“We can't lose Ukraine. We need to get Ukraine in. And that means we need to get Ukrainians to belie

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“We can't lose Ukraine. We need to get Ukraine in. And that means we need to get Ukrainians to believe in it.”

Interview with Erik Jones

 

Erik Jones is Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and Non-resident Scholar at Carnegie Europe. Until 2023, he was also Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Professor Jones is author of The Politics of Economic and Monetary Union (2002), Economic Adjustment and Political Transformation in Small States (2008), Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity (2012 — with Dana H. Allin), and The Year the European Crisis Ended (2014).

He is editor or co-editor of more than thirty books and special issues of journals on topics related to European politics and political economy including reference works like The Oxford Handbook of the European Union (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics (2015). Professor Jones is also co-editor of Government and Opposition.

 

O. Kandyuk: Thank you for your time. So, just to start with the question about the general development of the European Union. In your works, you’ve discussed how crises, such as the Eurozone crisis and Brexit, have reshaped EU governance. How do you see the EU's crisis management mechanisms evolving (if they do) in light of ongoing challenges like the war in Ukraine?

 

E. Jones: It's such a good question because people like to imagine that the European Union evolves in some coherent way in response to crisis, but actually the European Union changes in different ways because each crisis requires a different solution.

What has evolved in a consistent way is the European Union's capacity for crisis management, so it gets better and better at managing crises. Unfortunately, this is making the European Union less and less strategic in its thinking, because instead of being strategic and imagining some future Europe that it wants to build, it basically spends a lot of time figuring out how to make a better crisis response mechanism to be more flexible and adaptive in response to changes in circumstances. And I'm not sure that's the best way to build political legitimacy over the longer run.

I'm not sure what the story they're trying to tell about what the European Union is and how people are supposed to believe in that story in a way that would get them to transfer their loyalty to European institutions in a lasting way.

 

O. Kandyuk: Okay and what could be the consequences, if any, of that progress in terms of transformation of European bureaucracy? I mean, whether the transformation of the European bureaucracy to something bigger than it is now possible?

 

E. Jones: I don't think so. I think what we're seeing is that there's a greater centralization of authority inside the European Commission.

If you look at von der Leyen's commission and read the mission letters for each of the new members of her college, what you discover is that the organogram is unbelievably complicated. The reporting structures are very difficult to streamline and imagine visually. And that means that essentially she controls a lot, which is good if you want the Commission to be nimble and agile in the sense that it can move quickly to focus its attention on whatever crisis emerges.

It's not great if you want it to become a much more robust mechanism for governance across a huge number of different dimensions. It's going to have a harder time to walk and chew gum at the same time, if you see what I mean.

 

O. Kandyuk: You’ve written often about the importance of leadership within EU institutions. How can leadership at the European Commission and Council level effectively navigate the increasingly fragmented political landscape of Europe? How critical is public trust in EU institutions (keeping in mind that its not elected institutions) for the long-term success of integration, and what strategies should the EU adopt to rebuild trust in member states where skepticism is high?

 

E. Jones: So now I'm a little bit embarrassed because the role of an academic is to take simple things and make them sound complicated. And I think what I've done is take something and elaborate it in a very complicated form that is actually really simple.

And the really simple point about leadership is that leadership actually helps people to get organized to do things together, even if the things they do are very different from one person to the next. It's all about coordination. And really good leadership tells a story, that helps everybody understand why they're doing what they're doing when they're doing it.

And that story should give us a measure of progress. How do we know we're doing a good job? And if we've got all those things where everybody is working together and everybody knows why they're doing what they're doing and everybody knows how they know they're doing a good job, then the leadership has done its task. This is good.

And that kind of leadership helps people make difficult decisions because there are a lot of trade-offs that need to be made along the way. For all this to work, you  a really good story, a vision that gets everybody to focus their attention on all of these things. The coordination, the separate actions, the measure of progress, the trade-offs that they face along the way so that they can explain at each step to anybody who asks what's going on.

In the European context, that is exactly not what European politicians think they're meant to be doing. They say: “No, we don't like this vision thing. If you have visions, you should go to an eye doctor”.

