Introduction
Europe’s security has been closely tied to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) since the ratification of the latter by its member states in 1949, preceding the establishment of the European Union (EU). All the European founding members of NATO, with the exception of Norway and Iceland, are now member states of EU. Following that, subsequent enlargements saw the inclusion of many European states that are now members of both organisations. This underlines the inherent link between EU’s security and NATO. This is not to say, however, that EU had intended to rely only on NATO for its security. As Bretherton and Vogler pointed out, “in many ways the EU, from its original conception in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), was always in the business of providing security.” By forming a community with the aggressor of the past Germany, and pooling together vital resources, the other members of ECSC effectively removed the possible threat of a resurgent Germany and ensured security by preventing conflicts.
Fifty-five years down the road, ECSC in its present form of the EU, has now a clear, institutionalised system in charge of security. Following the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the EU is separated into three pillars. “The first pillar comprised the European Community (EC), including Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); the second comprised the Common Security and Foreign Policy (CFSP), a direct response to the external challenges of the post-Cold War world; the third covered cooperation on justice and home affairs, notably immigration, asylum, and criminal matters”. The security component of CFSP is subsequently realised in the form of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). This paper will attempt to cover the development of the ESDP, from the events leading up to its conception to its present form. In doing so, the paper will also attempt to argue that the ESDP is already a credible force in its own right and has the potential be increase its credibility. In doing so the paper will highlight security issues that surround EU and hence present ESDP as a policy that is at least capable of resolving some, if not most of them, by attempting to work out the definition of credibility. It will then highlight that the forces at play that influence the development of the ESDP, including NATO, and the direction it should take to achieve that potential. Hence, the paper will argue that a credible ESDP is already there, a work in the making, and not just a pipe dream, even as Europe’s security is at the present, to a certain extent still underpinned by NATO.
The ESDP
There are different viewpoints as to the actual beginning of the ESDP. Howorth and Keeler, for example, believe that “today’s ESDP may be viewed as a project in gestation for some fifty years,” bringing the ESDP back to as early as the 1940s. Beginning with the call for the Western Union by then British and French foreign ministers Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault in 1947, to the creation of the European Defence Community in the 1950s, the Fouchet Plan of the 1960s, to the European Political Cooperation in the 1970s and the Western European Union in the 1980, Europe in its various forms has made several attempts at creating some forms of a defence and security capability. The real breakthrough however came during the St. Malo Declaration between United Kingdom (UK) and France. Following the Balkan crises, which demonstrated a “series of handicaps” on the part of the EU, the St. Malo Declaration called for “EU itself to acquire the capacity for autonomous action backed by credible military forces.”
The St. Malo Declaration did not become plain talk as the EU began taking steps in the building of a concrete approach towards European capabilities, resulting in the formation of the ESDP. As part of ESDP, the EU now has as part of its institutional framework, a High Representative for CFSP, a Political and Security Committee (PSC), a European Military Committee (EUMC) and a European Military Staff (EUMS). At the Helsinki European Council meeting of 1999, a call was for made for what was later known as the Helsinki Headline Goals (HHG). It called for,
“EU Member States to be able to deploy up to 50,000 - 60,000 personnel (corps level) within 60 days that are sustainable for a year in support of the Petersberg Tasks. The Petersberg Tasks include humanitarian and rescue tasks; peacekeeping tasks; and tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking (referred to as ‘peace enforcement’ in some contexts). The forces pledged ‘should be militarily self-sustaining with the necessary command, control and intelligence capabilities, logistics, other combat support services and additionally, as appropriate, air and naval elements.’”
The HHG was originally scheduled to be fulfilled in 2003 but it did not materialise. As a result, the Brussels European Council in 2004 came up with a new Headline Goal 2010, this time calling for,
“EU Member States to ‘be able by 2010 to respond with rapid and decisive action applying a fully coherent approach to the whole spectrum of crisis management operations covered by the Treaty of the European Union.’”
The Laeken European Council in 2001 declared ESDP operational, despite the latter’s inability to meet the HHG of 1999. As a result, the declaration of “operationality” has largely been regarded as “controversial” and “were criticised by serious strategic analysts.” This premature declaration contributed to the notion of the ESDP not being a credible force. The ESDP was not given a chance to even out its shortfalls. By declaring it operational, the EU invited reviews and attacks on a policy that was still in its infancy.
A credible ESDP with potential
The question of the credibility of the ESDP depends on the definition of credibility. The “civilian power” approach which EU pioneer has, among others, led to Robert Kagan’s analysis as EU weakness and has gathered mixed responses. EU’s foreign policy and military involvement has largely been Petersberg Tasks such as humanitarian and rescue operations and peacekeeping. The examples of Bosnia and Kosovo was raised by Kagan, in which he said,
“Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation.”
