As leaders from 45 European nations get together to discuss everything from energy to Russia’s war in Ukraine, experts say what seems like a noble idea might be limited in format and outcomes.
Migration, security and energy cooperation may be the official items on the agenda for leaders from about 45 European nations to discuss at a summit in England on Thursday but EU-UK relations, the war in Ukraine and the upcoming elections in the US are likely to dominate talks.
Leaders will convene in Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill near Oxford in southern England, for the fourth summit of the European Political Community (EPC).
The forum, launched in 2022, has delivered no tangible results so far, and this one is unlikely to buck the trend.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this summit, therefore, appears to be UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Organised by his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, the gathering will be the second occasion since his election to Downing Street just two weeks ago to rub shoulders with a whole host of world leaders following his trip to Washington last week for a NATO summit.
Officially, this meeting aims to provide leaders with the opportunity to “discuss some of the most pressing generational issues facing Europe,” according to a statement from the UK Foreign Office.
“Today’s threats are generationally challenging, and the Prime Minister is clear that the United Kingdom is always stronger when working in close collaboration with others. The UK government will use the summit to discuss closer collaboration to tackle illegal immigration and greater security cooperation with European counterparts to keep Britain safe,” it added.
Starmer’s EU reset
Unofficially, Starmer, who led the Labour party to a landslide victory on 4 July, is keen to use the summit to reset relations with the European Union and to advance talks on a defence pact between the two sides.
“It is a good opportunity to start changing the UK-EU relationship. This will, first, be a change of tone towards more constructive engagement after the more antagonistic mentality of the Johnson/Truss era (somewhat better under Sunak),” Iain Begg, professorial research fellow at the London School of Economics, told Euronews.
All 27 EU leaders should be in attendance, as will European Council President Charles Michel. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, will however skip the summit to be in Strasbourg to attend the European Parliament vote that will decide whether she will stay at the helm of the bloc’s executive for a second term.
According to Begg, “there is a limited range of immediate changes Starmer wants”. These include “the veterinary agreement and the freedoms for artists, but these are rather second-order. The subsequent prize will be dealing with some of the shortcomings (from a British perspective) in the TCA – even if ambitions in this regard need to be tempered by likely reluctance from the EU to re-open big issues.”
On the EU side, the new British government’s efforts to signal the wish for closer ties are seen as “a positive sign”.
“We are open-minded to see what can be achieved. We have our clear demands when it comes to youth mobility, when it comes to to citizens,” a senior EU official said.
“What we think is crucial is the implementation of existing agreements, what we have reached so far — Windsor Framework — but also the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. And those are the lines we have. As long as we don’t question what has been agreed so far, I think we could benefit from closer cooperation on foreign affairs and issues on defence, but we have to see how it is translated,” the source added.
The format’s limitations
Any such talks will be done on the summit’s margins during the times allocated for leaders to hold bilateral or multilateral meetings. Starmer has already indicated he will meet with Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris on Wednesday evening and French President Emmanuel Macron over dinner on Thursday.
Instead, the 45 leaders will focus on migration, energy cooperation and defending and securing democracy during thematic roundtables.
“Overall, it is useful to choose topics for the official agenda that all countries kind of have a buy-in,” Jannike Wachowiak, policy analyst in the Europe Political Economy Programme at the European Policy Centre, told Euronews.
The European political community has no formal structure such as permanent staff or a secretariat, so “the only thing that holds the EPC together is European leaders showing up and continuing to show an interest,” Wachowiak said.
“So I think in order to kind of guarantee this political buy-in from European leaders, you have to make sure that it kind of is seen as beneficial from everyone’s perspective,” she added.
Among the notable absentees will be Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who is expected to skip for the second consecutive time.
France and Moldova will steer discussions on the defence of democracy, with an emphasis on tackling disinformation and foreign interference. The two countries — which have both flagged Russian disinformation campaigns against them in recent years — aim to establish a network at the EPC level of national entities that tackle foreign interference, which could quickly identify, share, and coordinate its response to information manipulation attempts.
Michel and the president of Montenegro, Jakov Milatović, will take the lead on energy cooperation.
The migration talks will meanwhile be chaired by the leaders of Italy and Albania and focus on how European countries can cooperate to tackle irregular migration and create legal pathways.
The topic is a sensitive one and was at the heart of a minor diplomatic row during the last EPC summit in Granada last October. Italy and the UK angered at Spain’s decision not to put migration on the formal agenda, decided to hold a meeting on the margins with France, Albania, and the Netherlands.
Together, they came up with an eight-point plan to tackle migrant smuggling and provide operational support to partner countries.
‘No super-tangible outcomes’
Any outcome on the official topics this time around is likely to follow the same format, such as within so-called “coalitions of the willing” — or groups of countries — and would likely also centre around operational cooperation.
Unlike other formats such as G7, G20 or the European Council, no communiqué in which all leaders agreed to joint positions is released.
Starmer is also expected to put forward a proposal for EPC participating countries to pledge to crack down on the shadow fleet of vessels Moscow uses to circumvent Western sanctions against its oil sector.
This lack of formal structure is both the EPC’s weakness and strength.
“It is worth saying, we have not seen super-tangible outcomes,” Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World Programme at Chatham House, told Euronews. I think it is an opportunity just to establish the principle of kind of cooperating on some of these issues.”
“The kind of flexibility in the lack of structure, you could absolutely critique but you could also say that’s quite valuable because it makes the forum quite adaptable to kind of current priorities,” she added.
NATO, OSCE and the Council of Europe will attend for the first time in a sign that the war in Ukraine and defence and security should also monopolise a lot of leaders’ attention on the margins.
Ukraine is almost embedded in the EPC’s DNA as the format, the brainchild of Macron, was birthed after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour in 2022 as a means to bring together EU and non-EU countries together on a regular basis and at the highest political level.
But the US election in November should also feature prominently, as the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House becomes more viable by the day.
“I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up,” O’Sullivan said. “It will hang over the summit and broader discussions about the topics on the agenda are going to be informed by this sort of wider context, the possibility of a second Trump term, the sort of necessity of a bit more of a shared geopolitical outlook among members of the European neighbourhood.”
The senior EU official concurred: “That’s one of the issues that is in everybody’s minds and I think that’s been there for a while. And I can expect leaders to share their impression and how we can prepare for this.”