But, how are you going to coordinate people without some kind of overarching vision? What they end up doing is they substitute for vision with these kinds of complex organograms. But that means that nobody knows what anybody else is doing because they can't figure out the lines of authority and none of the trade-offs are transparent. And how could anybody believe in this thing if they can't understand how it works?

What succeeds in centralizing authority actually fails in giving us a clear measure of progress, a clear direction of movement, a clear sense of responsibility, a transparent way to assess the trade-offs that have to be made.

It's very hard to fall in love with the European Union the way it's structured right now. I say that as a devoted European. Even though my Texas accent betrays a different upbringing, I actually believe in the European project. I just wish they would find a way to explain it better to the people who don't spend their whole professional lives studying this thing.

 

O. Kandyuk: Speaking about Transatlantic Relations. With the new president in US, well, at least in the lights of his electoral promises, EU should expect some changes. Many experts are also predicting the shift of American foreign policy interest from Europe to Asia. What is your opinion on that? Do you think that transatlantic relations will evolve and which area will be harmed the most?

 

E. Jones: So first, I would argue that Trump is a symptom of the changes that are going on in the United States and not the cause.

When we look at Trump, we should not be surprised to find significant continuities between his policies and Biden's policies or between Biden's policies and Trump's policies from his first administration or between what Trump promised in 2016 and what Hillary Clinton promised in 2016.

If we scratch deep enough beneath the surface, we can stretch these continuities back all the way to the early 1990s and identify changes that have been underway for decades that have been pulling the United States and Europe in different directions.

As they move in different directions, bad things happen. For example, the Europeans have been taken for granted that the United States is going to be their ultimate security guarantee. And on one level, that's probably still true.

But on another level, I'm not sure how far that extends to the East. For example, everybody who's looking at Ukraine and saying that the easy way to solve this problem is to bring Ukraine into NATO and to give it a strong Article 5 commitment or bilateral security guarantee from the United States is not looking at the U.S. Senate.

They have missed the fact that there's no way the Senate is ever going to ratify a treaty that either gives a binding bilateral security guarantee or Article 5 commitment to Ukraine. This means that Europeans are going to have to secure Ukraine through their own security guarantees. How they organize that remains to be seen.

That's just one thing. The other thing that I think is important is that the United States is really concerned about the role of China and China's influence on the way the world works.

It's not that the United States is trying to pivot to Asia. The United States is focused on Asia and it has been focused on Asia for decades. And the focus is becoming more and more absorbing.

In that context, the United States is engaged in a de-risking strategy that looks a lot like decoupling. And as it de-risks, it will obviously have implications for the way global value chains work. Because a lot of the de-risking is oriented around intellectual property that's used in complex manufacturing processes. That's why we talk so much about microchips and their architecture, for example. And as the United States clamps down on that intellectual property, it does so beyond U.S. borders. That's why Dutch microchip firms are not allowed to do business in China.

Europeans are going to be forced at some point to choose between the United States and China as their main economic partner. They don't want to do that. But I don't see how that can be avoided. When they make that choice, it will change the way Europe does business in fundamental ways.

So those two things: Europeans becoming more responsible for European security than they have been since the end of the Second World War, and Europeans being less autonomous in terms of the way their economies are structured than they have been since the Second World War, are two profound shifts that Europeans are going to have to adapt to.

 

O. Kandyuk: To continue the topic - The European Strategic Autonomy which was widely discussed especially recently. And Europe can be lets say pushed to go that way even without full consent. So, In light of debates about European strategic autonomy what do you see as the most significant hurdles to achieving this goal? And do you think it possible at all, in short term?

 

E. Jones: I think Europe can begin to move towards strategic autonomy immediately and should. I think the Draghi report and the Letta report, they both outline important steps in that process, ways to mobilize capital more efficiently and then ways to influence the way this capital translates into investment, investment both in green and renewable technologies, better energy vision and investment in developing their own technology, but crucially also investment in security, investment in military production. These things are possible. Is it going to happen immediately? The thing has to start immediately if it's going to ever happen.

And this is the point. I think we need to focus politician’s attention on what they can achieve. That is to start the process and accept that it will grow in an exponential fashion and they'll have greater strategic autonomy.

Will they ever become really independent of the United States? That should not be an objective. What they want is to become so important that the United States is not truly independent of Europe.

