What lessons should be drawn from the EU’s response to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russian war in Ukraine? How can the European Union act more efficiently in a crisis and reduce bureaucratic procedures? What is the overall strategic and geopolitical vision of the EU? And what should we know about the referendum on including integration with the EU into the constitution and the presidential elections in Moldova? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Nicu Popescu, a distinguished Policy Fellow of the European Power programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), based in the Paris office. His areas of focus include how the EU should adapt itself and its policies in light of the war in Ukraine, including the development of a ‘war economy’, as well as EU enlargement to the east and Europe’s relations with Russia. He served as Moldova’s Deputy Prime-Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and European Integration between August 2021 and January 2024, and Foreign Minister between June and November 2019.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): In a policy brief written by you together with Laurence Boone for the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), titled Better Firefighting, Reading Europe for an Age Between War and Peace, you propose recreation of a European version of the US Defense Production Act. Why do we need it?
Nicu Popescu (NP): The starting point of that paper is about the need for speed in our administrative decision making. Therefore, we made a parallel to where Europe is today in terms of security with firefighting machines, police cars, or ambulances. Most of the time, these vehicles drive at a regular speed, but when there is a crisis (an accident or another incident), they put the sirens on because they need to get to the place of the incident fast. If a firefighting car, a police car, or an ambulance does not get there in time, people will die. Being slow is, therefore, dangerous.
In terms of European security, we are currently witnessing the biggest war on the European soil since World War II. In a crisis like that you need resources, defense spending, but you also need to be fast – in terms of placing orders for weapons or boosting electricity and energy infrastructure. You cannot go into a crisis situation at the regular speed of administrative procedures.
Our institutions have become extremely slow, as if they were stuck in a traffic jam. If you look at how slowly the European Union countries spend the money from the NextGenerationEU fund (a post-COVID-19 recovery fund), you will see that most EU countries have spent around a third of the money they were meant to spend. Moreover, a very tiny fraction of cohesion funds have been spent on the allocated timelines.
Furthermore, imagine that during World War II, when the Americans and the British were doing public acquisitions for the Normandy landing in 1944, that they would have used today’s public acquisition procedures. If that were the case, the Normandy landing would have probably happened in 1950 or 55 at the earliest – it certainly would not have happened in 1944. Therefore, we are arguing that we need to act fast in times of crisis.
We need to be fast at placing orders for military equipment, but also in terms of various non-military elements – in the areas of energy or infrastructure upgrades. It is not just about allocating more money (because more funds are needed), but also about using our existing funds, which should be easier to reallocate to new priorities because there is a war on the ground.
LJ: Should cohesion funds be used for these purposes? Or do we need new legislation, perhaps a new institution trying to mobilize and institutionalize it? How do you think it could be realized in practice, considering that many countries keep their prerogatives to themselves in these particular areas, and it is only in times of crisis that the EU manages to go beyond its usual pace?
NP: We totally need both. We need new administrative procedures, which might be based on laws or regulations, and we need them both at the EU level and the national level.
What we are arguing in the publication is that we need the European equivalent of the American Defense Production Act, which is a piece of legislation adopted in the early 1950s in the United States and allows the American executive to spend money fast in crisis situations. Therefore, sometimes they use it to boost research or to place orders on weapons, but they have also used it for non-military purposes. For instance, they used it to make it easier to import solar panels in the United States in the context of the need to accelerate the green transition. They even used it for baby milk.
As such, the American Defense Production Act it is a pretty flexible legal instrument which allows you to be fast in crisis situations and put aside peacetime procedures, which are typically slow. What happens in Europe is that some countries are doing it on the national level.
In 2022, in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine, Germany adopted a piece of legislation called the LNG Acceleration Act because they needed to build LNG terminals fast, not at a standard speed where you know it takes five years of paperwork before you start building physical infrastructure.
Now, in the Netherlands, there is a draft law currently discussed by the government that is more or less supposed to emulate what the US Defense Production Act is doing. However, the problem is that it is not only Germany or the Netherlands that need this kind of legislation, and it is not just in the LNG sector. We need it on the pan-European level if you want to be fast in developing cross-border projects. Therefore, we not only need to work on the legal side, but also find better ways to reallocate existing money.
