In a special episode of Europe Inside Out, Rosa Balfour, Judy Dempsey, and Jan Techau shed light on the creation of Carnegie Europe’s “Strategic Europe” blog and assess Europe's changing role in the world.
After twelve years at the helm of the “Strategic Europe” blog, Judy Dempsey is stepping down as its editor in chief.
Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, sat down with Judy and Jan Techau, a former Carnegie Europe director, to analyze how Europe’s global role has evolved since 2012.
[00:00:00] Intro, [00:01:30] How Did the Blog Begin?, [00:08:50] Has Europe Become More Strategic?
Rosa Balfour
Welcome to a special episode of Europe Inside Out. Today, we celebrate Judy Dempsey and her remarkable twelve years leading Carnegie Europe’s blog, Strategic Europe.
From the Arab Spring to Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, many developments have shaped Europe’s global role in the past twelve years. Our blog has consistently captured these events, putting them into context and offering innovative ideas by bringing in a diverse and vibrant community of experts.
As Judy prepares to step down from her role as editor in chief this summer, we trace the evolution of EU foreign policy and address the question that has guided the blog since its creation: Has Europe become more strategic?
Rosa Balfour
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Europe Inside Out, Carnegie Europe’s monthly podcast about the continent’s greatest foreign policy challenges.
My name is Rosa Balfour, and I am the director of Carnegie Europe.
In today’s special episode you will hear from Judy Dempsey and Jan Techau, former Carnegie Europe director and co-founder of the blog.
I sat down with Judy and Jan in Brussels a few weeks ago for an event to celebrate Strategic Europe. These are the highlights of our conversation. I hope you will enjoy them.
Let’s start with Judy. Your first blog came out on the first of March, 2012.
I really think it has shaped the debate on various matters relating to Europe’s role in the world.
Well, let’s start with the story that you started to talk about when I arrived, when I interrupted you earlier. How did this all start for you?
Judy Dempsey
I knew Jan when he was at the National Defense College, and then he moved to the DGAP in Berlin. He was a great interlocutor. We used to discuss Germany’s policy towards Israel. And I was with the Herald Tribune in New York Times at the time, having left the FT. And I won’t discuss the politics of newspapers, but I rang up Jan for two things. I said, Jan, can you give me an interview? For my background, for my blog? And second, I got another question. We did the interview and said, So what’s the question? I said, I want to give up the paper. And this man, who became a very good friend, said, Oh, great. I have an idea. And then it went from there. It took some time to mature, and Jan was traveling all the time, and I found it difficult to locate him. And we met in December and that’s when you offered me the job.
Rosa Balfour
Okay. Can you tell us what was your idea?
Jan Techau
This was the beautiful moment that really the Judy story started. The blog story started a bit earlier than this. I joined Carnegie in the beginning of ‘11, and I realized quite quickly that this was really the only think tank in town at the time who was exclusively talking about foreign policy. Not talking about so much integration affairs or the stuff that Brussels usually is good at and strong at. But we were talking the international thing, and there was really a field to own. But we needed, because we were a small outfit, we needed something that made us look bigger. And I thought we need a presence on the web that puts out stuff there on a regular basis that makes us part of the debate. And then we can look bigger. And I had no idea how that would function or work, but I wanted a permanent stream of short content to come out. That was the idea. And then we did a test run with an essay series that we published in ‘11, a series of, I don’t know, 24-25 pieces for three weeks, one piece each day.
But we also knew that we couldn’t do it alone. And then Judy called and said: Jan, I’m going freelance. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. And then we had this idea. I said, Yeah, Judy, I have an idea. Then we sat down, we schemed and thought it up, and then we did a dry run for a few weeks where we published basically, we’re in full swing, but it didn’t go outside. And then we started it in early 2012. I think that’s how it came about. And then, of course, we did lots of trial and error.
The question of the week at first didn’t really work. We had to change the model. And the great thing is two things, and this is what I’m thankful for. First of all, the bosses in Washington, being the good German that I am, I asked them, who do I have to ask for permission to do this? And they said, Jan, you try this. It’s your call. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, you stop it. And I said, Great. I love this. And the second thing is from the first, from the get-go, they allowed us to have people from the outside to be on the blog, not just Carnegie authors, which I think was absolutely crucial.
Rosa Balfour
So, Judy, what do you think is special about what you’ve set up?
