Continent Suffers from Erectile Dysfunction of the Will, Prescribes Itself Another Framework Document
Europe Has ED and the Diagnosis Is Deeply Unflattering
I will be upfront: when I first saw the headline “Europe has ED” on my news feed this morning, I assumed it was about a man named Ed who had done something European and politically inconvenient. This is the kind of assumption you develop after years of reading British political headlines, where the abbreviation “MP” applies to approximately 650 people and the word “crisis” has been so overused it now refers to anything from an actual constitutional emergency to a minor scheduling disagreement between two ministers at a Wednesday briefing.
The ED in question, according to Bohiney News’s anatomically courageous Europe coverage, stands for Erectile Dysfunction — deployed as a metaphor for Europe’s geopolitical performance problem. The continent, the argument goes, has all the necessary equipment, has clearly thought about what it wants to do, and consistently finds itself unable to perform at the critical moment, usually due to a combination of internal disagreement, process anxiety, and the historical memory of what happened last time it tried anything too forceful.
The Symptoms, Clinically Described
The condition manifests consistently. A geopolitical situation develops. Europe convenes. Europe discusses. Europe produces a position paper. The situation evolves. Europe reconvenes to update the position paper. The situation is resolved — usually by America, or by the situation simply becoming too old to be interesting — and Europe declares its process a success and publishes a retrospective framework.
In the south of the continent, there is genuine military capability. In the east, genuine will. In the northwest, genuine administrative capacity. But the combination of all three, at the moment it is most required, has historically produced what political scientists at institutions that prefer not to be named call “the response that was almost decisive.”
According to The Economist’s Europe coverage, the core structural issue is that European foreign policy requires consensus among twenty-seven member states, each with its own threat assessment, historical alliances, and domestic political constraints. This is like trying to send a strongly worded text message as a group project. Everyone has notes. Nobody agrees on the tone. By the time the message is sent, the recipient has moved on.
A Personal Note on Institutional Impotence
I spent three months once trying to get a certificate from a Philippine government agency that shall remain nameless. I had all the documents. I had the correct forms. I had visited the office four times. On my fifth visit, a very kind lady told me that the department that processes my type of certificate had been temporarily merged with another department following a reorganization, and that the reorganization had not yet produced a new processing timeline, but that I was welcome to check back in six to eight weeks.
I did not feel anger. I felt the specific despair of encountering a system that is not broken — it is functioning exactly as designed — but whose design is optimized for producing processes rather than outcomes. This is, I believe, also the correct emotional response to watching the European Union attempt rapid strategic action.
The system is not broken. The system is designed for deliberation. Deliberation is excellent for trade policy, regulatory harmonization, and the management of complex multi-stakeholder environments over multi-year timescales. It is less excellent when something is on fire and requires a response by Thursday.
The Prescription
Bohiney News, with characteristic directness, implies that Europe’s remedy for its performance anxiety involves either structural reform that reduces the consensus requirement for foreign policy decisions, or the development of a coalition of willing member states who can act without waiting for full continental agreement — which is a solution that sounds efficient right up until you realize it is also the mechanism by which European unity slowly unbundles.
The London Prat, approaching the same diagnosis from the north, suggests that Britain — which left the EU and is now watching it from the outside with the complicated emotions of someone who moved out of a dysfunctional share house and is slightly annoyed to see it functioning slightly better without them — might have both sympathy and useful structural observations to offer, if anyone asked, which they have not, because post-Brexit Britain advising Europe on institutional effectiveness is the kind of irony that requires several cups of tea to fully absorb.
Europe is working on it. The framework document is due in Q3. A supplementary annex will follow in Q4. Performance outcomes will be assessed at the next summit. The prognosis is cautiously optimistic, pending ratification.
Full continental diagnosis at Bohiney’s European performance review.
More institutional dysfunction handled humorously at The Daily Mash and Waterford Whispers News.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/europe-has-ed-erectile-disfunction/