really glad that I finally managed to make it. So what I wanted to do this afternoon is really tell you a bit the story behind this book. It's a book that I wrote after the global strategy was produced, as was mentioned. I am director of basically the equivalent of this Institute back in Italy, the Institute for International Affairs, but I'm also special adviser to the high representative and vice president of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini, and on behalf of her, I coordinated the work and drafted the global strategy. And I wrote this book, well, the idea of this book, flyers, by the way, downstairs so you can get a discount. But I decided to write this book a few weeks after the global strategy was published. And I was sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka, trying to relax after what had been an awfully stressful couple of years, because a couple of years it took to actually get this done. And all of a sudden, it came to me sort of all these thoughts, these memories, these facts, these anecdotes came back to me. And I really thought, I've got to write this down. I've got to write it down before I forget, before the memory starts fading. And so this is not really an academic book at all, but it is the book written by an academic, and I think Tanka, that has had this incredible privilege, basically, of being a little fly in the machine, and looking and observing, and acting, obviously, within that machine. And as I said, I guess the first reason why I did it is this whole idea of not forgetting, putting it all down on paper. But then connected to it, I really felt the need to share the privilege that I had. As I said, I think there is far too little interaction, real interaction, between the world of academia and think tanks, and civil society more broadly, and the world of practice. And I had, because the High Representative gave it to me, this incredible privilege to be this fly in the machine. And I really strongly felt the need that, I really ought to share it. I really ought to share it with colleagues, particularly both those inside the machine, but most importantly, those outside the machine. Because I'm convinced, and then this is my third point, which is really what I wanted to concentrate on today. I really felt that there is far too insufficient interaction between these different worlds. And the insufficient interaction, of course, has many causes. And there's a lot of resistance coming from both worlds, both the world of practice and the world of academia. And I certainly confronted quite a lot of that resistance when I started this work. So here comes the first little anecdote. The way in which the work was organized on the global strategy for those of you who don't know or don't remember, essentially had two main phases. There was phase number one, which was, we sort of in shorthand called it, the strategic assessment. It was basically work that started more or less around Christmas of 2014, up until June 2015. And it produced a document on the basis of which, then the HRVP was given a mandate to produce the global strategy by the European Council in June 2015. And it was basically a picture of the world. It described a world that was more connected, more contested, and more complex. And just after that phase ended, we started discussing how we were going to organize the work for the second round, for the real thing, the real strategy. And there was a very senior member of the European External Action Service that kept on referring to the fact that we needed to have a comité d'Ithoriel. And I knew that the HRVP was actually quite convinced, as I was, that the pen had to remain in one hand. Because if you want to do something coherent, I mean, of course, you've got to get input from all sorts of directions, but at the end of the day, there needs to be a pen. So I kept on pushing back and saying, comité d'Ithoriel, what do you mean? And he was saying, he was kind of bringing up all of these names of diplomats or retired, most of them admittedly retired diplomats that should have constituted this comité d'Ithoriel. And I said, well, this is fantastic. We can have a sounding board. That's how I called it. So basically a group of people with whom to share ideas, bounce ideas, and essentially sort of have a collective brainstorm. But then at the end of the day, there would be one pen. And he really resisted against this concept. And he kept on going back to this comité d'Ithoriel, comité d'Ithoriel. And I realized as time went by, that he was in a state of pure panic. And the reason why he was panicking so much was because I was external. I was an outsider to the machine. I was not someone that could be easily controlled. And all of a sudden, he, at some point, when I kept on saying, there's not going to be a comité d'Ithoriel, he at some point said to me, what do you mean, Natalie? I mean, did you actually want to write it on your own? And I said, yeah. And his face kind of, you know, white. And he said, well, what if you get ill? And I said, well, you know, with all due respect, I think there's a much higher chance that some of the people that you were mentioning to be members of the comité d'Ithoriel are going to get ill rather than myself. Anyway, in the end, it was just a sort of small anecdote to really highlight how there is a lot of resistance, a lot of resistance from both worlds to really interact more with one another. And I think there is, which is the third reason why I wrote this book, there is so much to learn from one another. I'm absolutely convinced that the global strategy would not be not, it could have been me, it could have been Ben, it could have been someone else. But the point is, the global strategy, as we know it, would not be what it is had