On September 16, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the boycott of Expo Dubai 2020. It also called for European companies dealing with the Expo to follow suite. This is the second major blow to afflict Expo Dubai 2020 after the original dates were changed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This ruling and the fallout it has generated also puts the spotlight back on the EU’s increasingly schizophrenic foreign policy behavior: the time has come for European nations to make a stand.
Expo Dubai 2020 continues the tradition of previous World’s Fairs, which are designed to showcase the achievements of nations as well as promote the achievements of the host country. The European Parliament’s reasoning for the boycott is the alleged human rights violations by the government of the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is a part). The Parliament’s report identifies specific human rights activists who have been arrested by authorities of the Gulf state. The European Parliament also makes mention of the UAE’s ongoing involvement in the Yemeni Civil War in which it has been accused of war crimes.
The timing of the resolution was also pertinent. The boycott was passed while the Crown Prince of the UAE was on an official state visit to the UK. One wonders how the vote tallies would have changed had Great Britain still been an EU member, or if such a vote would have occurred in the first place. Maybe the Europeans took this vote, one week before the opening ceremony of the Expo, to embarrass their renegade former member? Either way, the British decided to go it alone by putting money over any moral scruples and in the process extracted a $14 billion pledge in investments from the Emirati Crown Prince – a major coup for post-Brexit, post-Covid UK.
For the idealistic Europeans, the path is not as clear. The vote tallies at the Brussels-based Parliament don’t make for easy reading. Yes, a majority 383 voted in favor of the boycott and while 47 voted against, there was a whopping 259 abstentions. If one adds the votes against the abstentions, the vote comes to down to a much narrower 383-306 vote in favor. Clearly, this issue has torn European policy-makers in two, with each country (and in many cases each political party in each country) making its own decision on this matter.
On one side of the debate are the Austrians, who, like the British, decided to go ahead and strengthen ties with the Emirates regardless of human rights sermonizing. The same is broadly true for the countries of “New Europe” such as Serbia, Greece and Israel, looking for an Arab/Islamic partner wherever they can find them to act as a counterweight to their more proximate Islamic neighbors. For the Italians, the issue was not as straightforward, with different parties taking different stands thus muddying the waters. Indeed, the Italian example closely resembles the greater European Parliament’s example.
Of course, the actual text of the resolution does not demand a boycott, but rather the European Parliament: “In order to signal their disapproval of the human rights violations in the UAE, invites the international companies sponsoring Expo 2020 Dubai to withdraw their sponsorship and encourages member states not to participate in the event…”
This means that an actual boycott by any European country this close to the opening event is unlikely. European nations as diverse as Hungry and Lithuania to Portugal and even the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg have pledged to participate, with most nations recruiting celebrity architects and architectural firms to design their pavilions. Likewise, there are many European architects and architectural firms who have also agreed to design pavilions for other nations. To top it all off, Dubai was chosen as the host of the 2020 Expo way back in November of 2013 with the announcement made by the Bureau International des Expositions whose general assembly meets in that most European of cities – Paris.
The schizophrenic nature of European foreign policy continues with little indication of any cure for its ills in the short short-term. European states and European decision-makers have to resolve once in for all: will it be money or will it be morals?