Dr Cleo Davies (University of Warwick)
After some delay, the UK finally announced that the next summit of the European Political Community (EPC) will take place 18 July 2024. This is a welcome development, not least because the EPC has a strong symbolic dimension. In convening, leaders across Europe signal their shared stake in the European region, even as Russia continues its war on Ukraine. The EPC has symbolic value for the UK too. As the host country of the fourth summit, further delays or perceived prevarications over holding the summit risked undermining the UK’s capacity to project convenor power post-EU membership.
In practice, the EPC’s value lies principally in providing a space for dialogue, including bilaterally, between heads of states and governments of countries across the European continent. The EPC has no secretariat and does not produce statements or declarations, nor does it have a roadmap for action. The absence of any formal structure is what enables open and equal-to-equal dialogue. But it also means that the continued relevance and existence of the EPC depends almost entirely on political commitment at the level of leaders.
When the French President presented his idea for a European Political Community in May 2022, he clearly viewed it as a way to structure the European continent, in the short and medium term, beyond EU accession. It would include EU members, those aspiring to become members and those not wanting membership, including the UK, but who share core values. It was his response to what he called ‘the need to recognise that there is a will to aggregate the European continent’.
Emmanuel Macron’s proposal drew scepticism especially from those countries aspiring to EU membership, who worried that the EPC would become an alternative to EU membership. These concerns have since dissipated; the EU has opened accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova and granted Georgia candidate status. Instead, the EPC has emerged principally as a platform for political cooperation to discuss events across the European continent.
The only commitment agreed at the first EPC summit in Prague in October 2022 was the hosts of the next three meetings. This set the precedent of a bi-annual gathering, rotating between an EU member state and a non-EU member state – Moldova hosted in June 2023, followed by Spain in October 2023. Other recurring informal institutional features have emerged over the course of the first three summits: it provides space for bilateral discussions between leaders and roundtables to discuss areas of shared interest.
At this stage of its new existence, the one certainty about the future of the EPC beyond the 18 July, is the name of the EU member state that will host the autumn summit and the fact that it will have the resources and convening power to do so. That is because the informal meeting of the heads of states and government of the autumn rotating Presidency of the EU is being combined with an EPC summit – in October 2024, it will be Hungary. As a result, the European Council, at first circumspect of yet another leaders’ summit, is turning into the most structuring dimension of the EPC.
With regards the next summit, the UK has clearly identified the symbolic dimension of the EPC. It has chosen Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, as the location for the summit in July and emphasises the historical reference. The UK has also indicated it is working to ‘promote coherence across this and future summits’.
In terms of substance, the UK lists migration and support to Ukraine as the topics for the EPC. With some success, PM Rishi Sunak has pushed to make the EPC about migration and organised immigration crime (people smuggling). He focused entirely on the issue in his communication at the Moldova summit which was at odds with the main message of the summit. And there were tensions with the Spanish PM, Pedro Sánchez, over Sunak’s request to make migration a focus of the Granada summit. Nevertheless, he did co-convene a smaller group on migration and organised immigration crime with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni on the side-lines of the summit, which even led to a joint statement. Whilst Sunak clearly wishes to make migration crime a focus of the UK summit, leaders have discussed a broader set of issues at previous summits, such as energy infrastructure security, youth mobility or cybersecurity. Regarding the latter for instance, there was a commitment following the Granada Summit to deploy franco-EU training for non-EU members.
Whatever the substance of the discussions in July, it would be a surprise if this summit leads to a declaration given that the previous iterations haven’t. A minimum benchmark of success for the ‘Blenheim summit’ may well be a clear commitment from two non-EU member states to host the spring summits in 2025 and 2026. If not, the signal will surely be that there is not enough political appetite for such an organization. Symbolically, it would put a dent in the EU’s ambitions to become a geopolitical actor, capable of being a regional power for peace beyond the offer of EU membership. For the UK, it would weaken any legacy for the Blenheim summit. That is because Victor Orbán is hosting the next meeting on 7 November 2024 and may well be perfectly content to bury the initiative.
More practically, the importance of summitry should not be dismissed. In the words of Simon McDonald, head of the British diplomatic service until 2020, ‘successful diplomacy is impossible if people do not know each other personally. And summits are the best way for leaders to get to know each other.’[1] In a hardening regional and international geopolitical context, with war in Ukraine and local conflicts brewing across the European region too, it is all the more important that leaders have a forum to meet, even if a very informal organization is all they commit to at this stage.
[1] Simon McDonald (2023). Beyond Britannia. Reshaping UK Foreign Policy. Haus Publishing, London, p. 121.
Cleo Davies (University of Warwick) is Senior Research Fellow on the ESRC funded project ‘Living with the neighbours: the UK, EU and wider Europe’, part of the UK in a Changing Europe Programme.
The views expressed in this blog post are the position of the author and not necessarily those of the Brexit Institute blog.