I have recently been conducting research and holding meetings with senior officials in Brussels and Berlin. I arrived shortly after the summit between Lee Jae Myung and European Union leaders, which began a swing through Europe for the Korean president. Lee had a packed agenda: an EU-Korea summit, bilateral summits with the Belgian and Italian prime ministers, an audience with Pope Leo XIV and attendance at the G7 leaders’ meeting in France.
As former EU ambassador to Korea Michael Reiterer put it, “a Korean president spending 10 consecutive days in Europe sticks out.” Indeed, after 18 months of relative torpor in Europe-Korea relations, Lee’s visit marked a step forward. Above all, it was a moment for strategic partners to take stock of a mature relationship that suffered deprioritization due to recent distractions — notably Europe’s focus on Russia and Seoul’s reestablishing of political normalcy following Former President Yoon Suk Yeol martial law folly.
My time in Brussels and Berlin thus came at the right moment, and provided a timely opportunity to hold discussions with policymakers, officials, diplomats and experts. I walk away from these meetings with the following tentative conclusions.
First, the good. The EU-Korea strategic partnership is strong, as are relations with major EU member states. As evidence, the EU-Korea summit joint statement not only recalls all the typical language on shared interests and values, but also outlines tangible deliverables: a Competitiveness Partnership for economic resilience, a High-Level Economic Dialogue on economic security and trade and industrial policy, the signing of an EU-South Korea Digital Trade Agreement, implementation of the EU-South Korea Security and Defense Partnership (covering cooperation on everything from cyber to maritime to space security) and the launch of negotiations for a Security of Information Agreement to facilitate the exchange of classified information.
A second positive is that Europe recognizes Seoul’s role as an important arms provider in the context of the Russia-Ukraine War. Korea had hoped to be a part of the EU’s SAFE instrument (Security Action for Europe) providing 150 billion euros — mostly EU-backed loans — for arms procurement by EU member states. That did not happen for the first tranche of disbursements, and for the moment Canada is the only non-European country accepted into the SAFE program. But there may well be a SAFE 2.0, and Korea’s record on timely, quality arms delivery has impressed European states, making it a candidate for future SAFE inclusion, provided it meets the technical terms on co-production within Europe.
Finally among the positives, Europe — both the EU and member states — sees real opportunity for “minilateral” cooperation with middle powers such as Korea. It is by now a truism that the U.S. is an unreliable partner and China flatly predatory. Moreover, the rules-based international order backed by multilateral organizations is utterly tattered. Navigating all this is tricky, and middle powers are seeking to create parallel cooperative security, economic and diplomatic structures to mitigate the risks of international disorder and serve as a bridge to a new equilibrium. Europe is open to building such cooperative networks with Korea, if Seoul is willing to collaborate.
There are, however, areas in which Korea needs to reflect on what it can do to improve its chances of meaningfully getting added value from cooperation with Europe.
First, to return to weapons, Korea wants to move up the list of arms suppliers, but in the European context its lackluster position on Russia’s war against Ukraine hurts its chances. So does Korea’s protectionism of its own arms market. Seoul wants to sell more weapons to Europe, but many interlocutors in Brussels and Berlin stressed that the trade flows should also go in the other direction. Realistically, this will be hard to change quickly, but at the least, Seoul should explore ways to ease cooperation with Europe on arms-market supply chain resilience and other complementary areas.
Second, it is an unfortunate fact that Europe is very focused on the threat from Russia and ongoing attempts to salvage what it can from the multilateral system (especially NATO). This does not leave much time for focusing on other issues, and Korea does not work enough at capturing mindshare. Bluntly put, Korea needs deeper, broader, more sustained official and public diplomacy to get more attention from Europe.
Lastly, there is a major change likely to hit European foreign policy — possibly as soon as 2027. Namely, Europe is likely to have much greater power and influence held by the far right — for instance, a French Rassemblement National candidate may win the French presidency next year, and the far right AFD is now the most popular party in Germany. Europe’s far right has some very different positions on trade relations, the Taiwan Strait and Russia. Korea’s ministries and think tanks need to do some forward-looking analysis on what a rightward shift would mean for economic and security cooperation between Seoul and the European capitals. The urgent often displaces the important, but Korea should do both.
Source: Korea Times News