it been written exclusively internally from within the machine. For reasons that I'm going to get into in a moment, but essentially, it is clear that coming from the outside, you do have, in some respects, a more analytical and more long-term view of things, able therefore to organize things in a way which, sort of paint that broad brush strategic picture. But it's also clear that there is a lot to learn by academics, and I've learned tremendously over the last three years. A lot of the academics and think tankers can learn from being within the machine. My perspective on all sorts of academic issues and debates has completely changed over the last three years, and it's really been the product of this experience. Anyway, so moving on to the content and really reflecting back on this idea of the interaction and the interplay between academia and practice and how it's played out, in particular, in relation to the EU global strategy. So this is a book that essentially deals with why we did it, the how we did it, and the what is in the strategy. And then I'll move on to an end with the what next after the strategy. But these three questions, I think, all three relate very closely to this point I'm trying to make again and again about the interplay between academia and practice. So first question, why was the strategy written? Why was it done? And that is a key, the key question in strategy making. And I hadn't thought about it myself initially, but pretty much the first thing I did when Federica Mogherini entrusted me this task was to phone up someone who had written the only other strategy that the EU had in the past, meaning the 2003 European security strategy. So I phoned Robert Cooper up, who at the time had been Secretary General of the Council. And I asked him, can you give me some advice? And Robert said to me, well, before I even begin to do that, why are you doing it? And I was like, well, I don't know. I hadn't really thought about that question. But it is the key question. Because unless you answer that question in a convincing and compelling way to yourself, you cannot then organize a text. You cannot organize a strategy. So what were the motivations? And I think the motivations are very clearly connected to this issue of the different worlds. I mean, the world of think tanks, of bureaucrats, and of politicians. So motivation number one is the motivation that would come from the official, the bureaucrat. And it would be a rather bureaucratic rationale for doing a strategy. As you all know, the big difference between the 2003 European security strategy in terms of context, well, lots of differences about context. But in this particular bureaucratic and institutional sense, the main difference between the 2003 European security strategy and the 2016 EU global strategy is that it's a post-Lizban strategy. Meaning it's a strategy that the HRVP did wearing both hats, that of the vice president, and that of the high representative. And of course, we all know that, particularly the first years of implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, when it comes to this bringing together the commission end of external relations with the more traditional end of foreign and security policy, it was an experiment, and the HRVP being one example of it, the EAS obviously being another. It was an example that really struggled to take off. Stories about institutional turf wars in Brussels were particularly in those first five years of implementation of the global strategy very, very strongly felt. And so the first bureaucratic rationale for doing a global strategy, which is global thematically and not only geographically, was precisely that of bringing these different actors and getting them to work together. So indeed, there was work obviously with the member states, but there was work with the commission. Every single directorate general of the commission was involved in this exercise. There were representatives from every DG in a task force that was set up representing the external dimension to the commission. And initially, they weren't quite convinced. Initially, they would have probably been quite happy to simply have a security strategy, which would have meant it wasn't their thing. Get on with it. Use security people. And the other time, they grew into it. And they started actually feeling quite involved in the exercise. So I'd say the first reason why the strategy was done was this rather bureaucratic and institutional rationale of essentially implementing the Lisbon Treaty. And so the text itself, the process designed to arrive to the text itself, was really aimed at trying to fulfill that first motivation. Motivation number two was this whole question of political unity. And this was really what the message coming, particularly from politicians, as beginning with the HRVP herself, but obviously all ministers sitting around the Foreign Affairs Council. Of course, this document and this work was done in a period which, in many respects, was so living in, although things have gotten slightly better since then, of great divisions within the Union. Divisions over the Eurozone, divisions over the role of defense, divisions over migration, divisions over Russia. I mean, there's a very long list there. And different and cross-cutting cleavages between member states. And the whole idea and the second main reason for producing the global strategy was that of trying to create a narrative, trying to forge a narrative that could somehow keep it all together, that could somehow bridge over those differences and bridge over those divisions. And this is actually the reason, coming to the Brexit point, why Federico Mogherini decided to go ahead with the publication of the global strategy 48 hours after Brexit. It was not an