Supporters of Kagan’s viewpoint and opponents of EU would thus agree that the EU and the ESDP is not a credible force. Christopher Hill added on to that citing the war on Afghanistan,
“The Europeans could never have mounted an operation themselves had they been original victims of Al Qaeda. The only significant military contributions some of them could make was through special forces,” and that “the Europeans could not, either collectively or in sub-groups, handle the ‘high-end Petersberg Task’ represented by Afghanistan.”
On the other hand, EU has been able to perform the task allocated to them, involving in “several military or quasi-military operations, not only in ‘New Europe’ but also in Africa,” taking over peacekeeping operations in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It also launched an autonomous mission, without American support in the Republic of Congo. The reality that EU is able to carry out such operations belies their credibility. “Although on occasions the kind of work the EU does has been sneered at as reduced to ‘clearing up’ or ‘foreign policy as social work’, it is an indispensable part of modern international relations, and requires the commitment of resources, political capital and long term thinking.” In contrast, despite the United States’ (US) capability to carry out high intensity operations such as that of Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and more recently Iraq, it lacks the ESDP’s ability to carry out peacekeeping missions,
“The average US soldier, trained for high intensity warfare, operates at levels 8 to 10 on an intensity scale of 1 to 10. If forced to, he can ‘operate down’ to level 6 but is uncomfortable with that, owing to the lack of training in the art of peacekeeping and nation-building.”
As mentioned above, peacekeeping operations is an indispensable area of modern international relations. Using the same examples, US need the EU to complement it in their military operations. If the EU do not intervene in ‘low-end Petersberg Task’ and with the US unable to carry out such missions, the war in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan would have been self-defeating, leaving the people no better than before American intervention. In this perspective, Kagan’s concept of American power and European weakness would be reversed and the ESDP is already a credible force with a style that complements the Americans.
The question of credibility also needs to take into account as well the security issues present. It is not in absolute terms but in relative terms. The end of the Cold War meant a great change in terms of the immediate threat posed to the EU. With the Soviet Union no longer existing, EU’s top security concerns changed from that to the newly-independence states in Eastern Europe. However, through its enlargement process, that threat has largely disappeared as well, with 17 of the former Soviet satellite states now members of EU. Following September 11, the focus was shifted to the Middle East. However, “its intervention in the Middle East are likely to retain an exclusively civilian character, not least because of the dominant position of the United States in the region.” In this case, EU’s position as a civilian power is no longer one due to its lack of credibility in its ESDP, but rather because of its ally’s unilateral actions. The ESDP is strong enough to handle the security that it faces.
The preceding examples have argued that the ESDP is already a credible force in its own right. It is then important to realise that it has the potential to go further that the EU is a union of 27 countries. Before the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, EU already includes over “450 million people producing a quarter of the world’s gross national product.” In military terms, as of 2004, this translates into 1.8 million people under arms and an aggregate defence budget of China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea combined. In 2003, EU-25’s military expenditure was USD208 billion, bettered only by the US and NATO, the latter including many of EU members. This has yet to make an impact because it represents the expenditure mostly of individual countries. However, it also represents the amount that can be directed towards a possible EU defence budget. Although it pales in comparison to US’s USD450 billion, it does not take away the truth that EU’s expenditure is still more than all of the other major world powers’ combined. In addition, EU’s credibility is not based on its relative strength to the US and hence the disparity does not equate to a weak Europe. Instead, it represents a huge potential ready to be explored.
Towards development
With so much potential, it is worthwhile to examine the factors that could propel ESDP towards further development. There are many possible factors present, both endogenous and exogenous. It is not possible to discuss all of them but it would suffice to raise the more prominent ones so as to present the case for further military integration. First and foremost, “a state of military dependence on others should not be compatible with the dignity of nations like those in Western Europe , which should seek to be come more militarily self sufficient in their homeland defence and security.” A union the size of EU, which is already an undeniable power in terms of trade, should have a military strength that is comparable to its economic strength. This coincides with the St. Malo Declaration calling for EU to “be in a position to play its full role on the international stage.” The EU is the largest trading bloc and the largest developmental aid donor in the world, comparable only by the US, what was missing was only military capabilities.
