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Mogherini takes the helm
The next chief of the EU’s foreign policy navigates with assurance the quiet waters of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
Federica Mogherini’s hearing before the European Parliament was never going to be a dramatic event. The question was what type of event it would be. Swiftly, it became more apparent what the evening could become.
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The future chief of the European Union’s foreign policy arrived in a crowd of journalists and set about gladhanding with members of the foreign-affairs committee, AFET, wandering down the aisles to say hello to a familiar face. Everyone smiled. There was nothing to disturb the happy, easy mood. If food and bunting had been behind Mogherini, this could have looked like a party fundraiser or conference.
But how would the centre of this showpiece use the moment, and what would her supporters demand of her? Mogherini had arrived willing to give much. In her written statement to MEPs, she had underscored again and again how much she saw the Parliament as a potential partner. In her early statements, she talked about what a “pleasure” – yes, she used the word – it was to come to the Parliament regularly for discussions. She used the word “love” at the end about the same prospect. When, in her closing statement – or, rather, her unscripted commentary on the debate – she expressed surprise about the lack of questions that MEPs had asked about institutional issues, it seemed that she had been willing to share more about her love than had been demanded of her.
Mogherini had correctly pinpointed one of the oddities of this hearing. Unusually, MEPs did not seem anxious to extract as many promises of rights and respect as they are normally. Perhaps they felt they had already secured, in Mogherini’s written statement, as much respect and co-operation as they could ask for without becoming unseemly.
MEPs did little pandering (even the three fellow Italian socialists who asked questions did so without obsequious comments and simply asked questions, questions that were in fact quite substantive) and the mood in the chamber was also unexpectedly quiet. Clearly, no political party was willing even to hint at undoing the deal struck between EU national leaders on 30 August, when Mogherini was named alongside Donald Tusk, the incoming president of the European Council; but, still, Mogherini’s selection had been acrimonious and some of that acrimony might reasonably have been expected to linger.
Read the live blog from the hearing – as it happened
It did not, and no one was about to try to light the fires of discontent again. Nonetheless, Mogherini was bound at some point to be obliged to face the cause of the disquiet in the summer: her and her country’s response to the Ukraine-Russia crisis, which much of central and eastern Europe (and other parts of Europe) felt was far too weak in the face of Russian aggression. The question came up quickly, and well, in a question from the British socialist, Richard Howitt. If a bear approaches someone, survival experts say, a person should either lie on the ground, form a united front with others in their group, or speak softly: how would she confront the bear? “I like this committee”, which is why she wants to come back often, Mogherini said, before answering: we need a mix of “assertiveness and diplomacy”, a mix that would depend partly on the reaction of the bear. It was an answer, but not a full answer to past criticisms of her.
But if one of Mogherini’s goals for her hearing was to clarify her position on Russia and Ukraine, freeing her views from the interpretations of them by others, she did not seize the opportunity. Twice more, she had very good opportunities and very good reason to clarify her position – she won dubious praise from a hard-left Spaniard, Pablo Iglesias, and a far-right Frenchman, Aymeric Chauprade, for her “balanced” (Chauprade’s word) and “common sense” (Iglesias’s phrase) attitude to Russia at the start of the crisis. Mogherini did not put clear blue water between their perception of her views and her original positions, and some of her answers to questions about the crisis and its history were tangled. She did, though, indicate an indication of where her thinking now is on the Russia-Ukraine crisis: the EU needs to show solidarity with Ukraine and use Ukraine as its “point of reference” in shaping its policy towards Russia.
By the end, she had yet to satisfy Estonia’s Tunne Kelam (EPP) – but, on other issues, there were few signs of unhappiness. Bernd Lange, the German socialist who heads the trade committee, did not even use his right to a follow-up or second question, and so one of the big topics on the EU’s international agenda – trade – went barely addressed.
There were plenty of other topics that also failed to get much of an airing – such as development and climate change – but, then again, the same was true of many countries and regions. Even the Middle East peace process got very short shrift, not something one would usually expect to say about the Parliament. The world is a big place, and three hours was too short to touch on every part of the globe, which was the MEPs’ preferred approach.
It was largely left to Mogherini to volunteer what sense of direction she wants to give EU foreign policy and how she intends to work with member states (seemingly a lesser concern for most MEPs, other than the European Conservatives and Reformists, than co-operation with the Parliament). Mogherini said she was “naïve” to think that member states’ foreign policies should be displaced or subsumed; nor did she think that would necessarily be good. But the EU’s member states need “a common direction, a common vision, some common action … and to work on shaping that together”, Mogherini said.
She also indicated that she will ‘walk the walk’ – or, rather, fly the plane in the service of that goal: she gave herself the task of visiting all 28 member states within a matter of months to work on that sense of common direction. It was a big pledge and a sharp contrast from her predecessor, Catherine Ashton. So too was the unscripted nature of most of her comments, the assured manner and the command of the main issues.
None of that has ever really been in doubt – the question marks about Mogherini have been more about policy judgement and the lack of experience in running institutions – but it all served to give a good start to her five years in the chair of Foreign Affairs Councils, the European External Action Service and the European Defence Agency, and in a deputy’s chair in the European Commission. At the end, the hearing may not have been quite the political love-in that it promised to be, but it still served the purpose of making Mogherini and the MEPs feel good.
Leaving the chamber, it was hard to avoid feeling that the European Parliament’s biggest foreign-policy decision of the day was not about Mogherini – the decision was made long ago – but about whether Alenka Bratušek should be deprived of the vice-presidency of the European Commission and the role of head of the EU’s ‘energy union’.