obvious choice to put it mildly. And it was indeed criticized back then, in many respects. But I remember when I spoke to her on the afternoon of the 24th of June of 2016. And I was convinced that the whole work would be shelved, and we would not go ahead with the publication of the strategy. And well, initially, that morning, she said to me, I've got to think about it. Let me make some phone calls. And then I was sure it was all going to be called off. I booked a weekend at the beach thinking I've got to get my mind off things. There's two years of work down the drain. Let me get out of here. And then she phoned me back that evening, and she said, no, we're going ahead. And she said, we're going ahead because the work is done. And what she meant by the work is done was it took two years to get a compromise on this. I mean, beginning with the assessment through to the strategy itself, a year and a half. And this is 10,000 words, more or less. It's a fairly consistent, meaty strategy. And member states pretty much ended up agreeing with every sentence, every word, every comma, in this document. And now Brexit, the referendum happened 48 hours ago. All the talk is about division. All the talk is about domino effects. All the talk is about fragmentation and disintegration. This is a message that shows, hey, we can still be united. And so hers was, and it goes back to the reason why it was done, which is why I keep on saying it's so important to have that clear in your mind. It was a message of political unity. And the way in which the whole document was both worked upon, but also the content of it as such, was really reflecting a lot of this second political motivation. And then the third motivation, and this is mainly the motivation that comes, indeed, from the academic world and the think tank world, is this whole idea of policy direction. And indeed, because we have been and still are living in times of multiple crises, and this general sense of, here we are and we only react. We keep on reacting, trying to put out different fires as they pop up. And there is this general sense of, particularly criticism coming from the world of academia, coming from the world of think tanks of saying, well, what is it that you want to do? Other than reacting here and there, what is it that wants to do? And so there's sort of strong message coming from the outside world to the institutions of saying, there needs to be some sort of policy direction. And those three messages, I think, those three motivations have really been key in shaping the rest of the document and shaping the process through which that document was reached. Now let me move on very briefly to the how question and again relate this back to a document being written by someone who was on the outside, but obviously being and coming in on the inside. And the process through which, the method, if you like, through which the strategy was drafted was indeed not a particularly conventional method. And again, this was criticized very much initially, particularly on the commission side. Commissions tend to be very attached to certain procedures. And immediately when the first question is, well, is this going to be a joint communication? Well, no, it's not going to be a joint communication. I mean, so they really struggled to sort of fit it into one of their sort of process boxes in terms of how this had to be done. But again, maybe because I was coming from a different world, I was pretty sure that had certain procedures been followed, the result would have been very different. And I realized this when in the period of, when we were working on the strategic assessment, so this was basically the first half of 2015, this was the time when the commission, through a joint communication, was working on a revision of its neighborhood policy. And because obviously the two things were so closely interconnected, given that a lot of what the strategy was going to eventually be about was about the neighborhood, broadly understood. Obviously I was very much in touch with that process. And I remember seeing the very first drafts of that document, of that joint communication, thinking this is absolutely brilliant. This is not commission type of stuff at all. I mean, it's very clear, it has a very strong argument, it's well organized, and indeed the person that was holding the pen, because at the end of the day there is someone always holding the pen, was an extremely competent official. But then it goes through the machine, and it goes through your inter-service consultation, and it goes through all of that process. And then you read the final draft. It's not bad, but let's say if you were to read it for the first time in that final form, you wouldn't get what the real political message actually is. And one can't blame the process for being this way. I mean, it probably is the way in which things have to be most of the time for most documents. But I kind of really felt very strongly that if this was done in this way, it wouldn't produce the intended results. And so what did we concoct? Well, different things that were obviously not very traditional, in many respects. Well, the first, it was the input coming from both the commission and the member states. If this had to be something that on the one hand had to follow a sort of clear, analytical, if you like, structure, and therefore the skeleton had to be fairly top down in terms of organization of the various headings, it's clear that the flesh had to come from the member states, it had to come from the institutions, et cetera. And so rather than simply inviting non-papers, which would have probably ended up going in all sorts of different directions, we structured the input through the eventual non-papers, through questionnaires. And here