That's how they get strategic autonomy is by making themselves an essential partner to the United States. They have tried to do that in the past. They remain the best partner the United States has available.

But they can do a lot more to strengthen their role in the transatlantic relationship. And if they were to do that, they would discover real autonomy.

Real autonomy is not to go live on your own on a mountaintop. Real autonomy is I live in society, but have an equal say in how society is governed. And that's what Europeans should be striving for.

 

O. Kandyuk: Yes, hopefully. It looks like it’s not going further than the discussion, basically. Speaking about approaches to Russia. You highlight diverging U.S. and EU approaches to Russia. Do you think that these inconsistencies be resolved to create a more unified transatlantic strategy? And how the new American presidency will affect it?

 

E. Jones: The thing that I find worrying about the Trump administration is that it is very transactional. And it's transactional in the context of what we call positional bargaining. So, you know, I have X and you have Y. And then we have to figure out how we're going to make a trade so that you get some of my X and I get some of your Y. And we then debate about how much we each give up and how much we each get.

That kind of transactional bargaining doesn't leave us with a lot of principles. It just leaves us with a lot of stuff. And that's what the Trump administration wants. It wants a lot of stuff. But the best way to negotiate, particularly if you want to have a lasting relationship, is to negotiate over principles and not positions. And to say: “Well, what is fair, what is just, what is right? How do we resolve conflicts? And if possible, how do we resolve conflicts so that we all come out feeling like the solution is a good one?”

Vladimir Putin and the Russian regime right now don’t want to engage in negotiations over principles in that way. Ideally, it would not only get stuff, but it would use stuff like Ukraine to rewrite the principles that govern the international system and impose those principles on the rest of us.

The most important principle that Vladimir Putin wants to impose is the principle that he gets to decide which of his neighbouring countries is sovereign. If he gets to decide that, then, you know, you only have to ask yourself, well, where does the neighbourhood stop? Because maybe it doesn't stop at Ukraine. Maybe it extends into Poland or the Baltic states. Do we want him to decide whether the Baltic States are sovereign?

Say not. We don't want him to decide that. That's not a principle we support.

So we need to get Vladimir Putin to adhere to principles like the inviolability of territorial integrity and sovereignty. And he doesn't want to do that. If Trump is busy negotiating to get stuff that plays into Putin's hands because Putin will take stuff and then he'll negotiate for more stuff and he'll keep negotiating for more stuff until he establishes the principle he wants to establish, which is that he gets to decide who's sovereign.

But that's not a principle that either the United States or the European Union or anybody should support. You know, for example, the Indonesians should not support that Vladimir Putin gets to decide who's sovereign.

Because Vladimir Putin may build boats and then float to Indonesia and decide they're not sovereign. So at that point, I think we all need to get together and say, no, we have real principles that we want to negotiate. And let's negotiate over that. And the most important of those principles is that you do not kill other people and take their stuff away for no good reason. And unfortunately, that's going to be a hard conversation to have with Russia right now.

 

O. Kandyuk: Let's talk a little bit about the future enlargement. You highlighted the complexities introduced by the 2004/2007/2013 enlargements. How can lessons from these past experiences guide current enlargement strategies? I mean, if it will happen, hopefully.

 

E. Jones: I think the first thing that you need to know from past enlargements is that the European economic community, the European community and the European Union never, ever, ever reforms before it enlarges. It's just never happened. The only time they came close was the negotiation of the Nice Treaty.

That was the worst treaty that they've ever negotiated. So lesson number one, don't expect the European Union to reform before enlargement takes place.

And anybody who tells you that the EU should reform before enlargement takes place is telling you something that is sort of like we should all drink less and exercise more. Yes. But that's never going to happen.

The second thing is that the European Union is terrible, but I mean, really terrible at assessing ex ante how the country is going to develop politically after it becomes a member. Otherwise we would not have had Brexit.

I mean, they did a terrible job assessing the British as a candidate country. They did a terrible job assessing Denmark. Because Denmark has demanded a lot of exceptions. They did a terrible job with Sweden. Sweden is under treaty obligation to be in the euro. You know what? You go to Sweden. There are no Euros.

They did a terrible job with Austria. They brought Austria in and then the Austrian government brought the right-wing extremist party in almost immediately.

