The European Union must now ask itself whether the need to arrive at foreign policy decisions by unanimous agreement is a “hindrance” that undermines its credibility on the international stage, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said.
Von der Leyen, the head of the EU’s powerful executive arm that proposes laws, said Europe could not continue to be a custodian for an “old world order” that would not return.
Brussels is locked in a dispute with Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban, who is threatening to use his veto powers to block a €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine.
Orban has said he will hold up the release of the vital loan until Kyiv repairs a pipeline, reportedly damaged by a Russian strike, that runs through Ukraine and brings cheap Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia.
READ MORE
The dispute over the pipeline has inflamed tensions between Ukraine and Hungary, a relationship that had already been strained by Kremlin-friendly stances Orban has taken inside the EU.
Orban has frequently threatened to veto new economic sanctions on Russia, EU aid to Ukraine and other foreign policy decisions to extract concessions elsewhere.
The obstruction has led the commission and other European capitals to look for increasingly creative ways around the populist Hungarian prime minister.
Speaking on Monday, Von der Leyen questioned the EU’s policy of requiring the unanimous agreement of all 27 states to adopt a common position on foreign affairs.
“We urgently need to reflect on whether our doctrine, our institutions and our decision making – all designed in a post-war world of stability and multilateralism – have kept pace with the speed of change around us,” the German politician said.
The EU should ask whether its system, based on “well-intentioned attempts at consensus and compromise”, was “more a help or a hindrance to our credibility as a geopolitical actor”, she said.
Von der Leyen has previously suggested settling foreign affairs debates by qualified majority voting, rather than unanimity, as is the case for much of the policy decisions approved at EU level.
The suggestion of doing away with national governments’ veto powers would likely meet significant resistance, regardless of many EU leaders’ frustration with Orban.
In her speech to EU ambassadors in Brussels, Von der Leyen said the war in Iran had become a “regional conflict with unintended consequences”.
The commission president said debate about whether the United States and Israel had launched “a war of choice or a war of necessity” missed the point.
There should be “no tears shed for the Iranian regime”, which had brutally repressed its people and destabilised the wider region by arming proxy forces with missiles and drones, she said.
Iranians celebrating the death of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed in an air strike at the beginning of the war, hoped for a path “towards a free Iran”, Von der Leyen said.
She pointed out that Europe was already feeling the “spill-over” effects of the conflict, from rising energy prices to the disruption of global trade and the displacement of people.
“The idea that we can simply retrench and withdraw from this chaotic world is simply a fallacy,” Von der Leyen said. “Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old world order, for a world that has gone and will not return.
“We will always defend and uphold the rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies, but we can no longer rely on it as the only way to defend our interests or assume its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face.”
