[FR] The EU and the world: sink or swim

Twenty years after the creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) by the Maastricht Treaty, have Europeans really grasped the current risk of marginalisation on the international stage? Despite the Arab Spring, we have emerged from a period of euphoria in which, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Westernisation of the world seemed inevitable, with the gradual democratisation of political regimes and the liberalisation of economies. The EU’s enlargement strategy was then a formidable foreign policy instrument in the neighbourhood, culminating in the 2004 enlargement. The difficulties currently encountered in continuing to use this instrument and the delay in developing alternative and complementary policies now expose the CFSP and remind us how far the initial Maastricht objectives were out of step with the means deployed. Jacques Delors’ warning in 1992 that ‘we should not talk about a single foreign policy – that is an unattainable goal – but about the possibility of joint action in foreign policy’ remains more relevant than ever.