Although we have unused funds in the European Union’s budget (as well as in the development banks, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, or the Council of the Europe Development Bank), all of these banks have funds, but normally they do not have special procedures to fast track the allocation of funds in crisis situations for countries that need urgent solutions to pressing problems.
This is why this recommendation (in light of the recent news that the European Union is looking into ways to make it easier to reallocate petition funds) is a perfectly logical thing to do. This is the kind of things we all need to do, as Europe can no longer be as slow as it has been in reacting to the effects of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, to the COVID-19 crisis. We all need to be much faster when reacting to a crisis.
LJ: The Eastern EU members without a doubt consider Russia as an existential threat to their security. This attitude is reflected in the GDP spent for defense in the Baltic states, as well as in Poland or Romania. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that Italians or Germans would share the same perspective. Is it possible to introduce a new joint model of responding to such a significant threat without escalation of the war to the NATO soil?
NP: First of all, it is in everyone’s interest (including the interest of Italy, Portugal, or Spain) for Europe to be strong, for NATO and the European Union to survive. If the Russians continue advancing in Ukraine and if they get to the NATO and European Union’s external border (the border of Poland or Romania), then they would threaten even more the whole Western democratic institutional architecture.
Some people argue that helping Ukraine involves too many risks in terms of nuclear tensions with Russia. Actually, I would argue the opposite is true, and that the best way to minimize the future risk of nuclear tensions is by making sure that Russia does not get too close to the European Union’s border and to do so through conventional weapons. The best way to keep future risks – be it conventional or nuclear – as far away from the political agenda and the borders of NATO and the European Union is by making sure that the Russian army is as far away from NATO/EU borders as possible. And the only way to do that is by helping Ukraine with conventional weapons supplies.
This is a sad reality, but it is definitely a factor. The way in which this war is changing Europe poses an existential threat not only to the security of many European countries, but also to the whole institutional architecture on which Europe and Western Europe has been built in the last 80 years.
Therefore, it is a threat for everyone, including for Italy and Portugal. None of this countries is big enough to be relevant in a globalized world without allies. If we compare it to the threat that COVID-19 posed to the European economy, the European Union ended up borrowing 800 million euro. Meanwhile, it was not able to design a scheme to borrow money in order to keep the war as far away from European Union’s border as possible. Therefore, it is a bit of a paradox.
LJ: When it comes to the issue of ammunition production, what should be done about the unused capacity that exists in EU factories? And what about the interconnectors between Moldova and Romania, which were not created at a time when they were very much needed? And, finally, with the existing institutions, legislation, and funds, what can we do differently to improve the situation, providing there is a political will to do so?
NP: The interconnector between Moldova and Romania is happening, but too slowly. It should have been done by now – and it would have been if urgent security procedures had been applied, which is not the case. However, there is a number of other Kafkaesque examples of this phenomenon.
In 2020 or 2021, Ukrainian Road Construction Agency received large funds (100 million euro) to renovate roads in the Luhansk region. And then when the war started, Russia began the occupation of the region, so Ukraine could no longer renovate the roads in that part of their territory. Therefore, these 100 million euro were supposed to be repurposed for other purposes for Ukraine. The procedure, however, was so excruciatingly slow that, at some point, Ukraine decided that it is not worth trying to do the repurposing of the funds. In a crisis situation it was totally absurd. Using that money for another purpose (like for a grain storage or electricity infrastructure) was not possible because peacetime procedures were being applied to a situation that needed quick solutions – not two years of paperwork.
There were many other absurd situations like that, which means that the European Union needs to revise its procedures in a way that allows for special procedures in case of a war or a major crisis, otherwise Europe will be getting weaker and weaker, and it will be losing not only its global dimension, but also its cohesion and capacity to compete in the economic sphere.
