SECURITY & DEFENCE
Cold War lessons for security policy today
Summer 2008
Nuclear armageddon was such a potent threat that it yielded disarmament deals and the OSCE’s collective approach to European security. But Alyson Bailes warns that not just pillars but “whole bastions” of European security architecture have now crumbled away
Commentary:
RELATED ARTICLES:
During the Cold War, the threats to the security of the Euro-Atlantic community were clear. They were military and ideological, concrete and close at hand. Had these dangers been less obvious, NATO would most probably not have developed its unique system of binding and permanent defence guarantees.
The very real risk of armed confrontation also drew both camps of the Cold War into a broader structure of collective security in Europe. NATO and the Warsaw Pact reached disarmament deals and agreed the CSCE/OSCE regime of transparency and cooperation – the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and follow-up Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe – which was remarkably well observed in spite of the two sides’ extreme political differences. In those desperate times, collective defence and collective security were not so much competitors as natural complements to each other.
This somewhat surprising conclusion explains in large part why yesterday’s Cold War certainties have today been replaced in Europe by confusion, unease and cracks of disunity. The celebrations over the fall of the Berlin Wall had barely ended before people began to question how long NATO could survive without its long-time opponent, for the Warsaw Pact had challenged NATO and sustained it. Pessimists at that time prophesied trouble might still come from the east, but said it would no longer be military in nature. They therefore expected US attention to turn towards new threats from less advanced regions, or from non-state and non-human sources. Why then, these doom-merchants asked, should the world’s sole superpower continue to offer a collective defence guarantee to its old allies in Europe, let alone bring new partners into the fold?
In the immediate post-Cold War days, some analysts also guessed that the European Union would inherit some of NATO’s security duties in Europe, albeit the “softer” ones. But already they were unsure whether the EU would be up to the job, given its imperfectly integrated structure. In the early 1990s, the first phases of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia had already shown-up the weaknesses in joint diplomacy in the EU. Analysts questioned whether further expansion would harm the EU’s supranational “deepening”, and whether NATO’s enlargement might undermine its common purpose. They feared enlargement would block cooperation with Moscow, tipping the balance of opinion within Russia against Western influence, and thus towards new forms of authoritarianism.
Recent history suggests, at first glance, that these early post-Cold War worries were exaggerated. EU and NATO enlargements happened, yet the alliance’s Article 5, guaranteeing collective defence, survived. The EU adopted the Nice and Lisbon reform treaties and created its own military arm, along with several other innovations. Both NATO and the EU also established programmes for working with Russia as (officially) an equal partner. And east-west military conflict looks even less likely today than it did in the mid-1990s, when Moscow at one point boycotted NATO after the first round of enlargement decisions were taken.
But a closer inspection of events reveals a different picture. The fact is that NATO and the EU have arrived where they are today by a strenuous and unremitting process of change. When we look at what they have jettisoned along the way, we see the sceptics’ warning signals starting to flash again. NATO’s Article 5 may survive on paper, but it applies to an alliance with no collective military presence to speak of, both in the 10 new NATO members’ territories and in the eastern Länder of Germany. The last remnants of a US troop presence for collective defence are evaporating, and the planned new US bases in central Europe are to be built under purely bi-lateral agreements. Recent Russian incursions, or non-military styles of aggression against various Baltic states, have been described by NATO’s secretary-general as “bi-lateral matters”. Meanwhile, the alliance has watched, having tied its own hands, while Russia rescinded the most basic east-west military restraint agreement of the 1990s – the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty.
Could it be that both collective defence and collective security have withered away while the world was distracted by the façade of “globalisation”? If so, what went wrong and what may happen next?
It is tempting to link the turning point in east-west relations to the enlargement of NATO and the EU itself. After all, the timetable looks right. Russia’s former president Vladimir Putin rose to power only after NATO had decided to take in three central European states in 1997. After 1997, the EU never again created a treaty that was as clearly integrationist as the one signed in Amsterdam. And the downward trend for the OSCE and for European conventional disarmament became most evident after 2001-2002, when NATO and the EU decided on parallel “Big Bang” enlargements.
The connection between NATO as well as EU enlargement with the shift in east-west relations in fact exists, but at a higher geo-strategic level. One argument in favour of enlargement was to eliminate the potential “grey zone” of weakness and uncertainty between the borders of western institutions and the nearest Great Power. In earlier ages, this kind of no-man’s-land in central and eastern Europe had led to repeated conflicts, with in-between countries suffering most of all. Since 2004 the grey zone has disappeared, occupied by the West in a way that gave Russia neither a droit de regard nor an accepted “sphere of influence”. The momentous result is that Russia faces NATO and the EU across a common border in the north. So does Ukraine to the south, making the country a target for the strongest stream of western influence ever seen – and the most direct channel for such influence – into the very heart of the former Soviet region.
