Professor Ben Tonra:

When Deputy Calleary and I were last directly engaging some years ago, European security looked very different. We were talking about a Europe whole and free at the time, and that is very significantly under threat now. As for what Europe as a whole could do, we have to return to an earlier point. Josep Borrell travelled to Moscow as the High Representative and was roundly humiliated by his Russian interlocuters. I do not know the individual psychologies or the precise details of the events but it was visible that the Russians did not take him or the European Union seriously as an interlocuter or actor. Part of that relates, as Professor Ó Beacháin said, to self-interest. The Russians do not wish to see the European Union in pole position on this. They want to deal directly with Washington because they want to see themselves on a par with Washington. Dealing with the European Union as an equal is, for them, a downgrade.

On moral authority, there is much literature on this, as the Deputy well knows. We talk about normative power Europe and the power of European values, but those values rest on material power. The Union has material power in respect of trade and economics, although it is much more limited in terms of diplomacy and has effectively none in the military sphere. There is a genuine policy question to be grappled with, namely, whether we want the Union to have material power across all realms. Perhaps we do not, and there may be good arguments for that, but we then have to accept the Union's limitations as an international actor that come as a result of that, and witness the European Union being marginalised in the way the Russians have successfully marginalised it to date.

President Putin referred to the end of the Soviet Union as a great strategic tragedy. This comes to the Deputy's question about whether we are now at a more dangerous point. Putin is, in effect, attempting to roll back the end of the Cold War and to re-establish Russia's sphere of influence. He is attempting to return Russia to a place of global pre-eminence alongside the United States, as two global nuclear powers. For him, a strengthened Europe is an impediment to that goal. In that regard, we are indeed in more unstable and more dangerous times. One can have an entire conversation about what went wrong. From the time at which I was lecturing in Trinity College Dublin, TCD, when we were talking about partnership with Russia, Russia coming into the European family, Gorbachev talking about a European home, we can have a conversation about what went wrong with respect to that and where the blame rests, but we are now at a point where the prospect of some new kind of curtain falling across Europe is certainly on the Russian agenda.