Hungary and Poland were the most meritorious candidates for enlargement in 2002 when the decision was made to admit them. They were the most meritorious. And then we spent the next two decades fighting over rule of law issues in those countries.

So the whole idea that enlargement is merit based assumes that the EU is good at judging merit. It's not. It's terrible at judging merit.

What we need is to look back and say, OK, how do we actually get people to buy into the European project? Better than the British did. Better than the Hungarians did. Better than the Austrians did. And so how do we get people to buy in? There are lessons that we've learned. One is that you actually have to help people understand how the European Union works and how they benefit from the European project in very simple material terms.

That means you have to make it so that as the government changes in your country, the people's allegiance to the European membership remains changed. And that means that as we look ahead to enlargement, we have to do a lot more engagement with civil society at the local level to get them bought into the reforms that the countries like Ukraine are going to have to make.

And to get them to be able to explain to their own people how this reform process is going to benefit everybody and those benefits are going to flow from membership in the European Union. I mean, that actually can be done. It has been done.

It needs to be done much more heavily than it's been done in the past, because we can't afford a Brexit or whatever, having Ukraine come in and then go out again. The reason for bringing Ukraine in is to stabilize the eastern frontier of the European Union. And to push back against that principled approach that Vladimir Putin has for principles we don't accept. So we can't lose Ukraine. We need to get Ukraine in. And that means we need to get Ukrainians to believe in their future in the European Union.

We should stop pretending it's going to be merit based because the merit will be earned after they become members. And we should stop pretending the EU needs to reform first because those reforms are going to take place after Ukraine joins. So let's just do the enlargement thing the best we can.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy. Let's get the Ukrainians to buy into it and then let's sort out the rest of that stuff later. That means spending the next decades strengthening decision making, the rule of law issues and all the rest.

 

O. Kandyuk: Yes, actually, I wanted to ask the next question about it. Do you think actually that EU need to reform before the new round of enlargement? So the answer is – It actually needs, but it aren’t going to happen.

 

E. Jones: Yes. But just one thing that we should be very clear about. The EU needs reform. Full stop. It needs reform. Why? Because it never prepared the institutions for the last enlargement.

The Lisbon Treaty did not solve the problem it was supposed to solve, which is what happens if a country, let's call it Hungary, decides, to use the unanimity principle against the decision-making process and clog up the decision-making machinery forever. That's not supposed to happen. There are too many countries for us not to have institutions that work against that. And as we can see, article seven doesn't work. So what do we do? I mean, we need to fix that. We need to fix that, whether Ukraine joins or not. And there are a host of other reforms that need to be made as well.

 

O. Kandyuk: In the lights of possible joinment of Ukraine into the EU, should EU then compromise on its criteria or how else can the EU balance speed and preparedness in the accession process?

 

E. Jones: You will need to approximate the acquis communautaire. So that is a criteria. Also, you have to have the same rules in Ukraine that you have elsewhere, which means we also have to translate all the rules, which is a huge disadvantage for Ukraine, because, they've never written those rules in Ukrainian, whereas for the Moldovans, they've written those rules in Romanian. So it's easier for the Moldovans than it is for Ukraine. So you've got to do that.

You should have a functioning court system. It would be good to have a functioning court system because you're going to have a lot of different things that you're going to have to adjudicate.

You want to eliminate corruption as best you can. By the way, eliminating corruption is a work in progress in Italy, which is a founding member state. But nobody is looking at Italy and saying the corruption is gone. No, on the contrary – it's still there.

The fight against corruption is always a work in progress. So we need to get that done.

But the question is, how do we interpret these as criteria? And the answer is we interpret them flexibly as criteria because just because I tell you that we have great anti-corruption procedures doesn’t mean corruption is not going to emerge at some point in the future. Germany had great anti-corruption procedures and then Germany had an automotive industry that sabotaged the whole framework for emissions control on diesel engines.

I'm sorry, their great legal framework didn't work. And we can point to other examples of corruption.

I mean, in Belgium, they've been wrestling with corruption for years. And, you know, it's a problem. Democracy is always a work in progress. We have political instability in lots of countries. So what we need to do is to come up with a way of bringing Ukraine in and then bringing Ukraine into a process of continuous adaptation. Because everybody else is adapting too.

