I am aware that I am addressing you as one of a group of speakers, covering much the same set of issues from different angles. My role is to offer an ‘academic overview’ but I do so on decidedly false pretences as someone who spent 90% of their past career as an official. The best I can try to do is to try to approach the subject with academic techniques: which include taking a longer historic view; looking more widely at the context in which events take place; trying to see patterns including those which people may not have been conscious of at the time; testing a range of alternative theories; and being (perhaps irresponsibly) speculative about the future.
To start with the history: there is a lot of talk now about Euro-Atlantic ‘traditions’ being put in danger or the ‘status quo’ being under attack, but the fact is that the ‘Euro-Atlantic’ grouping has not been a normal or important one for most of modern history. After the establishment of the USA as a break-away colony, the Atlantic was for a century and a half as often a barrier as a bridge. The creation of a trans-Atlantic alliance based on permanent defence guarantees reflected the needs of a specific, and in many ways novel, situation at the end of World War Two: the need for a credible, nuclear-backed Western bloc to deter the Soviet Union and the further expansion of Communism in Europe, and the need to rebuild and consolidate democracy and a functioning economy on the territory of Western Europe itself. NATO was important also for the latter goal, (a) by blocking a nationalistic and competitive development of defence culture among its European members, (b) by providing a ‘shield’ under which West Europeans could rebuild their economy in peace, with far fewer resources diverted to defence than if they had been forced to stand alone.
Hence the famous Lord Ismay quotation (which also shows that NATO in the early days could be thought of in a very Realpolitik, not so idealistic way): NATO exists ‘to keep America in, keep Russia out and keep Germany down?
There was not much in “Euro” at first in ‘Euro-Atlantic’. The first impulse of West European unity after 1945 was to create the Europeans’ own guaranteed defence community (EDC/WEU), which was in effect then absorbed by NATO. When the European Community was created, its aims did include consolidating the peace of [Western] Europe but it did so by the indirect methods of destroying self-sufficient national war industries, diverting energies to economic and social cooperation, opening frontiers, creating new interdependent interests and so on. Hence a rather sharp functional division between NATO and EU (‘Mars’ and ‘Venus?) for the first 30 years or so, though NB the USA did explicitly support the EU’s supranational integrative approach as well. Only in 80’s did the idea of a distinct ‘Euro’ component in Western security re-develop (a) out of the burden-sharing debate in NATO (‘European pillar’) and (b) out of the gradual entry of the EU into the security sphere with Political Cooperation, support for arms control and OSCE, etc.—the line of development that has ended up with today’s CESDP. As a result of this evolution, the ‘Euro-Atlantic’ formula is today perfectly apt because we see NATO and the EU both concerning themselves with security-building and crisis management tasks within and beyond the greater Europe, both essentially sharing the same set of defence capabilities, lending assets to each other or working alongside each other in different crisis situations.
At this point worth noting that the overall ‘Euro-Atlantic’ system includes other institutions developed during or around the end of the Cold War, whose functions could be defined as (a) filling in functional niches, (b) providing a framework for relations between the Western groups and other groups and non-members, and (c) organizing relations among smaller and more specialized, notably regional communities. These other bodies include NATO’s and the EU’s own partnership/outreach structures, OSCE, Council of Europe, and the various sub-regional groupings within and on the edge of Europe. Future historians might judge that their existence actually helped NATO and the EU to survive and co-exist, by limiting their burdens and providing different arenas in which some particularly sensitive issues could be handled (eg Chechnya).
The reasons why both theoretical analysts and policy practitioners see this whole structure as being threatened or, at least called in question today can be traced to three main forces of change active during the period from 1989-90 to the present:
- the end of the Cold War and bloc confrontation, the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, the enlargement process and the change in Russia’s role vis-à-vis the West and its institutions
- the changed security environment and pattern of threats and challenges within and beyond Europe, including notably the powerful demands for conflict management capability and the growing prominence of ‘new threats’ (terrorism, WMD, but also crime, migration, disease, dangers to the environment etc)
- the increasingly prominent differences and divisions within what used to be the ‘Western’ camp, both between the US and Europe as a whole and among Europeans: objective gaps in military strength, doctrinal and technological development, different threat perceptions and priorities, different attitudes/decisions on use of force, different views on international law, global regulation and the handling of non-military security challenges.
I will speak more briefly about the first set of issues, which I see as basically less threatening because they are the “problems of success”, and more fully about the other two which are at the heart of the latest debates and anxieties.
