Vital Interests: Living in Europe and being the Director of European and Eurasian Studies at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies puts you in the midst of European developments. Can you give us your perspective on Europe today?

Erik Jones: The security issue in Europe is one that seems to be evolving quite dramatically at the moment. You have some interesting proposals coming out of France, in particular, but also the European Commission. Proposals that, in many ways, are in response to the current United States administration, and the rather sharp change, at least from the European perspective, of American attitudes towards European integration and towards NATO. 

VI:In recent years, parts of Europe were experiencing destabilizing financial crises with debt crisis in Greece, Spain, Portugal. and Italy. In addition there was the migration issue which certainly set all of the European Union on edge. What is the status of these situations?

Erik Jones: The European Union was pretty late coming to the economic and financial crisis that hit the United States starting in 2007 and then intensifying in 2008. For most European countries, by which I mean, not Britain and not the Low Countries and not Germany, but the rest of Europe, the effects of the crisis really only began to be felt after about 2008/2009..

Nevertheless, the crisis became ever deeper for those countries that felt it latest. Italy, for example, began to experience the crisis in full form only in 2011, and yet Italy is the country that has been slowest to recover. All this is important as background because what it means is that Europeans are still trying to figure out what they need to do in order to become more resilient in the face of these kinds of external shocks. If you were to talk to European policymakers right now, the questions that are on their minds first and foremost are questions about fiscal policy and monetary policy, not so much questions about security policy.

The main challenge for many European policymakers is to figure out some way for them to balance their concerns between the need for fiscal consolidation and fiscal probity over the long term and the need for some kind of effective monetary response. On top of that, there is the necessity  to deal with problems related to Russia, Turkey, North Africa, and China.These are all issues that European nations are wrestling with.

They're also wrestling with the migration problem. The migration problem, in many ways, has them hand-tied because of the role two key countries,Turkey and Libya, play in stopping the migration problem from becoming instantly acute again. There was a big surge of migration after the Arab Spring that came up across the Mediterranean into Italy and a second surge that took place in 2015 due to conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. Both of these movements have been contained at the moment, but only because of tenuous agreements made with the Libyan and Turkish governments.

When we talk about security policy in Europe we have to talk about security policy with an eye to making sure that those agreements with Libya and Turkey remain in place. Otherwise, migration will inundate Europe, or so the policy conversation runs, and all attention will shift from security onto migration. In essence, the Europeans are still wrestling with economic issues, they're still wrestling with migration issues, and the security issues are somewhat on the back burner.

VI: To focus a bit more on the financial situation, in each individual European country, they have their own economic pressures and difficulties. Unemployment, particularly for young adults, seems to be a pervasive problem. The European Central Bank is trying to stimulate growth with sub-zero interest rates. Where are the prospects for growth in Europe?

Erik Jones: We have to condition whatever response we offer with the sense of what prosperity is. Most of these European countries are pretty prosperous, they have an enormous stock of wealth. Italy, for example, has significantly more wealth than Germany because of the way Italians have invested their resources in housing and the Germans have not. 

In that sense, even though Italy's growth is low, Italian quality of life is high. The level of unemployment is high in some parts of Europe. But it is confusing if you look at national aggregates: unemployment in Spain, for example, is very high in the south, but it's almost non-existent in Catalonia and the Basque region.

In Italy, unemployment is very high in the south but it's almost not existent in places like where I live. In Bologna the unemployment rate is about 4.5%. We have a lot of variations within countries as well as across countries. The question is how much can we get these counties to grow? The answer is we're not quite sure. 

Policymakers are looking at the structural constraints on growth and accepting that the trend growth rate in Europe may be as low as 1% to 2% in some of these countries, only slightly higher in those countries like Germany that have access to significant export markets and grow as those export markets grow.

The consequence of this situation is that if China goes into a slowdown, then Germany goes into a slowdown as well and Germany's slowdown spreads across all those other parts of Europe that are tied to the German economy. The short answer is: Europeans are thinking now about how to adapt to a future that's defined by relatively high levels of wealth, relatively comfortable standards of living, but relatively low rates of growth.

VI: If cars and manufactured goods are key exports, in Germany and other European countries, does that put Europe at a future disadvantage to economies like the United States which have giant tech companies? 

Erik Jones: Automotive is significant in Germany, but Germany is probably best known for its machine tool industry. In other words, Germany is successful because of it's the ability to sell machines that are used to make other machines. Its machine tool industry is world-class and is the backbone of its export economy and of its small and medium-sized enterprise sectors..

