BRUSSELS — The crisis in Libya is a rare instance in which Europeans can plausibly claim to be outdoing Americans in foreign policy, and a rarer one still of the old world being more prepared than the new to use its military muscle. But while France and Britain have burnished their leadership credentials, the same cannot be said of the European Union. Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign-policy chief, has missed her best chance to date to seize the international spotlight. And Ashton's low profile is particularly striking in light of the fact that she is the first occupant of an office designed to ensure that the European Union would assert itself effectively in times like these.
But the bloc's new, much-vaunted, foreign-policy structures have been largely sidelined in the current crisis over Libya. When it finally came, leadership arrived not from Brussels, but from Paris and London. Unified the EU was not: Public disagreements have shattered any semblance of cohesion among the 27 member states. While Britain and France pushed intervention, Germany not only refused to back their motion at the United Nations Security Council, but also removed its ships from a naval blockade in the Mediterranean. Although Ashton issued regular statements, chaired meetings, and visited both North Africa and Egypt, she never emerged as a key power broker.
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All this comes less than 18 months after the European Union ushered in the Lisbon Treaty, designed to build a foreign policy worthy of the world's largest trading bloc. Where Ashton's predecessors were forced to rely mostly on the lure of EU membership to gain influence in the region, the latest treaty created a new EU diplomatic service and gave her control over significant financial resources. The European Union still has no military capabilities of its own, but many Europeans hoped that the EU's financial firepower and international prestige would finally be organized to consistently pursue the aggregate interests of all 27 member states.
Yet increasingly, those aspirations of common international strategy come across as adolescent fantasies of political maturity.
Some of the reasons for Ashton's shaky start lie in the fact that, unlike several marquee Europeans who were passed over for the job, she never really wanted, nor expected, this sort of position. She was selected in November 2009 on grounds of political and geographical balance. If Ashton doesn't seem prepared for the chess game of global grand strategy, it's because, in some sense, she isn't. Although she's not a political novice, Ashton has never held elected office. She was appointed by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to serve in his cabinet, and was later named as leader of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of Britain's Parliament, where she quickly earned a reputation as an adept conciliator.
In Brussels, too, she is known for preferring negotiating behind the scenes to sparring publicly with sharp-elbowed colleagues. As she put it at the time of her appointment as foreign-policy chief, she is not "an ego on legs." Her first EU post, as trade commissioner, suited this pragmatic, low-key style: she built solid relations with her U.S. counterpart, Ron Kirk, and negotiated a free trade agreement between the European Union and South Korea. But she seems ill at ease in the role of figurehead for a new, more assertive, European foreign policy.
Of course, in some sense, Ashton is creating the job as she goes along. As the first occupant of her post, she has inherited little by way of an effective bureaucratic infrastructure. Ashton recently selected and gained approval for a Brussels headquarters for the new European diplomatic service she is setting up, but it may be another nine months before she and her staff can move in and work from the same building. She is also suffering from the lack of an effective communications strategy: Last month, she appointed a chief spokesman to a position which had lain vacant for a year, and only recently have seasoned diplomats like Pierre Vimont, former French ambassador to Washington, been brought on board. But the initial negative press headlines following her appointment have already left their mark: The repeated questions about her suitability have fostered have a bunker mentality in Ashton's inner circle.
Ashton admits that she has faced a steep learning curve. "It is work in progress," she told me in early March, speaking in her current, temporary office on the 12th floor of the European Commission, the bloc's executive. "We are dealing with all these situations for the first time." She said, though, that she had learned from her experience last year following the natural disaster in Haiti, when she was criticized for reacting slowly. What she concluded was that "we could do things better."
But Ashton's first major foreign-policy test -- the cascading series of revolutions in the Arab world -- has been infinitely more complex than Haiti.
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