Judy Dempsey
I think what’s special is the generosity of the team and the generosity of the respondents and the intellectual depth of them. Without these three wouldn’t work. Secondly, the question of the week, which actually is a question every two weeks now, it says something about maybe the blog and how it’s dealt with, that people give their time to do this free, and they think about... I mean, we ask them for 200 words, but they think about it. They just don’t rattle it off. And I’m just so impressed with how they have shaped the blog as well and the content, because without them, the element of strategy wouldn’t be always at the forefront of my mind. And I remember in the early years, Jan was saying to me: We’ve got to keep strategy up there in the lead, because this is what’s driving us. But they’re the three things that I’m astonished how it has lasted, because one of the, I called them one of the head bottle washers in Washington, said to me after two years, This isn’t going to fly.
And I said to myself, Oh, yes, it is. And we kept it going. And it was one of the first. And then some think tanks in Germany or in Spain or in the Nordics said, Listen, how do we do this? And I said, You have to decide yourself on what audience you’re reaching.
Rosa Balfour
Well, I was a regular contributor from the outside. From the beginning, and I really felt it created the community. I would read it regularly. And the Judy Asks question, it was just so good to know what people were thinking on topics in which we were all banging our heads against. I’d like to turn to... Feel free if you’ve got anecdotes to insert them into the conversation, but I would like to turn a little bit to content, to substance. I think my first question to you would be, why did you choose Strategic Europe as a title?
Jan Techau
Yeah. I mean, at the time, the discussion here in Brussels very much about global Europe. That was the catchphrase of the day. People really were quite optimistic about the global reach of the EU also as a foreign policy player. And I was slightly more skeptical about this, and I said, No, first of all, let’s not emulate this and use that term as well. But let’s be slightly more realistic and call it strategic, because that implies that you have to make choices and set priorities instead of doing everything at the same time at the same level. So strategic is not exactly a very creative word in this context, but Strategic Europe at the time sounded good to us. And then we started to brand the whole thing. In the original volume in that essay series, I did a very preposterous thing. I created a standard for what would make European foreign policy strategic, and I developed eight or ten criteria, all slightly too academic, really, to apply to the real world. But I think not entirely untrue, most of that stuff still applies, but in political practice, things work differently.
This was kind of the hubris that we had when we started the whole thing, that we could somehow grade the performance of everybody out there coming from Carnegie Europe. And then, that worked, but mostly because the community on the blog was so great, and all the external authors like to come in, like to get tortured by Judy’s editing, and finding out how things got better when she did this.
And from that moment on, we had cracked the nut and people would start writing for us.
Judy Dempsey
And for me, always being a journalist, but with an academic element, reaching out to these academics at the institutions was a fantastic opportunity and a fantastic challenge because they said, Judy, we were committed to disseminating this. I said, you’ve got to do a blog, 850 words. No, no, no, no, 3,000 or 4,000. No, no, no, 850 words. You’ll get a huge play after this. And you know what? They clicked. It was wonderful. They were so generous, and they sent 2,000 words, and I edited, and then I sent it back, and they have to edit it. And then the next time the round came on, there was 900 words. And it was wonderful bringing in the academic circle into the blog because it widened the audience. And we have reached out to our Middle East centers and China and the United States. It hasn’t been easy because we’re so European-focused, but it started. It really has.
Rosa Balfour
Okay. Let me ask you, how strategic has Europe become in your view? How has Europe changed in terms of strategy and foreign policy and global reach?
Jan Techau
I mean, one of the things I learned at Carnegie is that with doom and gloom, you can never lose money as a think tanker. So being on the negative side of the story makes you interesting and sound deep. My feeling is that we haven’t become an awful lot more strategic, actually. If the standard is to shape outcomes in the world or maybe even just in our neighborhood, I think our ability to shape outcomes in our neighborhood hasn’t really increased in the last 10, 12 years. It has actually gone down. Most of our policies have pretty much failed. Our Russia policy is in shambles. What we wanted with Ukraine did not work. The Middle East, once the strong side of European diplomacy, is absolutely in tatters. We failed in the Sahel, North Africa isn’t in great shape. We haven’t resolved the migration issue. Most of the key European players are weaker players now. So the member state level also hasn’t really increased in terms of its strength and ability to shape outcome.
We are more serious about defense and there are also more instruments for it now at the EU level. But does it make us a strategic player in the sense of being a force to reckon with? Does anybody in the Kremlin have to change its cost-benefit analysis because of what the EU does? Rarely. And I think, I hope I get a lot of flak for this, but my feeling is that we haven’t become more strategic, and that’s not something I’m saying very lightly because it bothers me a great deal.
