There is a scene that recurs in Brussels with reliable regularity. A crisis erupts somewhere in Europe’s neighbourhood — a war, a sanctions dispute, a diplomatic rupture — and the EU’s foreign ministers gather urgently. Statements are issued. Commitments are made. The word “unity” appears in every press release. And then the cracks appear: one country breaks ranks, another insists on a softer formulation, a third blocks a specific measure for domestic political reasons that have nothing to do with the situation at hand. The world watches. Europe’s adversaries take note. And the moment passes with European influence diminished.
The structural problem
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy requires unanimity in the Council for almost all significant decisions. Every member state has a veto. This was always a design limitation — a concession to national sovereignty that the founding architects accepted as the price of getting agreement at all. But in an era of systemic geopolitical competition, where speed and coherence matter as much as deliberation, the unanimity requirement has become an increasingly costly liability.
The war in Ukraine exposed this in sharp relief. The bloc’s response was, by historical standards, remarkably unified — sanctions packages, financial support, weapons deliveries coordinated through EU channels. But Hungary’s repeated obstruction, most visibly on sanctions that targeted Russian energy interests, forced constant workarounds and coalition-building that consumed energy and time. And Hungary is not unique; it is simply the current most visible example of a structural vulnerability that any determined member state can exploit.
What a coherent European foreign policy would require
The Treaty of Lisbon created the position of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and established the European External Action Service — structural reforms designed to give the EU a single diplomatic voice. What they could not create was the political will to use that voice consistently. The High Representative can speak for Europe only when Europe has agreed on what to say. When it has not — on China, on the Middle East, on relations with Turkey, on almost any sensitive issue — the position is reduced to managing disagreement rather than projecting authority.
Genuine reform would require moving key foreign policy decisions from unanimity to qualified majority voting — a change that would allow the EU to act even when one or two member states dissent. France and Germany have both supported this in principle. The member states most likely to be outvoted — Hungary, but also smaller countries concerned about being marginalised — have resisted it. Without treaty change, which itself requires unanimity, the structural problem cannot be resolved through procedural innovation alone.
The cost of the status quo
Every diplomatic challenge Europe faces in the coming decade — the ongoing competition with Russia and China for influence in the EU’s neighbourhood, the management of the transatlantic relationship under variable American administrations, the response to climate diplomacy failures, the handling of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa that generate migration pressure — requires a European foreign policy actor capable of making credible, sustained commitments. As covered in our analysis of US political shifts and their European consequences, the window for Europe to build genuine strategic autonomy is not unlimited. Twenty-seven national foreign policies, loosely coordinated, will not be adequate for the world Europe is entering. Whether European leaders have the political courage to acknowledge this openly — and act on it — remains the defining question of European foreign policy ambition.
