COMMENTARY

Autumn 2009

by Charles A. Kupchan

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Julian Lindley-French is clearly right when he says that the EU would be wise to focus ESDP’s development on stabilisation and reconstruction (S&R) because such missions – especially those that prevent conflicts – will be important to deepening security on Europe’s periphery. The EU has the experience and the assets needed to develop a special avocation in this area, and reaching EU-wide consensus on these missions will be easier than forging agreement on more demanding types of mission.

But I would offer three qualifications to Lindley-French’s analysis. First, while focusing the development of ESDP on S&R makes good sense, that effort should not come at the expense of European aspirations to acquire more high-end capabilities. Europe cannot afford to restrict itself to S&R as contingencies will likely arise down the road that require war-fighting potential – even if in modest form. And the EU can only acquire that war-fighting potential by aggregating and coordinating the capabilities, procurement programmes and strategies of its member states. Europe will one day be left in the lurch if it heads into the future believing that robust S&R capabilities will be enough to ensure its security.

Second, although I agree with Lindley-French that the Lisbon treaty’s changes would ease the “fissures” over ESDP, it would nonetheless be wise for Europe to move more explicitly toward coalitions of the willing to deploy both military and civilian missions. The treaty promises to streamline decision-making, but such changes may be more than offset by the deeper forces of re-nationalisation that have of late been sweeping across Europe. National leaders and European publics are no longer animated by the European project, making investment in further integration unappealing and politically perilous. Hence the ongoing difficulty in forging a consensus on the EU’s next steps. And if the Tories take power in the United Kingdom, consensus within the EU is likely to prove even more elusive. In matters of security, therefore, Europe simply cannot settle for the lowest common denominator; whether called “variable geometry,” “reinforced cooperation,” or something else, EU members with the will and capability to forge ahead on ESDP must do just that.

The mission in Afghanistan represents a particularly trying test case, but the myriad versions of European involvement in the NATO operation do not augur well for the development of a common EU “strategic culture.” The ISAF mission in Afghanistan underscores the degree to which different EU member states have starkly different political sensitivities and therefore approaches when it comes to the deployment of force. One should not read too much into divergent European perceptions of the mission in Afghanistan – but nor should one read too little.

Third, in observing that Europeans “have absolutely no appetite for playing a high-end strategic global military role,” Lindley-French too easily lets the EU off the hook of the global responsibilities it needs to shoulder. He is, to be sure, right that the EU will not any time soon – if ever – acquire the mobile forces, lift, and aircraft carriers needed to project power to all quarters of the globe. But despite its current internal preoccupations, the EU must face the reality that tomorrow’s challenges are global in scope, not just close to home. Not only does the United States seek a strong European partner as its struggles to stabilise and reduce its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Washington desperately needs a Europe prepared to share the burdens of adapting the international system to global change.

The Atlantic community no longer has the luxury of focusing its partnership only on the Euro-Atlantic space. North America and Europe must together address the question of how the international system can be adapted to meet the aspirations of China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and other rising powers. And cooperation on stemming the proliferation of nuclear weapons will be at least as important.

In sum, the world cannot afford a Europe that restricts its ambition to S&R in its immediate periphery. It needs an EU prepared to help usher in the next international order, one in which the EU and the United States work with the rising powers to share responsibilities and forge consensually a new set of guiding norms.