EU's new leaders face big tests ahead

By Andrew Hammond

Last Tuesday night, EU leaders agreed in principle on a new team to lead the Brussels-based club into the 2020s after a battle royal to carve up the top positions.

The reason why it took five weeks and three summits to agree on the new post holders is that there is now massive pressure on them to successfully guide the 500-million population bloc's future strategic agenda at a time of potentially intensifying troubles.

Two women have top roles: Germany's Ursula von der Leyen, currently a defense minister in Angela Merkel's cabinet and an EU federalist, has been proposed for the European Commission president's role, while IMF head Christine Lagarde is nominated to become chief of the European Central Bank.

Meanwhile, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel is proposed for the president of the European Council, and Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell as EU foreign policy chief.

The new EU leaders are taking office at a moment of major change in the Brussels-based club with a series of key European domestic and foreign policy debates about the EU's future underway. They include how the union will be rebalanced, internally, following the exit of the United Kingdom, one of its largest members, as well as the bloc's future external role in a fast-changing world beyond the continent.

Amid these big challenges and potential opportunities, how the EU responds ― from ongoing pressures facing the Eurozone and Schengen areas, to ties with other world powers ― will determine its future and place in the world.

On the external front, numerous challenges are particularly pressing in what current European Council President Donald Tusk has called the EU's new geopolitical reality.

In 2017, he outlined these pressures which include an increasingly assertive Russia and China, instability in the Middle East which has helped drive the migration problems impacting the continent, and policy uncertainty from Washington with Donald Trump calling for the EU's further dismemberment.

This new geopolitical reality is already catalyzing the EU into reform, including a European Defense Action Plan which has been strongly supported by von der Leyen as German defense minister. This plan advocates greater military cooperation between member states, and reversing around a decade of defense cuts.

This is being driven, in part, by the new geopolitical reality cited by Tusk that includes Russian assertiveness post-Crimea, plus Trump's uncertain commitment to NATO and his campaign rhetoric that Washington should not defend European allies that are perceived not to be paying their fair share of contributions to the military alliance.

And Brexit too could now also eliminate a longstanding obstacle to greater European cooperation in this area given that successive U.K. governments have been opposed to deeper defense integration at the EU level.

Numerous European leaders also believe there is potentially a "window of opportunity" to move forward with a wider security agenda too. This is centered around how best to improve the internal and external security of Europe, while enhancing the socioeconomic welfare of citizens through a jobs, growth and competitiveness agenda.

Here there is growing consensus around what several European leaders have called a new, 21st century European security pact comprising measures to enhance security and border protection, and greater EU intelligence cooperation to emphasize the resilience of the EU project.

Indeed, given current disagreements within Europe on the wisdom of wider integration initiatives, including in the economics area, security issues are one of the few areas where there is significant consensus across the member states and Brussels on the continent's best way forward.

Impetus for movement forward on this security agenda has been provided by recent terrorist attacks on the continent, the migration crisis of recent years and the launch in 2017 by current high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy.

One other signal of potential direction of travel came in 2017 when current Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker asserted the EU needs its own army, a proposal welcomed by his proposed successor von der Leyen, so Europe can react more credibly to the threat to peace in a member state or in a neighboring state.

While such a force is at best a longer-term aspiration, however, the European Defense Action Plan may be a starting point to get there.

Taken together, significant change is now on the cards for the EU-27 from the complex array of challenges and opportunities it now faces at this pivotal moment in its history.

How Brussels responds, with its new leadership of von der Leyen, Michel, Borrell and Lagarde, will collectively help determine its broader place in the world at a time of major geopolitical turbulence and economic uncertainty.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.