Since the failure of the draft constitutional treaty (2005), the EU has suffered a chain of crises: recession, euro, Crimea, refugees, Brexit, Trump, coronavirus, war in Ukraine. The management of the pandemic – the purchase of vaccines and the adoption of the Next Generation EU plan of 750,000 million euros financed via pooled debt – has been a great step forward in joint action.
The European reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been even more forceful. Vladimir Putin is acting, despite himself, as a great federator of the EU. This has relaunched the defense policy – increased investment, joint purchase of material, co-financed shipments to Ukraine, creation of a rapid intervention force in 2025 – and has established foreign policy. He has revolutionized energy policy with the diversification of supplies, the acceleration of renewables and the promotion of strategic autonomy. He has removed asylum and immigration policy and cracked open the illiberal Visegrad subgroup, distancing Polish populism from the Hungarian autocracy.
The war in Ukraine has been a great shock for the EU, since its project is based precisely on peace, and at the same time it has awakened it to geopolitics. Today it assumes that confrontation determines relations between the great powers and that it has to go from being just a normative or commercial power to establishing itself as a strategic power.
The European response to the war in Ukraine has followed the path of progress already glimpsed in the post-pandemic recovery plan. Brussels sends weapons to Ukraine with the EU budget and studies buying gas jointly in the face of threats of supply cuts.
NATO, for its part, has awakened from the “brain death” that President Macron attributed to it and is gathering the necessary defense capabilities to guarantee security in Europe, while expanding to Finland and Sweden. NATO and the United States need the EU as an additional component of their political and military capabilities. After the war, the EU will have to face tasks of reconstruction and peacekeeping.
The EU is preparing to reform itself to adapt to the new geopolitics and become a functional, flexible and more federal union. It has a set of proposals on the table, such as those by Mario Draghi (pragmatic federalism), Enrico Letta (confederation), Emmanuel Macron (political community, variable geometry) and those coming from the conference on the future of Europe (removal of the rule of unanimity, treaty reform).
All these proposals are examined at the European summit that takes place yesterday and today, during the last month of the French six-month presidency of the EU. There it is decided on the possible convening of a convention in charge of implementing the reforms. This same month of June also takes place in Madrid the NATO summit, in charge of approving its strategy for the next ten years.
These are times of change in which the countries of southern Europe must establish themselves as a constructive, proactive and reliable block. Spain is a key country that will hold the European presidency during the second half of next year. It has a great opportunity to contribute effectively to the definition of the European institutional architecture after the war in Ukraine, which will in any case be more federal. Nothing will ever be the same after Ukraine.
