Continuing conflict in Iraq, between Israel and the Palestinians and the series of deadly suicide bombing attacks in Istanbul this week have brought it home that the Middle East region poses fundamental problems for the peoples of Europe and their security.
There is widespread support for developing stronger capacity within the European Union to deal with such issues, along with other worldwide threats to safety and sustainability. The latest draft security strategy document prepared by the European Commission, reported in this newspaper today, is welcome evidence that this is under way.
It puts forward four major principles to guide the EU's policies and actions. Multilateralism involves a commitment to work co-operatively with other states and international organisations, within the framework of the United Nations Charter and international law. Preventive diplomacy and action refer to timely intervention using many methods to head off or repair problems affecting security before they reach crisis stage. A policy of concentrating on the EU's wider neighbourhood during and after the forthcoming enlargement is put at the centre of the strategy. The document makes clear this must include the Middle East region as well as Russia and the Ukraine. And priority is given to seeking out the root causes of conflict so that they can be addressed effectively in the long term.
The logic of this approach increasingly brings out the EU's global as well as its regional role. Among the threats identified in the document are terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, climate change, state failures and organised transnational crime. They cannot be tackled without concerted international action. The potential strength of the EU in such fields is revealed in its much more developed role in international economic and trade negotiations, compared to which its political and security regimes are fundamentally under-developed.
In this respect the document gives high priority to developing a more effective and balanced partnership with the United States in political and security affairs. The importance of that task has been vividly demonstrated during the Iraq crisis, during which the US has sought to exploit divisions among EU member and accession states. Such divisions will not cease as a more coherent security and foreign policy develops, since the aim is to develop a common and not a single set of policies, as Mr Chris Patten, the External Affairs commissioner, pointed out in Dublin this week. Individual states remain in control of their foreign policies; but to make them more effective they see the merit of much closer co-operation in pursuit of common interests and objectives. Nor do these plans herald the emergence of an EU superstate, since neither the will nor the capacity to do that exists. Rather is a different approach to international affairs being pursued, based primarily on multilateralism and law rather than power and force.