The US presents itself, next, as a factor calling for a more credible ESDP in two folds. The first is the realisation for the EU that it needs to have autonomous capability in areas where EU and US interests diverge. Following the Balkan incidents, the US has been calling for greater EU involvement in its alliance within NATO. The dismal showing of EU in the Balkans had the Americans questioning “why it was that a EU with a GDP equal to or superior to that of the United States and with a considerably larger population could not do more organise and above all fund its own ability.” Similarly, the European Security and Defence Initiative (ESDI), established prior to the ESDP as part of the NATO to facilitate the EU to “assume greater share of the burden for security missions”, was to allow “EU forces to be separated out from the NATO force pool in order to undertake a mission with which the United States or ‘the Alliance as a whole’ did not wish to get involved.” Again the US demonstrated its desire for the EU to be able to handle things on their own without having to involve US resources, as Washington stated that “ unless the Europeans ‘got serious’ about rendering their armed forces usable, the message from DC read, the Atlantic Alliance was over.”
The other compelling issue with regards to the US is the latter’s increasing unilateralist approach to international affairs. Following the end of the Cold War, the US emerged as “the only superpower in the world” and “its behaviour towards some international regime raised doubts about how effective a state of this size could, or wished to, operate within a world of international organisations.” Using the Afghan War as an example, September 11 demonstrated the US’s ability to carry out operations on its own. Despite the member states of NATO invoking Article V, the US invaded Afghanistan with the NATO basically sidelined. Though “Washington eventually associated with its military efforts small numbers of cherry-picked European forces,” “the Afghan War was anything but a NATO operation.” This is not in concert with the EU’s method of modus operandi of multilateralism. After the war, EU and US also differed again over priorities in the region, with the Europeans prioritising,
“The political over the military; humanitarian relief over further escalation of the war on terrorism; the quest for a balanced Middle East settlement over the blanket support for Israel; and a long-term commitment to stabilisation in Afghanistan over the hunt for Bin Laden.”
Such stark differences meant that if EU wants to carry out their priorities, they would have to do it without American support, thereby underlining the necessity of having their own capabilities. The much needed capabilities would serve EU as well, in the promotion of their form of world order with the “UN are the core of the EU’s concerted efforts to re-launch multilateralism as a general and widely accepted method to conduct international relations.”
Challenges
If there are arguments for the development of the ESDP, there are more arguments against its progression. Despite the possibility to develop itself further, many obstacles and details still needs to be worked out before the EU and the ESDP can realise its latent strength. This section shall go on to highlight some of the most prominent ones as it is not possible to cover all of them in a paper of this length.
One of the problems has its roots in the beginning of the ESDP at St. Malo. From the outset, there is a “critical ambiguity”, which poses problems for the development of the ESDP. While
UK interpreted ESDP as “complementary to NATO”, France “regarded it as a first step towards counterbalancing US power and providing some real autonomy for Europe.” This difference in opinions extends to the other members of the EU. The member states of the EU are also divided into 2 camps, one pro US, and the other anti US in the directions of ESDP development. On the one hand, UK as it often did, leaned towards the Americans and supported the latter’s argument that “there was no need for the EU to duplicate planning facilities at SHAPE, as these could be used for EU as well as NATO operations.” On the other hand, France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg met up and launched the Tervuren initiative aimed at giving EU a new planning capability. Examples of such a split between EU’s leading nations, especially UK and France, who “had always presented themselves as the hard-power players” , could prove crippling for the development of the ESDP. This is truer when the area of defence and security in the EU is still very much an intergovernmental affair.
The second obstacle that hinders ESDP development is very much linked to the preceding argument of the split between EU member states. The intergovernmental nature of ESDP results in the existence of structural problems in making ESDP a credible force. First of the structural problem, as Bretherton and Vogler correctly pointed out, is that,
“The exclusively intergovernmental character of the ESDP required that it should be run from the Council Secretariat located in the Justus Lipsius Building in Brussels and its new secure military annex in the Avenue of Cortenbergh. At the same time an institutional means had to be found to enable the Council to take the kind of rapid decision that might be expected in a crisis involving the deployment of forces. Such expedition had not been a notable characteristic of the EU’s decision-making, especially operating beyond Community competence and in the expectation of a Union of 25 or more member states. In addition, the intergovernmental mode meant that dedicated Community funding was unavailable and that cross-pillar obstacles would have to be overcome, if the multifunctional aspirations of the ESDP were to be realised.”
Its intergovernmental character requires that the member states need to come to consensus when deciding on the course of actions required in particular cases. Since most international crises requires rapid decisions to be made, the Council do not have the luxury of slowly debating and coming up a decision that renders all member states happy. Secondly, with each enlargement, to the present of 27, there is increasing difficulty in coming up with a stand that represents every member since each member state has its own agenda and political leanings.