comes another little anecdote. I remember when I sort of presented this scheme of work to the commission in particular, this was not a meeting with the member states, it was a meeting with the commission. And I said to them, well, here's the questionnaire, just make sure that when you answer the questions, you don't just tell me what you're doing now, not even what you're gonna be doing in six months, but think outside the box. The kind of things you would like to do in three, four, five, six years. And one actually good friend sort of raised his hand and said, Nathalie, you've got to understand here, we can't think outside the box. We are the box. But actually he was wrong, actually he was wrong because, and this goes back to the, if you like, mutual learning and mutual benefits of the outside and the inside coming together, because if solicited in a different way from the way in which institutions are normally sort of mobilized, actually the input was extremely interesting. I must admit, and they may be particularly popular, sort of speaking in a capital, but actually the most interesting input came from the commission, not from the capitals. Because of course that's where the detailed technical knowledge is. And if that detailed technical knowledge is sort of invited in a different way, in an innovative way, lots of fresh ideas, but substantial ones actually emerge. The other sort of little trick that was not particularly conventional and probably wouldn't have happened had it been done by someone who was simply on the inside, if you like, and not straddling the inside and the outside was the fact that I understood fairly early that institutions and officials are very attached to the actual text, to the fine wording of things, even when a product is way off being complete. And I understood how much of an obsession this is when, you know, going back to the example I was making about the questionnaires, I, at some point, a couple of inputs, rather than answering the question on the questionnaire, track changed the question. So I realized, you know, if I start, because at some point you've got to start sending some text out, you know, otherwise how can you have a conversation? So I thought to myself, if I am the one that will be writing bits of text, we will not actually have a conversation about the content of what's there, but the conversation will immediately get bogged down in the commas. And so the second trick that I used was asking a colleague in the EAS, so I would write something, I'd write a chapter or something, and then I would ask him to summarize it. And the summary would be a fairly substantial summary. So for example, if the chapter was four pages, the summary would be three pages. So all the real stuff was there, so we could have, when we met with the member states, when we met with the commission, we could have the real debate about what was there, but I would tell them immediately, I hadn't written it. So there was no point quibbling with the word and the comma. And again, I think that is something that probably wouldn't have happened had it been done through official, if you like, procedures. And then of course, and most obviously, was the very wide and deep involvement of, let's say, civil society, and within civil society there's obviously academia and think tanks and NGOs and a lot more. And again, if you sort of use, as a point of comparison, the 2003 European security strategy, well back then, it's true that there were only 15 member states and not 28, but if I remember correctly, either four or five seminars were organized in four or five capitals. For the global strategy, I mean, this was a point that I really did insist a lot on. We organized over 50 conferences in every single member state. We went to Japan and the US and Brazil and Australia and I mean, all over the place, doing sort of public conferences. We didn't stop at the conferences. One thing that we did that I was very attached to was a student essay competition. And we got lots of excellent input coming from students. Interestingly, most of the time, far more optimistic than the input that we got from member states and institutions and academics. The students had a completely different take on many of the things and we used it. We used it a lot. I mean, it wasn't just a PR show. We really used the input a lot. And it was, I think, a really good piece of advice that I was given by the pen holder of the 2014 US national security strategy. When I went to the US, I asked him again for some advice and he said, you know, you're gonna get so much input. Make sure you use a bit, maybe just a word, maybe just a sentence, but try and use a bit of everything because people recognize themselves in the text. It's gonna make the text much richer and it's gonna get buy-in into the text. And that I did, but I didn't do it just when it came to obviously the non-papers coming from the member states and the commission. I did it from the student essays coming and I did it from literally, you know, from all sorts of contributions, from defense industry associations, to churches, to human rights NGOs, I mean, you know, across the board. And I really think that helped tremendously in actually shaping the content of the text because as I said, although I'm a firm believer of the fact that the skeleton has to be a top-down skeleton, all the flesh has to come from everyone else. It cannot be, it cannot be obviously a top-down thing. Last set of remarks that I wanted to make really relate to this, to the content part. So what is in the strategy and how what is in the strategy relates again to this interplay and connection between theory and practice. First, and I've said this already, but I think a first very obvious example is the fact that the text is