The same is true for Northern Italy. Northern Italy has a remarkable machine tool industry and precision electronics industry, so lots of different things that you wouldn't expect here in the Bologna region. There's a company called Data Logic started by individuals who invented the barcode. If you want to find high-quality barcode readers you come here or if you want to find state-of-the art packaging machinery you come to Emila-Romagna as well.

In that sense, the Europeans do have some high technology it's just not digital technology. What the Europeans need to figure out is, "How do we compete with Apple, Amazon, and companies like that, these giant digital enterprises.” This is becoming ever increasingly a strategic priority for the European Commission, and also for national governments.

VI: Within the European community, there is a good deal of inter-country trade. How does that compare to export trade to the United States, to China, and to other parts of the world?

Erik Jones: Just to put things into perspective, the largest trading partner for the United States is Canada which is what, 30 million people? If you live right next to somebody you're going to trade a lot with them. In the European context, obviously, the overwhelming majority of European trade is intra-European trade. The great success of European integration since the mid-1980s in particular, but also since the founding of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, has been to foster intra-European trade.

The value chains that run through Europe may center on Germany, but they extend vastly to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe or even Western Europe or Southern Europe. In that sense, the European economy is very tightly integrated in manufacturing, less so in services, including in finance, which is one of the disturbing elements. Preponderantly, the European economy is a European economy and the outside world factors in only to the extent to which it provides an outlet for exports from countries like Germany and Italy and others.

I mentioned Italy in that context because we have the mistaken impression in the outside world that Italy is not an export powerhouse. It is. It's the second-largest exporting economy in Europe right now and it has been for a while. When you think about it, there's just an enormous potential for European trade, but much of that trade is focused internally.

VI: Given this dynamic internal European market, are threats from the United States about tariffs on various European goods, stemming from Trump’s complaint about the bad deals the United States gets from Europe, less significant?

Erik Jones: I wouldn't say that. Trade politics is about targeting individual firms. There are significant firms and significant regions associated with firms that could be significantly damaged by U.S. trade policies. For example, if the United States were to slap a giant tariff on the export of cheese from Italy to the United States or to facilitate the use of the name Parmesan Cheese, putting it in competition with the Parma region, that would be a big trade policy issue even if it's not going to wipe out the Italian economy.

In the automotive sector, those tariffs are important for a very particular part of Germany. Because of the way the German automotive industry involves so many different suppliers and industries throughout Europe, moreover, if you target tariffs at a big keystone industry like automotive, that has knock-on effects and I think that's significant for us to consider.

VI: The Trump administration’s relations with European countries often revolve around personal relationships. Trump has buddied up to Macron but has been quite critical of Angela Merkel, he has supported the populist movement in Italy, and has blatantly become involved in Brexit politics in Britain. How does that play out in Europe in terms of European-American relations?

Erik Jones: The personality politics have an interesting impact in Europe because when Trump was first elected, there was this widespread belief that if you just made friends with Trump and if you just flattered him, and built some personal relationship, you would be insulated from United States foreign policy. That turned out to be a terrible assumption to make. The Trump presidency and the Trump administration is very transactional. Trump does have personal relationships with people, but those personal relationships do not get in the way with the way he pursues trade policy. You can have the best possible personal relationship and still get pulled over a barrel by the Trump's administration.

A good example would be Giuseppe Conte who's the Prime Minister of Italy right now. As soon as he was appointed Prime Minister, he was probably the only person at the G20 Summit in Canada in 2018 who befriended Donald Trump at a time when Trump was isolated. Giuseppe Conte has made a big show of being close to Trump at each of the big international gatherings. And yet, when the Trump administration decided to put the screws on Europe with trade policy, Italy was very much in the crosshairs and Giuseppe Conte's personal relationship with Donald Trump meant little if nothing in that particular context.

I think that's an experience that each of Europe's leaders has gone through, not least Emmanuel Macron. The difference with Angela Merkel is that I don't think she ever had any illusions of becoming friends with Donald Trump. I think there is a level of personal animosity or tension between them. I think she's the outlier in that sense, but I don't think it hurts her any more than it helps Macron that they had that buddy-buddy moment early on in their relationship.

VI: So focusing on Macron,  in a recent interview in The Economist he was very skeptical and gloomy about the future of Europe. He made provocative statements saying that if Euroeans don't pay attention to current realities, then geopolitically and economically, the Euroepan Union would fade away. What's behind this view? Is this Macron just trying to get attention?

Erik Jones: There are really important policy agendas that are baked into this conversation. There is an important rhetorical pivot that the Europeans are having to make. The rhetorical pivot they have adopted mirrors in many ways the language of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which is the language of national sovereignty.

