LONDON - The EU must adapt to the geopolitical reality of an "à la carte world," according to a new report published by the London-based think tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) on Wednesday (15 November).
Policymakers in the West should come to grips with a world "where you can mix and match your partners on different issues, rather than signing up to a set menu of allegiance to one side or the other," write authors Ivan Krastev, Mark Leonard and Timothy Garton Ash.
Timothy Garton Ash, co-author of report, said: "Europe's soft power must be complemented by more investment in the military and security dimensions of ‘hard power’"
Summary
- European and US leaders tend to view today’s world through a lens of competing ideological and political systems, in which you are with the West or against it.
- But the results of a major public opinion poll indicate that people all over the world instead favour an à la carte arrangement, in which their governments can pragmatically choose their partners depending on the issue at stake.
- China and Russia do not compete with the West in terms of their attractiveness as a place to live or the values that people want to live by. People also tend to prefer their countries to cooperate more closely with a US-led bloc on security, but prefer economic cooperation with China. Overall, people outside the West do not want full political alignment with either China or Europe and the US.
- This is perhaps most evident when it comes to issues of war and peace. Most people in non-Western countries want Russia’s war on Ukraine to end as soon as possible, even if it means Kyiv ceding territory.
- The value that people place on Western standards of living and values does not translate into faith in the European political project or the resilience of liberal societies. Many people outside the West doubt whether the EU and even liberal societies more broadly will survive.
For the full report.visit: https://ecfr.eu/publication/living-in-an-a-la-carte-world-what-european-policymakers-should-learn-from-global-public-opinion/