organized in an analytical way, not in a chronological way and not in a geographical way. It is not a text that talks about, you know, what to do with Russia and China and the United States. It is, and probably that geographical organization of the text would have led to a text which would have been fairly out of date pretty soon given how quickly things are moving. Whereas it was organized in a more analytic way. I mean, I had to at some point contain myself when for instance there's the section on cooperative regional orders. Initially I had wanted to organize, I wanted to completely get rid of geography altogether and just talk about four cardinal points, sort of north, west, north, south, east and west. And that was a step too far, you know. I mean, people wanted to, you know, particularly officials and diplomats wanted to see, you know, where is it you talk about Russia and China and the U.S. and that was the place to bring all that in. The second example, I mean, I'm not gonna run you through the strategy, are you, you know, for those who haven't read it, you can do it. But just another example is this whole debate about interests and values. And this really took up the first six months of work. And again, you know, coming, because I was coming from academia and because obviously the whole interest versus values debate has been so prominent in academic debate, I was so sick and tired of this, you know, and I was so sick and tired of it not only because if you approached it in the traditional way, you ended up in a, oh, you talk values, but actually you do interests kind of thing. And that is, if you like, mark one of the debate. Mark two of the academic debate is actually you cannot disentangle one from the other because at the end of the day, your value base is what allows you to articulate your interests and vice versa. So you cannot disentangle the two and by positing this as one and the other, you're actually creating an artificial distinction which doesn't actually exist in practice. It was a hard sell. When I tried to make this point to the member states and to the commission, it took a while, you know, and you know, and to me what was interesting and some respects funny about it is that I'm someone that comes from the values box if you really do want to separate in different boxes. But I was very conscious of the fact that actually if you put it as two dichotomous things it is the values that lose out. You know, it's the values that get the short straw. And so the only way to actually re-elevate the values is by making the case that it is one and the same with interests that you cannot separate the two. But it took a while to convince because all of a sudden I was thought of as, you know, the French, the French are very much into the interest thing and they thought I was a real ally of theirs because I was talking interests and didn't really kind of get the fact that actually I was coming from the completely opposite direction, but never mind the point was in the end made. Anyway, I've spoken far too long. Let me just briefly jump to beyond this book and really talk to you a bit about what is happening now. This was always meant, I mean, the global strategy was always meant to be an actionable strategy. But I think no one really could have known a year and a half ago that it would have been as actionable as it has been. And this is for reasons that go obviously beyond the global strategy. I mean, it's really because there has been partly before then and largely after then a real, an incredible alignment of the stars, many of which are obviously not particularly good, but that have really made the necessity of implementing so many of the things that are in the global strategy so urgent. The insecurity and the crises were obviously already there. So already we had Russia, already we had Syria, already we had Yemen and Libyan, long list. So that didn't really change. Of course, the big change was indeed the UK referendum. Now it was a big change because it changed the terms of the debate. It hasn't actually changed so much the practice and this is the interesting part of it because of course the United Kingdom still sits around the table. It's still voting on many of the things that are being decided. It's not blocking things. Of course, it feels less of a need for them to sort of hold back and block and because they are on the way out. So obviously it's changed the attitude but it's still part of this discussion. If I think back at, I was telling you earlier about the phone call that I had with Fiddiqa Mogherini after she was trying to sort of figure out what to do, whether to go ahead or not. And then in the end, she phoned me back again and said, okay, so we're going ahead. The work is done. Told you that story. And she said, we'll make the changes you wanna make given the results of the referendum and then we speak the next day. Lunchtime on Saturday. By this stage, I was at the beach. So I spend the whole morning in a cafe at the beach trying to revise the text with my computer with people looking at me thinking I was completely mad. But anyway, I do that and actually I don't change all that much. I mean, I strengthen the language on unity, putting it more in terms of the need for unity rather than taking it for granted but actually I don't change that much in the text. And the reason why I don't change that much in the text is that the United Kingdom was not an outlier on most of these issues. So had I changed the text dramatically in any way, I would have had problems with other member states. And this goes back to the defense point that I'm trying to make. So indeed it has unleashed a new dynamic behind the European defense discussion but it's not so much because of a problem, a real problem, a problem of