If you read the Macron interview, the number of times the word sovereignty shows up in that interview is striking. It used to be, in the European context, that the talk was always “pooled sovereignty.” This is the way the European Union existed, as this kind of hybrid organization that collected sovereignty from the member states, they pooled it and they work together to solve complex problems. Now Macron is saying, "No, this is not about pooling sovereignty, this is about the need for actual sovereignty. The European Union must have a form of strategic autonomy, and they must be able to act independently of the United States."

Forget all this pooling stuff, let's focus on sovereignty full stop. He goes on to say, in the context of human rights, "Look, European sovereignty is predicated on the sovereignty of the individual and so let's reconsider our political philosophy and focus on the need to protect individual sovereignty and to collect individual sovereignty into actual effective sovereignty at the global level."

Now, that rhetorical flourish is important because it's a direct push back against the sovereigntist argument that's being made by the populists at the local level in Europe and by the Trump administration whenever Trump speaks in front of the United Nations or whenever the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to the world. Pompeo’s  December 2018 speech to the German Marshall Fund in Brussels was a wakeup call for many Europeans in this sovereigntist domain. 

The policy agenda that flows from that has two different sides. One is focused on the need for effective security cooperation and decision making. The argument is that NATO is no longer capable of making strategic decisions, particularly given the way it's constituted, and particularly given the disinterest of the United States. 

The second focus is on digital technology and digital security. The argument is that the European Union has to create its own digital capacity.  Not just digital capacity in 5G but digital capacity in all aspects of data storage and management. I think that those two things have emerged as priorities in Macron's conversation that we, as Americans, need to look at very closely because they have implications for those tech giants I mentioned earlier.

VI: Given the sovereignty debate and realization that the United States is not to be trusted, does that mean that Europe then turns toward China and deals on a different level with Russia?

Erik Jones: There is an interesting line in Marcon’s interview where he says, "Look, we're still allies with the United States. They're still important to us, we still share values with them, but," he says, "When you're sovereign, that means that the enemy of your friend does not have to be your enemy. If we don't have to be total enemies with the enemies of our friends, then we're going to express a more nuanced relationship with Russia and we're going to have to express a more nuanced relationship with China as well.”

Of those things though, the Russia issue is the most important.  Because China is obviously a situation that the Europeans have been wrestling with for some time but the Europeans have been following American leadership on Russia, particularly with the sanctions regime in the context of Ukraine. What Macron is saying is, we can't follow American leadership, we have to take responsibility for our own neighbors, and that means coming to some kind of modus vivendi with Vladimir Putin and his government in order to stabilize our near neighborhood.

I think that would be an interesting change in European foreign policy that could alter the dynamics that we have seen with Russia over the past five years.

VI: When Macron says, "we," is he asking other leaders in Europe to get on board with his vision?

Erik Jones: Well, that is an interesting turn in the argument.  The European Union as an entity doesn’t have effective decision-making capacity over foreign security policy, and not all European Union Member States actually have an active foreign and security policy in the way we might consider. There are some neutral countries like Ireland and Austria that belong to the European Union.  So what Macron says is, look, France has a very capable military, so does Britain, and even if Britain is going to leave the European Union, that doesn't mean Britain is not part of the European security community.

Macron puts a big emphasis on the importance of bilateral relationships. He says, this is the cornerstone on which we're going to build the new European security architecture. The Europe of the future is going to be built on these bilateral relations that encompass the United Kingdom, that encompass France, and obviously to the extent to which other governments are capable of adding resources into the mix, and encompass them as well.

VI: In the past, it was Germany and France cooperating together provided leadership of the EU. With Merkel leaving soon and a shifting of power in Germany, what will post-Merkel Franco-German relations look like?

Erik Jones: The Franco-German relationship has always been important in the context of European integration, but the Anglo-French relationship has always been more important in the context of European security. We have two different issues that we have to talk about. One is about the extent to which the Franco-German relationship can continue to drive the European project and the other is the one that we just talked about, which is the extent to which the bilateral Anglo-French relationship can continue to lie at the basis of European security.

Macron clearly believes the Anglo-French relationship can go forward. They have not had great success in this Franco-German relationship, pushing forward the security agenda. Macron has tried to do this consistently since 2017, and he hasn't gained adequate traction. As he looks at the German political situation right now, it's clear that there's less energy to invest in this kind of security planning now than there was in the past because there's much more division in Germany, and that means there's much more introspection rather than an extrospection by German political elites, and I think Marcon has accepted that.