We see numerous European voters being upset with the governing parties. We may observe setbacks in France, Germany, and the UK. In Britain, the government lost elections just a couple of months ago. Clearly, there is a big backlash against governing parties. Yet, if you look at how fast the European Union has been spending the post-COVID-19 recovery fund, it is ridiculous.
Therefore, instead of finding ways to spend the money fast to boost the European economy and also keep the European political systems less affected by the popular vote of voters, we have created procedures which are so heavy that they make it impossible for governments to spend money fast to relieve the economy after COVID-19, or to help Ukraine fast enough in a broad spectrum of issues. This creates a dangerous situation for Europe.
LJ: Does the European Commission live up to the expectations? What needs to happen for it to become less of a very complex bureaucratic institution and more of a strategic actor which sets its own goals and is more flexible in achieving them when things go wrong?
NP: What happened in the last three years (also with the COVID-19 pandemic) is that very often you have a political realization of the fact that something needs to be done urgently. Certainly, the leadership of the European Commission as well as the leadership of the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction of Development all see the urgency of what needs to be done. However, we still need proper legal procedures to be worked out by legal departments and risk analysis units. All of them work on protocols which are designed not for crisis, but for slow, casual, peacetime speed. Therefore, it is not just a matter of political will.
Very often there is political will, but we also need a proper institutional adjustment that allows for administrative fast tracking. And we still have not seen a proper institutional adjustment that would make Europe better fit for crises yet – including future crises.
LJ: This brings us to a conversation about enlargement, and more specifically about Moldova. What is the current situation in Moldova after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia? And what was the rationale behind the recent referendum, which was combined with the presidential elections?
NP: After Ukraine, Moldova has been the country that suffered the most from the negative consequences of the war. I do not wish to underplay the impact of the war on Ukraine, as it has been a million times more dramatic and tragic. But among the other countries, Moldova has been probably the most severely impacted country in a lot of domains.
Moldova had to handle a big refugee crisis. Compared to the population of Moldova, its GDP, and resources to manage it, it was much more difficult than it was in Slovakia, Armenia, or Poland. On top of it, Moldova has had significant economic problems because of the war. Investors have been much more careful about investing their profits in a country located next to the war zone.
As a consequence, the costs of the regional logistics, chains, and transportation, everything has gone up. Meanwhile, a number of people in France or in Poland were dissatisfied with the inflation levels, but in Moldova, all of these problems have been even greater, and the government has had fewer financial ways to compensate and alleviate the economic shocks of the war. Therefore, the context is complicated.
In the last few weeks in Moldova, we had a presidential election and the referendum on introducing a reference to EU accession into the constitution. Maia Sandu won the presidential elections and reclaimed her mandate with an 11% lead, which is a really amazing result.
Meanwhile, across the world, especially in democracies, incumbents are being penalized by voters. In the last couple of years, the United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, and Italy all have seen new governments coming to power and people being dissatisfied with inflation and price levels, among others. Therefore, the fact that the Moldovans recommitted, once again, to a pro-European government, to Maia Sandu for a new mandate, and voted in favor of the EU-related referendum is clearly a testimony to a very high degree of resilience to the existing problems.
Nonetheless, these problems continue to erode the Moldovan economy, the level of optimism in the population, and the trust in the political system in general. All of these structural problems have been aggravated in recent months in Moldova with a very aggressive mass-scale Russian scheme to buy votes.
Through oligarchs, Russia had distributed at least 138,000 bank cards to Moldovan citizens, which represents approximately 10% of the total number of all voters in Moldova. Some of these people were being paid for several months in order to make them vote the way Russia told them to. The authorities know every single phone number related to this case because people who had installed the application of a Russian bank were receiving text messages during the installation process and cash payments on their bank accounts, which was all registered in the mobile operators data.
These are not mere speculations. We are talking about a pretty obvious situation with almost 10% of the voters who installed a Russian bank application on their phones and had been receiving cash for their vote. This is a very dramatic new form of hybrid warfare that comes on top of disinformation and many other methods that aim to destabilize Moldova.