reality. It's not because the United Kingdom was really such a break in my view. But that was the perception. And the very fact that most people perceived that United Kingdom was number one break on European defense meant that the day after the referendum took place, it unleashed a new dynamic. Then obviously after that comes Donald Trump which in my view has been an incredible boon for Europe. Thank God for Donald that he's reminded us how important it is to be together as Europeans. But more seriously, the Donald Trump story is also a story about perception because there is I think a long-term structural trend that is disentangling the United States from European security. Including broadly understood, so including places like the Middle East. And I think there is something structural behind it. I started with Obama, it's going on with Trump and it will go on. But let's say Trump makes that message clearer. For good, for good and for real. And so that is simply something that cannot be denied anymore. The idea of being more responsible for our own security. And then you have other pieces to this puzzle. You have the commission that for the first time in its history wants to put money on defense, unheard of in the past. You have Germany that as a member state decides to take defense seriously. I mean it's an evolving debate within Germany itself. And of course if you're Germany in an age of Donald Trump, selling this in NATO terms does not go down too well with public opinion. You cannot sell it in a national framing because of Germany's history. And therefore you need to have that European frame for what has ultimately been a national decision. And then alongside this obviously you have the election of Emmanuel Macron. And so basically you have all of the pieces of the puzzle coming together in a way which we could not have known a year and a half ago. And what to me is really quite astonishing is that so many of the things that are in the strategy but are kind of half hidden there. The idea of an operational headquarter. The idea of a PESCO, a permanent structured cooperation between member states. Only a year and a half ago were half hidden in the text. Because the consensus was not there yet. It was not consolidated yet. And here we go. And we have a MPCC that we have to call an MPCC because we can't call a headquarter. But that's basically what it is and what it will end up becoming more and more over time. It's not something big. We don't need something big but it's something necessary because those are the military teachers. You need to have a clear command and control structure which in the EU was missing. PESCO, which we're probably gonna see by the end of the year. Again, something that was really half hidden only a year and a half ago in the global strategy now happening. So it's incredible that there's been this acceleration. In some respects it's unfortunate the acceleration has been largely on the security and defense bit of the global strategy. I think the effort that the HRVP is trying to make now is to broaden it out to other areas and probably the two other areas which are really at the back of her mind if she thinks about the end of her mandate are, I think two. The first of a more regional nature is largely focused on the one hand on Africa, on the other on the Western Balkans. Particularly the Western Balkans story is key for too long. We took for granted the fact that surely and steadily although perhaps slowly the Western Balkans was moving closer towards Europe and towards democratization and modernization and all good things. And I think last year was a first warning signal that indeed it could go the opposite direction. And if it were to go the opposite direction history would not be kind to the European Union. That's quite clear. So I think on the regional end it's a lot about Africa and this is I think something that we have already begun seeing be in terms of implementation of the SDGs, the focus on migration, the focus on security, et cetera. But also the Western Balkans. And then the other area on which she is extremely keen to focus on is the whole question of multilateralism and the defense of multilateralism. And again, this has been, I mean it was always there obviously, it was there in the text but the political salience of it has increased tremendously. Again, because of the Trump phenomenon. And so the general sense of if it's not the European Union that defends multilateralism, that defends the United Nations, then who is? So all of this I think is work that lies ahead. There is indeed the security and defense piece of the puzzle to complete. And I think this is where we're heading. Last, very last point that I wanted to make because I think it's relevant particularly here in Dublin, is that as I said, I think the defense in all honesty, the defense bit probably would have happened anyway. Strategy not withstanding. But I do think that the fact that the global strategy was the first trigger of a set of decisions has meant that it, and it goes back to the point about unity. It's helped keep all member states together because it's all flowing from a narrative that everyone agreed to including those member states, like Ireland, that have a more complicated discussion, internal discussion, when it comes to sort of hard defense issues. So I really do think that in retrospect, it was extremely brave of Federica Mogherini to go ahead when she did, but also extremely useful in retrospect for her to do it when she did. Because although everything that has happened since then will probably happen anyway, the fact that it came in that order has really allowed to keep basically the unity that was again probably the most important reason why the whole strategy was drafted in the first place.