These developments account for one of the saddest features of current European institutional politics − the erosion of the roles of the OSCE and of the Council of Europe. Outnumbered by NATO and EU members, Moscow finds that neither institution provides Russia with a cushion against Western intrusion. Nor do they offer an effective arena for political bargaining with the twin giants of Brussels. In the circumstances Russia has concluded its energies might as well be spent tackling NATO and the EU head-on, and that it should not hesitate if bullying or bluff in that game can win it a better deal.
The arrival of the West on Russia’s doorstep also explains Moscow’s current priorities. Russia wants to block further encroachment into its own strategic neighbourhood and to strengthen its border as the only remaining cordon sanitaire against western interference in domestic governance. The recent crisis over the CFE treaty should be seen in this light. It was Putin’s way of challenging Europeans to decide if they were serious about wanting to salvage the rules of collective security, which were agreed under a more balanced strategic situation. If not, Putin was in effect saying, Russia too can play the game without rules.
Oddly enough, given how high the stakes are, no-one seems to be turning this drama into a crisis. Pillars of NATO’s 20th century policy have crumbled along with whole bastions of the European security architecture, but one barely hears the recriminations among western allies that could have been expected. This rather ominous calm could, of course, be due to NATO being in a state of pathological denial. Or it could be put down to one of three more likely explanations.
The first possible reason for the relative calm is that hopes and plans are quietly building for some return to west-east military détente when the next US president takes office. This notion needs little further discussion as only time will tell if it is correct. The other two theories are more far-reaching and suggest that both the conceptual and geographical goal posts have been moved. These theories assume (a) that a direct military conflict with Russia is out of the question, and (b) that we do not need Russia as a military ally against anyone else − China, for example. If either assumption is false, the West really is in trouble. If both are true, security relations with Russia that are tense and increasingly unregulated may be tolerable so long as the West can command the field in other games that today matter more.
The first alternative explanation along these lines is that the western democracies have found a new “threat agenda” to unite them. Military restraint or balance in any particular location is not especially critical, because this new agenda hinges on success in ad hoc crisis management tasks, like those that began in the western Balkans and continue in distant places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo or Aceh. Russian military involvement only matters if it has troops to contribute to western operations – which it currently does not – or if Moscow intervenes on the opposing side, which is so far unthinkable.
Success in these tasks would arguably allow western democracies to help build the equivalent of collective security in other needier continents. But some people still worry that the new trade-off sells Europe’s own territory short, sending the cream of European forces abroad while leaving eastern Europe without a collective defence apparatus and only minimal cover in depth. Nor does it make much sense for the West to plan new military installations in eastern Europe that provoke Moscow but which are specifically not designed to protect the local population.
Still, all these considerations may matter far less to western survival today than the fight against non-military threats from terrorism, crime, non-state proliferation of dangerous technologies, epidemic diseases, violent weather, climate change and so on. If these are now the main danger, then the NATO ideal of “collectivity” has not so much died out as been partially replaced by such relevant EU commitments as the Solidarity Declaration of March 2004, and partly by common Atlantic platforms in the G-8, the UN, NATO and various US-EU frameworks. Under these circumstances, the modern equivalent of Cold War collective security is the West’s ability to cooperate when necessary not only with Russia but also with China, India and at least some Islamic states to fight these common global foes.
“Victory” against such non-military threats will be far from easy. That said this 21st century cause is still largely to play for, and is certainly far from hopeless. It is arguable that Russia neither needs to be properly democratic nor to have an open border to be our partner in the fight against non-military opponents. Nevertheless, Cold War experiences raise other doubts. For instance, is Russia’s understanding of the terrorist challenge sufficiently close to ours to undertake joint action? And can threats that must be combated at home as well as abroad be fought effectively by political systems whose values are drifting apart?
The final theory on offer to explain the post-Cold War shift in west-east relations can be headed: “It’s the economy, stupid”. We are living under the shadow of a global economic down-turn, highlighting the possibility that economic, financial, technological, energy and ecological forces are far more important for the future than outdated military balances. Over-spending on the wrong military objectives would plainly be an own-goal in this context. Russia, in particular, needs to avoid this pitfall or it will add to the economic problems created by its over-dependence on natural products and a mercantilist handling of external relations. Under the “economy” theory of security, the West’s main question is no longer how to live with Russia without war, but how long Europe can do business with Russia without a more genuine form of integration – and integration on whose terms?
Again, success will be far removed from defence commitments and the arms control treaties of the Cold War days, even though the latter also have their own economic logic. Yet it is as well to remember that the Cold War can teach us useful lessons. The nuclear stand-off focused minds in east and west alike, so enemies as well as friends took each other more seriously in the face of utter peril. The threats lurking out there for Europe and Russia are still sufficiently real to revive the mutual seriousness that served us well in the Cold War. This holds true whether we define the worst case scenario as a US implosion, Chinese domination of the world or a failure to reconcile economic growth and climate change.