ECONOMIC SECURITY
The EU’s economic security strategy should not get bogged down in one-dimensional discussions, a new report by the world’s oldest think tank RUSI argues. “A lack of clarity of what economic security really is, will keep the discussions siloed by trade and security,” explained Eliza Lockhart, the author of the report, on a video call. The Commission hopes to follow a three-pillared structure of promote, partner and protect. The last has received the most attention as it is the most acute and concrete, for instance with a reform of the EU’s fragmented foreign direct investment screening landscape.
Who’s who: Lockhart, working together with Director Tom Keatinge, set up a taskforce in RUSI’s Center for Finance and Security made up of national EU civil servants, Commission experts, NATO reps and diplomats from Australia, Japan and the U.K. Together, these 40-odd participants were invited to simply brainstorm on the international workability of economic security.
Insert tension here: Hoping to avoid that “everything gets securitized” — as it does in the U.S. — some of the experts said they’d prefer a clear boundary between trade and security policy. However, the report says, “there was pushback against this assertion from a security specialist, who remarked that the playing field is already uneven precisely because of deliberate acts by hostile, non-aligned and even allied actors.”
As a guideline, it helps to visualize the landscape into three layers so you don’t lose sight of both the details and the big picture.
Ground floor: The first layer is the current interconnectivity of the global financial sector and how that offers both a broad variety of security risks and opportunities. Supply chains — we’ll get to them a bit later — are a part of this layer as well.
Second layer: Next up is the set of “tools, systems and capabilities employed to manage the risks and opportunities. “Inherent in this layer is how these levers and structures can be weaponized by hostile and non-aligned actors,” RUSI’s Lockhart writes forebodingly.
Maximum zoom: The top layer is a softer target and represents how much weight policy makers designing economic security view and weigh sovereignty, security and prosperity.
Turf war: The EU, both its countries and central institutions, lacks a platform to discuss economic security as it overlaps both centralized and national areas of policy making — and there are 27 perspectives on what security should look like. “While some countries have tried to align their national security strategy with the EU’s, that’s not a common thing,” Lockhart told me.
No choice? When the Commission revealed five parts of the economic security strategy in January, analysts commented it had to be careful to keep the divergent national governments on board in the long run. Lockhart acknowledged this. “The result is you have no framework for a discussion and no options for member states to coalesce around.”
VDL’s recipe: Ursula von der Leyen’s second team will feature a Commissioner who will have to unify both the trade and security styles of thinking: Maroš Šefčovič. He’ll have to work on the ‘protect’ pillar. Other Commissioners will be working on promoting and partnering, as is evident in their mission letters.
“With all the overlap it’s less siloed for sure,” Lockhart said. “But it could well lead to extra confusion.”
We’ll be hearing from this informal task force again quite soon as RUSI hopes to convene it again before the year’s end.