From another aspect, “at the level of the Union, the Commission already has a key role in the delivery of securities, and a role in the CFSP, but no decision-making function in the ESDP.” What this presented to the EU is potential of conflict between the Commission between and the Council. This will be further aggravated when the Commission and the Council have different aims and ambitions. As Anne Deighton correctly pointed out, “the Commission’s aims are to ensure a single and coherent EU position” and “a more cohesive institutional structure that reflects acquired European solidarities.” This poses a problem as the Council is seldom, if ever coherent in their position. As previously mentioned, the Council includes 27 member states, each with their individual agenda and leaning. To add to that, a cohesive institutional structure spells supranationalism with the Commissioner holding the power. For the newer member states that had only just regained their independence following the end of the Cold War, ceding foreign policy decision making rights will be difficult.
Other than the internal structural problems, the ESDP also faces external challenges. For one the US, which had earlier been calling for the EU to take up more responsibility in burden sharing now realised that EU, at least part of it, is calling for a “separate and not just separable” force. In response it is calling for EU to have “no discrimination between allies, no decoupling from the alliance and no duplication of military effort.”
“Essentially, the US regarded the ESDP as being within the alliance, providing NATO, and hence the United States, with the option of first refusal of any proposed operation, and indeed of defining what would be an autonomous European action through engagement in joint advance planning.”
The US wanted to remain influential in Europe without committing themselves to the security of the region. By keeping ESDP as complementary to NATO and keeping the option of first refusal, it can choose to intervene only when the issue is advantageous to the US. This was naturally not acceptable to the Europeans. The result was a Berlin-plus agreement, a middle ground between the two camps, which allowed ESDP to use NATO’s assets in the former’s autonomous operations. The agreement was vital as ESDP had yet to set up full-fledged capabilities in many areas.
The way ahead
As mentioned previously, the ESDP is already a credible force in its own right. Even so, there remain however, areas of improvement, which could render it a stronger force in international politics. This section will discuss some of the ways forward for the EU and the ESDP, giving some suggestions in going forward.
The first point mentioned was that EU’s strength lies in its economic prowess. This economic prowess is tied to the available and effective tools to its disposal in international relations. “The carrot without the stick” is the term used to describe EU’s foreign policy. In areas where economic sanctions and development aid do not work, military threat should be available as a diplomatic tool. EU, however, lack this tool. Yet, given EU’s economic strength, this tool is not unattainable. From the outset, it was highlight that the combined defence budget of the EU is one of the largest in the world, in front of countries such as Russia, China, India, and Japan. Besides, EU member states within the NATO structure also contributes to significant amounts to the NATO budget. Hence in the case of EU, funds are available but the crux of the issue is the use of the funds.
To make ESDP a credible force, EU should also coordinate, other than monetary resources, technological and logistical resources. “Much of it continues to be tied down in static territorial defences left over from the Cold War period or in the inefficient duplication of assets on a national basis.” By working separately, the EU member states do not get enjoy economies of scale and “potential synergies” that can arise from joint production. This is especially true for the smaller states with lower levels of technology. Efforts spent in the research and development could be assisted by information sharing from the more advanced states like UK and France.
The same synergy can be achieved in the area of decision-making. Mixed messages from within the Council and between the Council and the Commission make actual progression difficult. The decision-making progress has a higher chance of going forward in the hands of the Commission with one voice, rather than the Council with 27 and more coming in the future. As mentioned above, the Commission already has a key role in the CFSP; it is a paradox that it has no say in the ESDP, which is an element of the CFSP. Since viewpoints between states often diverge, resulting in inertia, the Commission can act as mediator. It was however, discussed that it will be difficult for the countries, especially the new member states to agree to cede their power to the EU body. Yet they must understand that cooperation in the field of defence have long-term benefits. First, having a joint defence can mean having a military force larger than what each state can individually afford. Secondly, information-sharing in the area of defence can bring the newer states up to date with technology that they do not possess and now need not attempt to research for. Thirdly, a force representing 27 voices makes more sound in the international scene than a voice representing one. The ESDP could have an amplifying effect on their individual interest.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this paper argues that a credible ESDP is already present, as highlighted by the various operations that it has undertaken and is capable of undertaking. While many people, such as Robert Kagan, see European capabilities as weak compared to the United States, we must understand that EU’s strengths are different from that of the United States and should not be compared totally in the same light. In addition, except the United States, the EU expenditure and budget on military is larger than all the other prominent countries in the world and that speaks for itself.
The most pressing problem is resolving issues with regards to the use of EU funds, having the appropriate directions that the EU should take and the correct authorities to make that decision. The ESDP can continue to progress into a force that is more approximate with the US, in terms of hard power capabilities. To that end, the argument that as long as Europe’s security is underpinned by NATO, is disputed. The presence of NATO ensures that the ESDP can continue to work out the details of its operations while reverting to NATO protection in situations that are at the present still outside the capabilities of ESDP. Therefore the argument that a credible ESDP is a pipe dream as long as EU’s security is underpinned by NATO is proved to the contrary. A credible ESDP is made even more possible by having NATO around.
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