Building Trust in Europe’s Future
Our guest for episode 95 is Fabian Zuleeg, CEO of the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Center (EPC). He discusses EPC’s role in advising decision-makers and influencing policy by engaging in events, publications, and networking, with trust being crucial in its operations, including the trust of decision-makers, personal trust, and trust in confidentiality and ethics.
Fabian reflects on the EU’s creation to foster trust among member states through cooperation, laws, institutions, and economic interdependence. However, he notes that recent challenges have decreased trust due to increased diversity and complex crises. He introduces the concept of “cognitive dissonance”, where unrealistic views lead to ineffective actions, and discusses “permapoly crisis,” referring to ongoing overlapping crises. He argues that crises can foster trust if faced collectively, as seen during COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though unity is harder in international relations with the US or China.
He criticizes the “collective progress illusion,” where Europe’s actions are insufficient to meet major challenges. He calls for honesty about the difficult, costly nature of overcoming these challenges, using climate action as an example, and emphasizes strategic planning and involving citizens in long-term solutions. Addressing far-right and populist movements, He describes these “anti-parties” as opposing policies without offering solutions. He stresses that democratic leaders must prove democracy can handle complex problems by being honest, admitting mistakes, and emphasizing collective action.
He touches upon the role of think tanks like EPC in an environment where facts matter less. He emphasizes producing and explaining facts, adapting to the competitive information marketplace, and engaging in accessible debates. He notes the challenge of ensuring proposed solutions are practical and effective. On EU expansion, he argues that trust is impacted by the. Promises to new members must be credible, but reforms are necessary to ensure the EU functions effectively. He highlights the Western Balkans’ prolonged accession process as a trust issue. Finally, Fabian Zuleeg discusses EPC’s future challenges, including adapting to policy developments, crises, and new technologies. Attracting high-level analysts and dealing with technological changes, such as artificial intelligence, are key.
The EU has created something unique
The EU has created something rather unique. It has created a way of former enemies working together and learning that they can trust each other, that there is a common endeavor which unites them. But we’ve also had over the last years a lot of challenges to that. And those challenges have also led to a decrease in trust at the European level, member states don’t work together in the same way as they used to. In part, that’s because we have also more diversity, including governments, which come from Eurosceptic backgrounds who don’t believe in the common endeavour in the same way and we have seen that we are now facing a variety of wicked challenges which are very difficult to deal with, especially because they also involve winners and losers.
Cognitive dissonance
To use cognitive dissonance, really to summarize a number of different phenomena. I think one part of it is that you hear not only from policy makers, but also from many populations, really the wish that the era which we are living in was different, that we wouldn’t be facing the challenges which we are facing now, and that often leads to us acting in a way which assumes the world is different than it really is. And that’s a dangerous cognitive dissonance, because it does lead us down the wrong path, because the consequences of not addressing these challenges are rather severe. But what we also see is that many policy makers, when you talk to them behind closed doors, will tell you that actually they do have solutions, or they very much agree with the solutions you’re putting forward, they agree with the analysis of what the world looks like, but the next step is always that they conclude that politically this cannot be done. So there is also a disconnect between the political realities we have and the policy solutions which are on the table, again leading to a situation where we’re not addressing these fundamental challenges.
Permaypoly crises
Being in crisis, I think does not necessarily mean that you have less trust or more trust with each other. It depends very much on whether you perceive the crisis as being something you are facing together, or whether you think this is something which actually tears you apart. If we see some of the crises we’ve had in the past as part of this permapoly crisis, in some parts of this crisis, we have very much acted together, for example, during the Covid epidemic, where we did things together at the European level, which would have seen as being impossible beforehand, but that’s because leaders very much recognized that this was something we all had to face together. Similarly, at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we saw a lot of actions at the European level which were unthinkable beforehand, including, for example, taking on the millions of refugees from Ukraine or dealing with the support needs for Ukraine’s civil society, but also military. But we’ve also seen tendencies in the other direction. We’ve seen tendencies to very much work against each other, to not trust each other for example, in the international field, when we’re dealing with the United States or with China, where it is far more difficult to get a common approach. So we’ve seen both at the European level and unfortunately, the permapoly crisis also means that we are going to have many more instances in the future when we get tested again.
New EU Member states
Something which is actually already impacting trust, but also trust within the EU is impacting the ability of the European Union to accept new members. So we have an issue that we know that the more member states we have, the more difficult it is to come to conclusions, to find a common line, to make things work. So we can’t just accept new members without carrying out reforms internally. But at the other side of the argument, we now have countries where it’s a geopolitical imperative that we accept them as new members. So we are making promises about when they can come in, when they can apply what is going to happen. And we have to find a way of making those promises credible. And the big warning sign here is what we have done with the Western Balkans, where we have had now countries stuck in an accession process for decades, which is leading to, in many of these countries, the trust in the European Union and the trust in European integration steadily declining because they are saying, rightly so, you promised us that we would be part of the family, but it’s not happening. So we have to find a way of making real on our promises, but at the same time making sure that this process is done in a way that then works because the last thing we want is an accession process where we have new members, but then it leads to a situation where the European Union doesn’t function anymore.