POLICY DOSSIER

Summer 2007

by Penny Douti

The EU and NATO both need to change tack if they are to complement rather than compete with each other, says Penny Douti

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Earlier this year, The Economist wrote of a “division of labour” in security terms in which international bodies will move into a conflict zone and parcel out the problem according to their expertise. “The United Nations”, said the article, would supply legitimacy; NATO would break the furniture; and the European Union would organise a trip to the nearest IKEA” by providing development and political support.

If there is any truth in this bleak but eloquent description, then the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is in big trouble. Calling the EU’s security efforts into question isn’t news, of course, but it is striking that ESDP should nowadays be criticised quite so ardently by both its adversaries and its proponents. The latter believe it should do more, while the former are concerned that it has exceeded its limits and is undermining NATO and the transatlantic partnership.

But the “to be or not to be” dilemma over ESDP is out of date. ESDP exists and is part of the real world; it no longer needs to prove its existence or point to its achievements, and it is a mechanism without a reverse gear. Nor, though, is there any room for complacency, as a rose-tinted self-assessment wouldn’t help us to rectify any flaws or weaknesses.

There is indeed some truth in the view that ESDP is not fulfilling its primary objectives, and therefore needs to change tack. The question is, in which direction?

To find the answer, we have to go back to its origins to trace the primary motives and aims of ESDP. It is really no secret that the original compromise at St Malo in December 1998 on which the whole edifice of ESDP has been based was twofold: the pro-Europeans, represented by France, aimed at endowing the EU with the ability to take its security in its own hands by reinforcing its defence capabilities and also its political cohesion. The Atlanticists, represented by the UK, were in pursuit of fairer burden-sharing, especially on arms procurement and EU governments’ defence spending. They also wanted to see an increase in European military participation in peacekeeping operations. Keeping these two different approaches in balance has ever since involved walking the tightrope of EU-NATO relations.

Revisiting ESDP seven years after its birth, risks leaving us with the sense that these goals have not been fully achieved, and are unlikely to be achieved in the near future. Here’s why. From an EU perspective, the whole concept of putting forward a common security and defence policy rests upon the idea that transatlantic security interests and threats are not identical to those of the European Union. This assumption does not call into question the commonality of security concerns shared by the transatlantic partners, but simply stresses the different security needs and priorities, and emphasises that for precisely that reason the EU cannot rely a hundred per cent on NATO to deal with its security concerns, and of course the memberships of NATO and the EU are not identical.

Perceptions of the “doctrine of intervention” differ across the Atlantic, as the Iraq case has shown. The American approach to interventionism poses legitimacy questions in Europe. Even if the European Security Strategy (ESS) reflects the US perception to a certain extent, civil society in Europe seems reluctant to subscribe to it fully. The fundamental question about ESDP, meanwhile, is whether, seeing how it has developed so far and is designed to function in the future, it will be capable of fulfilling the primary goals set by the EU’s key players? ESDP proponents focus their concerns on the following issues:

 The ESDP mechanism was not originally designed to carry out defence tasks. The hopes were that the EU’s constitutional treaty would sow the seeds of common defence (as enshrined in the Maastricht treaty), but these have apparently been fading.
 The EU is turning into a world policeman, intervening in crises in Congo, Sudan, Indonesia and perhaps eventually in Afghanistan, while its role in its more immediate neighbourhood of the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus is rather secondary, with the exception of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
 In the context of the informal “division of labour” or “delineation of tasks”, the EU seems to be the one that pays the bill to refurbish the broken house. ESDP does not have the capability to deal with major conflicts which threaten the security of the EU and require heavy military action in the upper scale of the Petersberg peacemaking tasks. Even the 2010 Headline Goal can hardly provide such a military capacity.
 The effectiveness of the EU in civilian crisis management is dubious, due mainly to a lack of inter-institutional coordination and the dispersal of resources. The four branches of ESDP civilian crisis management (police, rule of law, civil administration and civil protection) are rather self-limiting. New methods are needed to deal with the in-conflict and post-conflict civilian aspects of crises, which give rise to nation-building challenges such as refugee flow management, evacuation or institutional reconstruction. A more comprehensive approach is needed to allow the EU to make full use of the array of political, diplomatic, economic, administrative, social and other means at its disposal.
 There is a negative psychological effect stemming from the EU’s dependency on NATO. Europeans have come to rely on the military machinery of the US and the alliance.

From an Atlantic perspective, the ESDP has failed to stimulate an increase in national defence budgets, yet political frictions have been injected into the transatlantic security partnership. These difficulties have added fuel to the antagonisms of the Iraq conflict, with the US-led “alliance of the willing” creating widespread suspicions among public opinion in Europe. Many Europeans have become sceptical about interventionism, and this scepticism has put a brake on peacekeeping operations of all kinds, be they in a NATO or EU context or within the EU-NATO framework of Berlin Plus.

So what is the way out of this situation? An intense debate has been unfolding as Europeans look for the answer to this question. Some believe that EU-NATO relations must be revised, while others maintain that ESDP should be held back and should acknowledge the primacy of NATO. The solution is probably that we should readjust the ESDP by making full use of the institutional framework we already have. We should distinguish clearly between transatlantic threats that are NATO’s competence and purely European ones as a first step towards a commonsense division of labour. The EU must stop hiding behind NATO’s decisionmaking supremacy, using as an excuse the right of first refusal. NATO decisions are taken by unanimity, giving its EU members a strong say in both transatlantic and European security policy.

That said, the creation of parallel mechanisms is to some extent unavoidable. NATO and the EU are of a different nature, each with its own modus operandi. But this should not mean unnecessary duplication of forces. No nation state could ever afford maintaining two separate military forces, so the challenge is to decide on a case-by-case basis the distribution and engagement of the forces it will commit to either or both organisations. The NATO and ESDP military mechanisms therefore need to be of equal efficiency.
The European Union must acquire a defence capability which is not antagonistic to the alliance but is rather synergetic. The catalysts and prerequisites for ensuring that the European states shoulder their security responsibilities are (a) the political will and (b) the removal of mistrust and lack of confidence from the EU – NATO equation.