Rosa Balfour
But maybe looking back, was the Strategic Europe, as an ambition, was it too unrealistic? Or was it, do you think, going back to 2011, 2012, when you were thinking about this, and of course, this was the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, there was greater optimism, but was it perhaps too high an expectation at the time? Or do you think that the past twelve years have seen this deterioration, both because of politics in Europe and the institutional formulas not working and the international environment, et cetera?
Judy Dempsey
It’s an important question because looking back at the last twelve years, in fact, looking even after the last twenty years, there is a fear of thinking strategically, because if you want to act and think strategically, you have to have a common threat perception and a common perception of what your goals are and a common perception of what certain conflicts mean. And it’s not as if we didn’t have enough examples of this. Going back from Chechnya to Georgia to 2014 to 2022, there are so many examples, and in the Middle East and how the Europeans dealt with Israel and the Palestinian authority. And somehow there’s a fear of dealing with strategy because it means confronting all the weaknesses among the member states that we don’t have a common foreign policy.
Jan Techau
But maybe there is a silver-lining here because, you know, the one person who’s made Europe more strategic is Mr. Putin. Right? Putin wins against the blog in making Europe more strategic. Because he’s kind of really turned some attitudes around. I’m not saying that it’s an ideal situation, far from it. It’s exactly the kind of thing we wanted actually to prevent from happening, and that didn’t work. But, if out of their own strength and conviction, the member states are not making Europe more strategic, then maybe pain will. I mean, this is the cynical theory of international relations, that you’re learning only through pain. I don’t like that at all. But my feeling is that we’ve seen some of the turnarounds that we’ve seen are because of pain, not necessarily because of insight.
Judy Dempsey
Pain isn’t pain enough, actually. We still live in a comfort zone over Ukraine. And you read some of the comments from inside Ukraine, that we still haven’t been touched by what this war means. And it’s terrible to say that we need more pain because pain actually verges on a war or conflict happening here in Europe. And we’re still untouched by the repercussions of this war in Ukraine and what they actually mean.
Jan Techau
I remember I wrote a piece roughly saying that just because something has to be done doesn’t mean it’s going to get done. Because we had argued so many times in various pieces and various authors that this is really something that now needs to be done. This must be done. It’s quite clear that this must be done, and then it never got done. When I was back in Berlin I moved to the defense Ministry and worked there for three years. And the difference between policy and politics becomes so apparent to you when you’re actually on the inside. Everybody can write a piece about the ten things that need to be done now, policy. Some people can even write good policy. But the real thing is the politics.
How can you actually get it done against a myriad of opponents and obstacles that are there.
Judy Dempsey
Just one comment on this. We have Marc Pierini here. And anytime Marc writes about Turkey, the economic market, always it comes back to values, human rights, media freedom, and so on. These are the bedrocks of the European Union. And yet why are they so difficult to actually pursue even among the member states. This is what we have been pursuing over the past twelve years doing the block. The values and the... Is it that difficult to uphold and sanction even the members of the EU who are undermining this? This is what strategy is about also, defending what the European Union stands for, and it doesn’t do that.
Jan Techau
Here’s another blog piece that we did at the time, where I tried to square this interest versus values topic, which we always talk about. My take at the time was the difference between interests and values is time. In the short term, you can absolutely violate your values while pursuing your interests. It’s possible to separate the two for a while, but they will always keep catching up. After a while, after time passes, you will no longer be able to do this because it comes back to hurt you. And I think our Russia policy is a great example of this. So the difference between interests and values is time. Politicians are short term creatures, and they are tactical. All politicians are short term creatures, and they have to because they have four or five years of electoral cycles. So the structural problem in this is that in order to reconcile interests and values, you need time, and very few politicians have it. When you actually see a politician in the Ministry of Defense being driven by the daily madness, barely having time to breathe or contemplate anything, you know what that means: no time.
Rosa Balfour
What I’m not seeing, or haven’t really seen over the past twelve years that we’re talking about today is that leadership, that kind of seizing the moment, having a strategic vision. I think that’s a little bit what we’re missing. The doom and gloom that is our bread and butter doesn’t help see the opportunity. I think we also need to look at things about things differently.
On this note, I would like to thank you for joining this month’s episode of Europe Inside Out and to wish the best of luck to Judy, who will stay at Carnegie Europe as a senior fellow.
For those interested in learning more about Europe’s role in the world, I encourage you to keep reading the Strategic Europe blog, which will continue to provide insightful analysis under the stewardship of a new editor in chief.
As for the Europe Inside Out podcast, we will be back with a new season in September. Until then, I wish you a happy and relaxing summer. Goodbye.