The good news is that between the first and the second round of the presidential elections, the authorities pushed back quite significantly against this vote buying scheme. Therefore, judging by the results – although it is difficult to give the exact numbers – it seems like the pushback against the scheme has more or less worked for a significant number of people who have sold their vote in the first round of the presidential elections, but who have hesitated in the second round, when they saw that it is not that you get 100 euro for selling your vote but you can also get fined, detained, or investigated by the police and you will end up in the justice system. Therefore, it likely prevented a lot of people from selling their vote in the second round and, as a consequence, the results were more reflective of the rule of the voters.
LJ: It seems that Maia Sandu wanted to make the presidential elections very much a referendum on the European future of Moldova. In hindsight, did it make sense to polarize voters along the party lines on the EU question? Perhaps it is the issue that would allow for mobilizing more voters in support of the European Union?
NP: It is too late to speculate about what would have been better, and it is always easier to have strong opinions in hindsight. What we have seen with the EU referendum was that in the first round Maia Sandu received 43% of votes, whereas changing the constitution and introducing a reference to the EU or several references to the EU observed 50.4% of support. Therefore, there was obviously a higher number of people voting in favor of the EU than for Maia Sandu in the first round.
At the same time, within these results, approximately 10% of votes that had been bought also influenced the final result, which became less persuasive when all the opinion polls came in. I, myself, was involved in running the civil society effort to inform about the European Union and to push back against the lies and the propagistic lies spread about the EU.
Let us consider another parallel. Everyone considers Donald Trump as the newly elected president. If you follow the media and the Democratic Party, people talk about Donald Trump’s crushing victory, a swiping mandate for implementing his policy priorities. Yet, if you look at the exact numbers, Donald Trump has been voted by the same number of people as in 2020 (74 million people, 49.9%. of all votes). Therefore, it is somewhat less when the EU referendum result in Moldova was. Still, there was a massive discussion surrounding the results of the referendum.
However, the conversation about the referendum is done by now. The Constitution is now being amended. And now, the current and future governments will need to make sure that they implement the necessary reforms as fast as possible to bring Moldova into the European Union.
We have discovered what we already knew from the case of Brexit and the French referendum on the European Constitution back in 2005, which did not get a positive response. Clearly, referendums are a double-edged sword. You sometimes ask the question and very often voters give you an answer that is not the answer to this question, but rather a reflection of what they think about the government or the economy.
LJ: How will the position of Moldova transform vis-a-vis EU integration? How will the government approach the parliamentary elections, which perhaps might be even more crucial regarding the future of Moldova? And what do you expect will happen in the area of EU integration and on the domestic front regarding those issues?
NP: Next year will be very difficult for Moldova. We are going to have the parliamentary elections, and the developments in Ukraine remain unclear. We do not know how the front line will evolve, whether there will be a peace deal, and how sustainable it would be. Therefore, all of these conversations that we hear between the new American administration about the future of Ukraine are all casting a dark shadow on the Moldovan politics and regarding public attitudes toward domestic political players, Europe, the United States, and Ukraine. All of this makes for a very difficult context for Moldova.
Additionally, the Russian pressure continues. Russia is most likely continuing to invest money in its election-related scheme, fine-tuning it, trying to find better ways to sway the vote also next time. Meanwhile, the Moldovan economy continues to suffer from the impact of the war. There is also massive disinformation.
Moldova has managed to weather a lot of crises in the last 30+ years. Regardless of that fact, even last month, Moldova once again recommitted to a pro-European track. Nonetheless, the context is very complicated, and it is likely to be so in the future as well.
This is why it will be extremely important for Moldova to continue to get the support of its partners and for it to happen very fast. Because when we talk about infrastructure development in Moldova, in a crisis situation, it is really not very wise to offer grants and then spend five years on paperwork before these grants turn into actual bridges and roads. Three or five years is too long.
Therefore, there is a need for a greater speed and assistance, which is crucially important for Moldova’s political and economic realities. And this is going to have a significant geopolitical impact on Moldova’s positioning in the world in a region that remains dangerous.
Check out the ECFR report: https://ecfr.eu/publication/better-firefighting-readying-europe-for-an-age-between-war-and-peace/
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
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