It may have owed more to Vladimir Putin's anxiety about Covid-19 than to his taste for clunky symbolism, but the comically elongated table that separated the Russian president from two of his recent visitors, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, was nonetheless a tidy metaphor for the sidelining of Europe in the crisis over Ukraine.
The threat of war on its eastern borders strikes at Europe's heart, yet for all their shuttle diplomacy the continent's major powers are bystanders in what is a straight fight between the United States and Russia. The crisis has highlighted Nato's dependence on American leadership, funds and hardware. And while the European Union's status as Russia's biggest trading partner gives it significant economic leverage, the union has made little attempt to hide its frustration at not being at the table when it comes to dealing with the crisis.
Europe’s exclusion is partly by Russian design. The timing of Putin’s military encirclement of Ukraine seems likely to have been influenced by his assessment that Europe is relatively weak and divided.
A decade of internal squabbling caused by the financial crisis, migration, Brexit and an authoritarian drift linked to the rise of the nationalist right has taken its toll on European cohesion. Moscow has worked hard for many years to widen those divisions, aligning itself with sympathetic leaders such as Hungary's Viktor Orban, while interfering in national democratic processes in an attempt to shape events to its advantage.
Compromised
The crisis over Ukraine comes at a time when Macron, the French president, is in the middle of a re-election campaign. Europe's pre-eminent leader for the past two decades, Angela Merkel, has left the scene and her successor, Scholz, is still finding his feet.
Britain, already compromised by the vast Russian financial laundromat in London, is convulsed by political instability at home and increasingly isolated abroad, while Poland, one of the strongest advocates for a firm and united European stand against Russia, is at loggerheads with Brussels over its government's dismantling of the rule of law.
For Putin, who has long regarded European unity as a threat to Russian interests and who pines for the days when European security was decided between the two great powers, this panorama must make for satisfying viewing.
But there are deeper reasons for Europe's bit-part role in the current crisis. While the dominant narrative of the past decade has been America's decline relative to a rising China, less frequently commented on is that the US has become far more powerful relative to its European allies over the same period.
Writing on that growing transatlantic power imbalance this week, Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations observed that since the 2008 financial crisis, when the EU's economy was slightly larger than America's ($16.2 trillion versus $14.7 trillion), the US has soared ahead. Today the US economy is one third bigger than that of the EU and the UK combined.
The real test of European unity will come if and when Putin orders military action against Ukraine
At the same time, Shapiro points out, global use of the dollar has increased relative to the euro and US technological dominance over Europe has expanded.
Perhaps most importantly, Europe has fallen further behind the US on military spending, and that spending is inefficient because of a lack of co-ordination. Meanwhile, the internal divisions caused by its decade of crises have blunted the EU’s ability to build a common foreign policy. “Overall, the EU has become ever more divided and less capable of speaking with one voice,” Shapiro writes.
Diplomatic efforts
So far in the Ukraine crisis Europe’s lack of agency has been obscured somewhat by its remarkable success at forging a common public position on Russia’s threats, its full-throated support for Ukraine, and the frenetic diplomatic efforts of leaders such as Macron and Schulz.
After struggling for years to articulate its purpose in a post-Cold War world, Nato appears rejuvenated by a crisis that forces it to go back to doing what it knows best: deterring Russia.
The real test of European unity will come if and when Putin orders military action against Ukraine. The sanctions package the EU says it will introduce, covering energy, banking, tech companies and oligarchs close to Putin, would have a severe impact on the Russian economy. But it’s one thing announcing sanctions as a deterrent; it’s quite another getting 27 states to introduce those measures and accept the economic hit that they would entail for themselves.
When the EU imposed sanctions on Belarus over its crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 2020, several states sought exemptions so as to protect their own companies trading with Belarus.
Italy and Austria have close business ties to Moscow, while Germany takes more than half its gas imports from Russia. Viktor Orban has already expressed doubts about the sanctions plan. If just one of those states were to break with the rest, all of Europe's efforts to project unity in the current crisis will have been for nothing.