Having finished reading Catherine Ashton’s speech to Corvinus University in Budapest, I was struck by the seeming re-emergence of elements from the old ‘civilian power’ doctrine, which the European Union’s security and defence policy was supposed to dispel. The High Representative has often come under heavy and unwarranted criticism – her job has not been easy – but on this occasion, her speech could not have been made at a worse time. While Europeans face yet another foreign policy humiliation – this time in Libya, a country in our own backyard, our own neighbourhood – the High Representative seems to have danced off into the land of the Cheshire cat.

Consider, for a moment, Mrs. Ashton’s following comment:

I start with the obvious point that the EU is not a state or a traditional military power. It cannot deploy gunboats or bombers.

This first sentence is good as far as it goes; the European Union is clearly not a sovereign state. At the moment, it lacks political cohesion and cannot deploy armed force quickly enough to respond to a real crisis. As the retired British ambassador to Poland, Charles Crawford, has pointed out, the European Union is extremely large on mass but very short on velocity. That is to say, foreign policy can only be credible when the full plethora of assets and tools are brought rapidly to bear – as power. Thus, to some extent, the High Representative is right: Brussels lacks power. But this should not be celebrated (as she seems to do): in an increasingly uncertain and non-European world, velocity – power – is becoming increasingly important. With regard to her second sentence: has she forgotten that the European Union currently has a flotilla of gunboats deployed in the Gulf of Aden, guarding the sealanes against pirate thugs?

She next proclaimed:

The strength of the EU lies, paradoxically, in its inability to throw its weight around. Its influence flows from the fact that it is disinterested in its support for democracy, development and the rule of law. It can be an honest broker – but backed up by diplomacy, aid and great expertise.

What? Like in the Caucasus and North Africa? Or, previously, in the former Yugoslavia? Should our willingness to allow whole countries to fall apart or get invaded – countries in our own neighbourhood – really be seen as our ‘strength’? Is it not because Brussels (and the Member States) has been so ‘disinterested’ in its support for constitutional government abroad that its policies have been so ineffective? Mrs. Ashton should perhaps express a little more humility here, particularly in light of recent events. If anything, given the turmoil in the eastern neighbourhood in August 2008 and the southern neighbourhood now – in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – far from ‘great expertise’ among European diplomats and strategists, there seems to be a certain lack of it!

Moving on, she then she declared:

Whatever the subject, the ambition of countries round the world, from the biggest and richest to the smallest and poorest, is the same: to make the EU their ally.

Of course, it is desirable for foreign countries to admire us. But, as Thucydides taught us in the Melian Dialogue, they must also fear us. As the Athenians told the Melians: ‘Your hatred is evidence of our power!’ So if foreign leaders tell us that they want to be our partners, they may also be telling us that we are not relevant, while they actively and consciously re-enforce our own illusions. Indeed, and let us be clear here, there is one thing that foreign powers do not want: they do not want the European Union to be effective, because they know full well that – should it ever come together as an integrated political unit – it would have the capacity and power to prevent them from doing what they might otherwise want to do. After all, the first rule of the political is to divide your opponents, and then rule them (or, keep them weak by encouraging them to believe in their own fantasies, particularly when those fantasies serve your own agenda, i.e. hegemony).

In sum, it strikes me that the High Representative’s speech represents the re-emergence of the ‘civilian power’ ethos, which many analysts – including this one – thought had been largely discredited after the bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia. If Catherine Ashton really is downplaying or deliberately trying to usurp the work of her predecessor, who sought for over a decade to carefully build up the European Union’s credibility and authority as a ‘global power’, then she is playing with fire. For if the ‘Ashton doctrine’ re-constructs the European Union as a ‘civilian power’, Europeans may quickly slide back into their old, quiet and comfortable ways. Twenty-years ago, such an eventuality may have been a harmless development (unless you were from Bosnia or Kosovo). Today, however, as the world becomes increasingly multipolar – and therefore more uncertain and dangerous – Brussels can ill-afford to have a fantasy as a foreign policy, or a delusion as a doctrine.