Part of the reason that I put that emphasis on bilateralism beforehand is because Marcon accepted that France is going to have to build new allies. Even within the European context, they're trying to work much more effectively through the European Commission. If you were to look at the new European Commission appointments that were made, and they finally got the French Commissioner to be accepted by the European Parliament as well, there's quite a lot of emphasis in this new European Commission on creating strategic autonomy through the digital space, on reinforcing  the creation of the European security and defense identity, and integrating foreign policy into all aspects of policymaking at the European Commission level.

So I think Macron's biggest ally is the European Commission as a force multiplier with the idea that, when Germany sorts itself out, Germany will then give support to that effort as well.

VI: Looking at the Anglo-European situation, eventually it will be post-Brexit time. What do you think that will look like?

Erik Jones: The biggest issue to look at when looking at the United Kingdom is the  December 12th elections. If the Conservative Party manages to score an outright majority and the vast majority of Conservative Members of Parliament are in favor of the deal that Boris Johnson has negotiated, then I think we have one scenario that's very easy for somebody like Macron to deal with.

Macron has built an effective working relationship with Boris Johnson. I think Macron reconciled himself far earlier than any other European statesman to the fact that Britain is going to leave, and I think that Macron has the capacity to make the argument to Johnson about the necessity for this bilateral relationship to go forward.

The bigger concern is that the Conservatives might somehow fail to get a parliamentary majority or that the Labour Party might succeed in getting the parliamentary majority. These are outlier concerns. I think most of the polling suggests the Conservatives will win. If the Conservatives were to lose, then we have a much more complicated situation. Macron would lack an obvious interlocutor. Britain would fall in on itself, trying to sort out the added political complexity. The opportunities for effective bilateral relationship would have to be put on hold until Britain could sort out itself internally, and then sort out its relationship with the rest of the EU.

VI: So the idea that we don’t have to worry about post- Brexit because we'll come up with a trade deal with Great Britain and all the trade they need is going to be with the United States and don't worry about Europe that is a false reality?

Erik Jones: I think that's true, but I think it's also a false reality that the Trump administration holds to this idea that a divided Europe is somehow in America's interests, not having an effective actor in this particular piece of land that sticks off of the larger Eurasian landmass. You've got the Middle East, you've got North Africa, you've got Russia and all these things have to be dealt with.  Having nobody to intervene in these areas and leaving all that responsibility to the United States would not be good. I think that the Trump administration needs to reconcile itself to the need for some kind of European partnership, even though, ideologically, I think they find the whole idea of European integration to be a non-starter.

VI: Within Europe itself, do you see political stability in the years to come? It seems that Spain now is probably the most troubled country because of separatist movements and problems forming governments there. Are there other countries that are precarious or are they pretty stable?

Erik Jones: Again, going back to Macron because his interview was a pretty clear-eyed assessment, he says, look, every country in Europe basically is on the brink of that kind of political instability that, I would add, we also see in the United States. These hotly contested elections, these new political movements on the rise, awkward coalitions, the Spanish situation is one illustration, but the coalition that's governing Italy is not all that robust either.

The situation in Germany, as Merkel underscores, is deeply divided or fragmented; so are the Belgians, the Dutch, you name it. The only people who seem to be solidly in control of their countries are places like Hungary and Poland, and that represents a different kind of dilemma. Then there are the countries that used to be friendly with Europe that now seem to be much more standoffish, like Turkey. I think the political landscape is complex.

VI: Europe is a vital region which 2020 presidential candidates should be aware of. Certainly there will be key events in 2020 that will necessitate attention from the United States foreign policy establishment? 

Erik Jones: I definitely think developments in Europe demand attention. Realistically, I don't imagine any of the Democratic candidates giving a campaign speech on Europe or how to deal with Europe's problems or rebuild relations with Europe.

In that sense, it's very different from 2008, when Barack Obama stood in a square in Germany and addressed a crowd of hundreds of thousands. That isn’t going to happen this time around. I think Europe is going to disappear from these elections despite the fact that the premise of your question is absolutely correct and Europe should be front and center. Because without Europe, the United States is all alone in many respects and all alone in a hostile environment, which I would not envy any administration to have to face.

Erik Jones is Director of European and Eurasian Studies and Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He is also Senior Research Associate at the Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale (ISPI), Milan. Jones is author of The Politics of Economic and Monetary Union (2002), Economic Adjustment and Political Transformation in Small States (2008), and, together with Dana Allin, Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity (2012). His most recent book is a collection of short essays called The Year the European Crisis Ended (2014). He is editor or co-editor of more than twenty books or special issues of journals on topics related to European politics and political economy including The Oxford Handbook of the European Union (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics (2015). Professor Jones teaches on topics in international and comparative political economy with a particular focus on Europe and the transatlantic relationship.