Look at France. The Fifth Republic was, you know, the result of a coup, essentially, in the 1950s, overturning the Fourth Republic, and replacing it with an imposed constitutional arrangement. And that constitutional arrangement seems to have run out of steam. So what do we do? Institutions are not permanent. That's it.

 

O. Kandyuk: In your works you propose a "phasing-in" model for candidate countries. This is basically a form of differentiation. How could this model address the challenges of integrating the Western Balkans and Ukraine? And how can we avoid the upset of “second hand membership” in candidate countries?

 

E. Jones: Well, for example, Romania has just been let into Schengen. They've been a second class citizen for 20 years, right? I mean, it happens. Differentiated integration is a fact of life. And always has been. I mean, Ireland is not in Schengen, for example. Norway is, but Norway is not part of the European Union.

You know, the question is: can we use differentiation in a way that will help bring Ukraine in as quickly as possible? And the answer is, of course we can.

What's the greatest constraint for Ukraine? You don't have enough civil servants who know enough about how to make or contribute to decision making and rulemaking in European institutions. And so what do we do? Every time you complete a chapter of negotiations, you've completed the chapter, so you've learned a lot of stuff along the way. But let's not forget that a key communautaire is going to continue to evolve after those negotiations are completed.

So why don't we bring some Ukrainian representatives into the decision-making procedures for the policy area covered by that chapter? They will have been prepared for that. They will participate in the decision-making. And in doing so, you will expand the cohort of Ukrainian civil servants who learn how to participate in European decision-making as observers.

Each chapter expands the cohort a little bit further. If the accession process is the training ground for bringing people in, then they can keep Ukraine abreast of all developments in the key communautaire after those negotiations are completed. So what we're doing is using the accession process to develop the Ukrainian civil service so that by the time you've completed all of the chapters, they are ready to make decisions over all of the chapters like a real member state.

 

O. Kandyuk: Yes, that really makes sense. And the last question I usually ask the experts is about scenarios. If you were asked to outline possible scenarios for Ukraine's integration into the EU, which 2-3 options would you describe?

 

E. Jones: First, I should say, I'm so glad you're asking this question. I've spent the last 15 years, 20 years of my life training academics for forward analysis.

I believe we have an obligation to do that and to do it systematically. In the kind of scenario building that you're asking about, I think we would have to start by asking a really fundamental question. And the fundamental question is: are we able to bring a cessation of hostilities to Ukraine, a ceasefire? The answer could be yes or no.

When we bring the ceasefire, are we able to stabilize the line of contact between Russia and Ukraine? Wherever that is, if it's at the 1991 borders, if it's at the border with Poland, somewhere we've got to stabilize the line of contact. And then the third question is: once we've stabilized the line of contact, can we create a diplomatic process to address the underlying unbelievable harm that we've done to the Ukrainian people, society, country, and economy?

And so I think we have a scenario where we don't get a cessation of hostilities. And then we don't even need to talk about European enlargement of Ukraine. We get a scenario where we get a cessation of hostilities, but we don't stabilize the line of contact. In which point, I think basically we're looking at a continued aggression or my nightmare, the collapse of the Ukrainian government and its replacement by one that decides the only way to stabilize the line of contact is to do whatever Russia wants. Like we see in Belarus.

I don't think that's going to happen, but it scares me as a prospect. But let's say we stabilize the line of contact. So we've got a cessation of hostilities and we stabilize the line of contact.

How do we do that? I think the only way we do that is through European enlargement to include Ukraine. That's the only way we make it credible for Russia and Ukraine, meaning Russians and Ukrainians believe that Europe will come to Ukraine's defense if the line of contact destabilizes at some future point. And we've got to put a lot of skin in the game, a lot of investment, a lot of people, a lot of firms, and not just civilian stuff, military stuff.

We've got to start building a lot of military equipment with Ukrainians, both for Ukraine and for the rest of Europe, because the rest of Europe needs a lot of military equipment. And if we manage to do that, then it becomes fair to ask, what do we do with all of the people left behind under Russian occupation? It's totally unacceptable. We have to have some dialogue with Russia.

We're only going to be able to dialogue with Russia from a position of strength. So again, enlargement must be part of that process. And then we use the dialogue to achieve both the repatriation of Ukrainians and hopefully the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty.