Lyubomir Kyuchukov: Currently, the EU tries to play at other players’ ground
The former Bulgarian deputy foreign minister and former ambassador to the UK speaks to Cross-border Talks about international and EU affairs at the start of the new Trump presidency in the US, the EU’s search for emancipation, expectations for the resolution of the war in Ukraine and other issues.
Interview by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat.
Lyubomir Kyuchukov is a leading Bulgarian foreign policy analyst. Among other things he was a Bulgarian deputy minister of foreign affairs (2005-2009) and Bulgarian ambassador to the UK (2009-2012). Since 2012 he has been the director of the Sofia-based Economic and International Relations Institute.
Within days, Donald Trump is about to take over the presidency of the United States. In our Central and South-Eastern European region – but not only – most governments are waiting for a big shift in international politics. In your view, what will actually change with Trump’s arrival? While Trump has made a lot of suggestions about what he might do, some of them seem completely surreal. Others have been replaced by other promises… What to expect, then?
Well, I’m afraid the only predictable part of Trump’s political behaviour is the unpredictability. But on the other hand, we always have to remember that Trump is the spokesman, the catalyst, but not the generator of deeper political trends and processes. And some of his public statements on foreign policy actually reflect processes and tendencies that have already been developing over the last year or two. He is just trying to take advantage of them and ride the wave of some of these processes.
This has to do, first of all, with the two wars ongoing – in Ukraine and in the Middle East. These processes have already created a kind of need to find a solution to the two wars, a political solution, and he is taking advantage of these tendencies.
On the other hand, I think that transatlantic relations are perhaps the ones that will suffer most from Donald Trump’s second term. There we will be confronted not only with the objective processes that are taking place in international relations, but also with Trump’s contribution to these relations, and I do not think that it will be a positive one. His policy towards Europe could be a kind of revenge policy. In fact, it seems that he has already appointed the person responsible for revenge, Elon Musk. By the way, Musk seems to be responsible for the revenge both nationally and internationally. He will be the one responsible for the reshaping of the whole administration, and he has promised to fire about 200,000 civil servants in the United States. At the same time, we have already seen that he has started a political campaign to reshape the leadership of some of the most important European partners of the United States – Germany and the United Kingdom.
It is possible that this will be the old-new approach of Trump: both transactional and pressure approach. The combination between the two, and in all areas, will be most probably all-encompassing in the relationship between Europe and the United State. Most politicians tend to point to the relationship within NATO, bearing in mind both the history of Trump’s behaviour and attitude towards NATO, but also his current statements about NATO and the responsibilities that the European members of the Alliance should bear.
We should always bear in mind that the goal of American foreign policy is always the same: to be a dominant factor in world affairs, the global leader. That has always been the case, whether it was Biden, Trump or anyone else in the White House. This objective will remain with the new Trump administration.
These are the tools and the instruments of how to achieve it are very different between Biden and Trump, between the Democrats and the Republicans. In fact, the Democrats are more expansionist, and on the other hand, they rely more on partnerships. They need partners to achieve their goals. For Trump, partners are a kind of burden.
NATO is designed to be an instrument of American foreign policy, not a union or an alliance of independent states with an equal say in what needs to be done. Of course, there will be a lot of pressure within NATO, although I do not think anyone believes that it is possible for each NATO member to contribute 5% of its GDP to the NATO budget. There will most probably be a clash from that point of view and some kind of redistribution of responsibilities within NATO in the future.
The same goes for trade and economic relations. Trump’s statements that he is going to impose customs of 10 to 20 percent on European exports to the United States also prove that the approach I mentioned before will be applied in every area of bilateral relations.
While Trump seems quite predictable in his unpredictability in these areas, the attitude, the reaction of the European Union seems quite strange and even humiliating from my point of view. Especially when you think about what von der Leyen said. She suggested that Europe was, of course, ready to buy more LNG if the Americans insisted on it – just to be left alone and not to see new taxes and customs imposed. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe, most of the countries seem to be looking beyond Brussels, Paris and Berlin in terms of security. They are looking to Washington for their stability and security. That could create internal divisions within the Union. I am afraid that this could be one of the biggest problems and challenges for the European Union: to maintain unity in its relations with the United States. There will be quite a number of European leaders tempted to solve their problems with the United States on a bilateral basis, without taking into account the positions and interests of the European Union.
We might also see quite a number of Trumpophiles in European politics.
What Elon Musk has recently done in relation to both Keir Starmer and Alice Weidel is unthinkable for most European politicians. When we hear about foreign interference in another country’s election process, it is usually Russian interference mentioned… and now an American billionaire is playing favourites in a number of countries. Do you think this could happen in our region?
Interference in internal affairs has always been a fact, all over the world. What we see now is a new level of interference. It is an interference in the internal of the European Union’s main partners.
There are two distinctive tendencies here that I think are important to mention. The first is that Musk’s actions are actually legitimising Putin’s approach to international relations to a large extent. Secondly, and more importantly, we are being reminded of a concept that has been absent from international relations for a long time – the notion of imperialism, or neo-imperialism. What we have seen is Russia waging war and occupying foreign territories. Now we see Trump in the United States claiming foreign territories – Canada, Panama Canal, Greenland – as something necessary for the security and prosperity of the country. If you also take into account the Chinese approach to Taiwan and the declaration that the two countries should be reunited sooner rather than later – which means that Taiwan should be reintegrated into China – that changes the whole picture. We are no longer talking about an episode, but a process that is taking place between all the major global factors.
It also shows that there is a new perspective, a new way of looking at the processes of globalization. If we think of the last 20 years as the period of globalisation in international relations, when the interests of corporations were leading in international relations rather than the interests of states, and when the main instrument, the main tool was the economic and political domination of different countries in the interests of the corporations, now this has changed. Now, again, it is about territories, the acquisition of land – which takes us back a century before the First World War and imperialism. From wild globalisation we stepped back towards nationalism. Of course, it is not a turnaround, because globalisation is an objective process, but it is a setback from the wild globalisation without rules and norms of behaviour.
The second factor is something I call the oligarchization of politics. In fact, money has always been present in politics. In American politics, the influence of money has always been much more visible than in Europe. Nevertheless, there has always been the political class and the ruling class between the money and the public opinion in order to maintain a certain kind of balance between the corporate interest and the public interest, to keep the balances and act as a buffer between the two.
Now we see, and not just in the United States, but also in Europe, that money is already trying to take control of politics and rule the society directly, without intermediaries. This is the case of both Musk and Trump. In Europe we have had the same situation, for example in the Czech Republic. We have the same problem in Bulgaria with the oligarchy. But oligarchy and its influence on politics is not just a problem of Eastern Europe and the influence of the oligarchy on politics. It is a global challenge.
As neo-imperialism re-emerges, what is the place of the United Europe in the new world? Is the United Europe capable of reforming itself? The Draghi report was a catastrophic diagnosis of the European Union’s economy and capabilities. The project of European strategic autonomy was practically abandoned even before the war in Ukraine. Now it does not seem unlikely that the United States will turn against its European allies and assert its own interests. It would be natural for Europe to defend itself somehow, but is the united Europe capable of self-defence?
That is a crucial question for Europe and I am afraid the answer right now cannot be positive.
Of course, Europe has declared its ambition to become a global player. But if it sits at the table of global players, I’m afraid it will be in the second row. Europe faces an enormous challenge, because current international developments are in conflict with the basic founding principles of the European Union.
For example, when we talk about the global role of the European Union and the strategic autonomy of the European Union, we usually mean security. But it is not just about security!
If we try to put into more understandable words what global autonomy should mean, I think it means emancipation from the United States in terms of security and international politics in general. It means emancipation from Russia in terms of resources and energy. It means emancipation from China in economic and trade terms. At the same time emancipation, in my view, does not mean confrontation. It means cooperation, but without dependence, which is something completely different.
What we are facing now is that the European Union is trying to play on other people’s turf. It has left its own ground, where it was a real factor, and it is trying to move to another playing field, where it is not prepared to be a real player. In security matters, the European Union has always been a soft power. Brussels has insisted on values and principles, created norms and tried to find solutions through diplomacy. Now, when we talk about security, we talk about weapons, and that’s the only thing we talk about. Arms, rearming…
… and closing borders.
Yes. A total militarisation of international relations is taking place all over the world right now. I am afraid that all the global factors are directed towards how to prepare for a new war and not how to prevent a war. What we have completely neglected is the second major factor of security – the political or negotiated security, the agreements that make security permanent and long-term. I have always argued that Europe was most secure not during the Cold War, but during the period of détente, that is – not while rearming, but while disarming. That is when we felt safe. Now we have left those grounds and we are trying to compete with Russia, the United States and China on grounds that are not ours.
The same applies to a large extent to the economy. The European Union was created as a trade and economic union, but primarily as an anti-monopoly union and a social union. Now Europe is trying to find a way to create our own monopolies to compete with the monopolies of the other global factors. The EU is not good at it, and I am not even sure this is the right way to tackle the international problems at the moment. We are facing, with the process of globalisation, another phase of the process – monopolisation. We are talking about the big three, four, five companies in every field. At the same time, we do not have anti-monopoly laws at the global level. Such laws were actually created in the United States a century ago to prevent this kind of development at the national level. Now they are being reproduced on a global scale, and instead of trying to create a new legal framework to prevent the monopolisation of the world economy, we are trying to become part of the monopolisation of the world economy. That’s why I say that we – as the European community – are trying to play on foreign ground while, at the same time, struggling to preserve the unity of the European Union. That may be the biggest problem, because with the return of nationalism, it is becoming more and more difficult to find the unifying vector in European politics.
The biggest problem of the European Union has not been resolved. It is not about speed. I do not think a multi-speed Europe is a real problem. There could be even 27 different speeds. The problem is the direction: whether we go forward towards deeper integration or whether we have to take a step backwards towards more prerogatives for the national states. Now we are in a position when we try to do both…
… which cannot work.
Yes, it will not work, and if in gymnastics splits is a valued performance, in politics it is not the most stable position.
What we are facing in the last years is what we used to call the far right wave. I am afraid this wave was a very predictable development. The problem was not whether it would take place, but when exactly and in what form. Now it is the dominant tendency in Europe both at the national and at the continental level. And this has changed the whole political architecture of Europe.
Geopolitics has actually erased the ideologies. Now we face a confrontation between the geopolitical and the national, not between the right and the left. And the political parties are labeled pro-Russian or pro-European – before being defined as left or right-wing.
In fact the centre-left and the centre-right have lost their alternativeness. They look the same, they are interchangeable. And when people look for an alternative, they look to the far right. If we take into consideration that the main opposition line is now between the global and the national, and not between the social and the conservative, we can see why there is no tendency to look for a political alternative at the radical left.
The left in general, from that point of view, remains quite isolated in the overall picture – and more and more irrelevant. The left has not found the answers to the big challenges: globalisation, geopolitics, wars. And I am saying this as a person of left-wing political views.
Because of the lack of a plausible left-wing alternative, the most commonly chosen alternative to globalisation is to look in the rear mirror for the security we have lost, once provided by national states. We are not trying to solve the problems of the future, we are trying to return to the past where we felt safe.
I see three major deficits in the political sphere at the moment. The first is the security deficit. Globalisation, migration and wars led to a situation where we feel vulnerable, having lost security and confidence – collective, national and personal ones. In Europe, but not only, we have lost the personal horizon and the social stability that we were used to. And we are trying to find that security on sub-state level, in ethnic or religious communities. The xenophobic right-wing and the Islamic radicals are two sides of one coin.
The second deficit is the deficit of fairness. The inequalities are getting deeper and deeper, both nationally and internationally. There is no remedy for this in the current system. In Eastern Europe this fairness deficit also has another meaning. It means a dysfunctional legal system and the deficits of rule of law in most of the Eastern European countries.
The third deficit is the deficit of credibility. There is an abyss between the ruling class and the general aspirations of the population. Sometimes we have the impression that they live in parallel realities. That creates a fundamental problem for representative democracy, because people feel that they are not properly represented and that their ideas and their problems are not properly addressed. That is one of the biggest challenges we face right now.
If we go back to international politics for a moment, what do you expect to happen with the war in Ukraine, now in the Trump era?
There is a strong tendency, which started a year ago, that there should be some kind of negotiated end to the war. But again, there are two parallel processes. One is the way in which we’re trying to reach some kind of negotiation process. This was confirmed in international relations at the meeting in Switzerland last June, which was supposed to support Zelensky’s plan. But in the end it was not like the previous summits in Malta or Saudi Arabia – it was not a meeting in support of Zelensky’s victory plan, but for peace in Ukraine, something completely different. The community of the meeting was completely different from the previous ones. It was entirely based on the UN Charter and the principles of the UN Charter.
The main objective there was the integration of Russia in this process, as there is a more and more widespread understanding that without the participation of Russia no negotiated agreement could be reached. In fact that’s now the goal of Zelensky himself: he has said that he wanted the war to end in 2025 through diplomacy and political means. The problem is how to get to the negotiating table. So far the formula has been to ‘negotiate through escalation’, which is extremely risky. We have seen that work throughout the year. As a result, it is much more doubtful whether the real negotiations could start or what the outcome of the negotiations might be.
The main points of a negotiated agreement seem to be more or less clear already. And this will be a ceasefire agreement, not a peace treaty. I cannot imagine a peace agreement in the near future, because an agreement on territorial issues sounds impossible as of now. Only a ceasefire seems to be feasible. But even for that, there is a need for a kind of buffer zone on both sides of the current front line – because the ceasefire agreement will most likely be based on the current front line. That will require a UN peacekeeping force to guarantee the implementation of that agreement. On NATO membership for Ukraine, I do not think that an agreement could be possible. It therefore seems very questionable that the NATO forces could be present within the EU peacekeeping forces. Russia will not agree to have them as peacekeepers, as one of the main reasons for the war was Moscow’s disagreement to see NATO soldiers in Ukraine. And so the problem remains with the guarantees, and the guarantees seem to be sought on behalf of the EU and NATO, and as far as Ukrainian security is concerned, in the pact signed last year in Washington – that is, on both international level and on the bilateral level, between the EU and NATO member states with Ukraine, for Ukrainian security.
Cover photo by Vladimir Mitev.
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