For all the benefits it has conferred on its members, the European Union often resembles an imperious aunt from a PG Wodehouse story, permanently tut-tutting and issuing lofty edicts from afar.
A new directive, however, has made many in its population base of 450 million draw a sharp breath. Updating its emergency preparedness advice – chiefly about what householders should stockpile – it newly urges preparing for attack. By Russia.
Many are inured to regular nagging from the EU about the possibility – verging on inevitability – of another pandemic, crippling cyber attack, natural disaster or sudden dramatic energy shortage. There are also people who, still bristling with indignation about what they see as unnecessary Covid lockdowns and restrictions, make it a point of principle to scoff at such advice.
But for the EU to be so frank about the possibility of war with Russia has been adrenalising. Worse, Europeans are realising the crises might not arrive singly but could easily coincide.
Patently, the threat of war is the most terrifying, upsetting decades’ worth of comfortable assumptions that few countries would ever again be silly enough to dabble in globally escalatable incursions.
It’s scarcely news that the United States’ reframing of its security priorities and Russia’s intransigence on Ukraine have given Europe’s leaders a massive fright.
But what is newly confronting is this reassessment of how much concurrent peril could lie in store. Bird flu is continuing to spread through the region and is now confirmed on an English sheep farm. Few are panicking, but neither are experts blithe about its mutation risks.
As for cyber attacks, many have been more nuisance than catastrophe, but there’s no mistaking the malice. Infiltration heavily favours military and economic targets, but hackers are also adept at sabotaging logistics, such as in Denmark, where they knocked out its rail service in 2022.
There’s been a swift and surprisingly lightly contested EU resolve to lift defence spending. But with punitive US tariffs promised, the economic and social cost is bound to become a political nightmare.
The portents are not all grim. Data firm Morningstar has observed a rush to European equities as investors desert US stocks, apparently in response to President Trump’s drastic foreign policy and trade reset. For now, capital flight appears to be punishing the US in Europe’s favour. EU growth is also humming, including in previously underperforming economies like Spain. Most members are growing; several, notably Denmark and Ireland, are booming.
The US shockwave has also caused a rethink on debt ratios, with Germany the first member state to relax its strictures on government borrowing.
For business, however, uncertainty can cause at least as much damage as the actual arrival of a trade-throttling measure. Though saying he’s by no means optimistic, Airbus chairman Guillaume Faury has predicted the tariff war will prove so mutually destructive, the US and its trade partners will have to call a truce. Alternatively, he says, it’s possible the US might come off worst.
Already the tariff plans are credited with fuelling US inflation, and consumer spending has softened.
Rather less sanguine is Ineos Automotive chief executive Lynn Calder, who says tariffs will be a “life or death” matter for the British company, and it’s all the EU’s fault. She’s among those who think Brussels’ trade negotiators have been shortsighted. Americans pay a 2.5% tariff for EU cars, while US cars attract 10% in Europe. That, she says, was never sustainable. The backlash should have been predicted.
All of which makes the EU’s crisis advice – 72 hours’ worth of torches, batteries, tinned food, first aid kit and dunny paper – seem somewhat undercooked. Covid left electricity unscathed, but Russia mightn’t be so lenient. An entire continent suffering caffeine deprivation hardly bears thinking about.