Enlargement
To underline the importance of next year’s expansion of NATO and the EU to around 25 members each, useful to recall that after the fall of the Berlin Wall no-one would have dreamed of such a scenario being fulfilled in just 14 years. Theories then were either more idealistic—‘single European house’ will replace partial and selfish organizations with ‘comprehensive security’; or pessimistic—West and revived Russian Empire will end up fighting over a chaotic Central Europe, and even the West may be renationalized. Outbreak of Balkan wars in early 1990’s encouraged the pessimists, but in the event:
- Inter-ethnic/’failed state’ conflicts took place only in former Yugoslavia, and parts of former USSR
- NATO proved itself necessary to deal with the FRY crisis, survived the severe pressures the crisis involved and drew from it lessons for modernization and burden-sharing with other institutions
- The EU reacted against its initial divisions; large nations came back together in the ‘Contact Group’; institutional ‘deepening’ continued through Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice, EMU successfully launched
- All Central European States rejected nationalist, regionalist and Russian-led alternatives to bid for full membership in both NATO and EU, and accepted and even anticipated their “peace-enforcing” effects by democratizing internal defence arrangements, ending disputes with neighbours and building “pre-integrative” local cooperation schemes
- Russia failed even to re-build USSR or keep peace on its own territory, let alone re-capture any satellites to the West: after initial frictions acted side by side with West in Balkan crises; accepted first NATO enlargement.
Now we are witnessing a fresh surge forward in NATO and EU membership, both including the Baltic States i.e. going right up to the borders of Russia and the shores of the Black Sea. In addition:
- Balkans clearly on way to ‘integrated’ solution and to becoming a truly European responsibility
- Turkey making real progress towards EU entry (enormous implications)
- Russia has not only acquiesced in the ‘big-bang’ enlargement but demanded a closer, more integrated relationship with NATO and EU for itself: hence NATO/Russia Council ‘at 20’, visions of an EU-Russia ‘economic space’, etc.
To sum up, could say that Europe (if not the world) is becoming ‘uni-polar’, and that the Euro-Atlantic model stands without challenge or competition as a single zone of cooperation and peace for more than 400 million people. But new set of questions bred by success itself:
- Impact on the enlarged institutions themselves: future coherence and efficiency in decision-making, internal divisions and power structures, popular understanding and support
- Are Balkans really ‘solved’, are they ready to behave well with purely European incentives and can Europe keep them in line without US back-up?
- Other new EU/NATO borders: how far does the zone of ‘convertibility’ to the ‘European way’ actually go (different challenges of Turkey, Ukraine etc.) how can the next stage of (much slower) conversion be handled, how to organize relations with those ‘new neighbours’ who can’t be converted in foreseeable future?
- How ‘Europeanized’ is Russia really, how far can it be ‘integrated’? Will it accept gradual extension of the European model to the CIS too, or keep dreaming of a counter-bloc (issue could be brought to a head by new conflicts in CIS and/or possibility of European intervention)?
- What role left for OSCE, COE, sub-regional organizations?
Adaptation
On their own these challenges might not be too frightening, but the problem is that they are hitting us at the same time as major demands for change and adaptation in the Euro-Atlantic system: partly as a result of our larger and more diverse membership but more importantly as a result of successive and cumulative shifts in security agendas. By simplifying somewhat, can distinguish three ‘waves’ of challenge which have had different effects on institutions and on their mutual relations.
The first was the rising demand for Western-led military inputs to conflict
management, in the Balkans and around the world, from the early 1990’s to
the end of the 20th century. Its most immediate impact was on NATO, which found itself in demand for ‘hard’ and heavy’ interventions (thanks above all to its ability to draw on US assets), and duly proved its capacity to end at least the “hot” phase both of the war in Former Yugoslavia and the crisis over Kosovo in 1998-9. In the process, real-life pressure obliged the Alliance to carry through changes in military organization and doctrine some of which had been theoretically on the agenda since 1994; to strengthen and speed up its decision-taking capacity; and to learn to work in the field with Russian troops and other non-member contributors. In turn, the more bitter aspects of the Kosovo experience, especially the exposure of Europe’s limited capacity to contribute and US/European friction over operational style, gave the decisive boost for the EU to develop its own options for leading crisis management operations in the framework of the new Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP). The EU’s plans extended into some areas that NATO could not reach, i.e. the parallel construction of non-military (notably police) intervention capabilities; but an attempt was made to limit the risk of harmful duplication and competition in the area where NATO and EU ambitions did overlap—low- to middle-range crisis interventions – by maintaining the idea already developed between NATO and WEU of dual access to the same command and control and support facilities initially created by NATO.
The second wave of change came in autumn 2001 with the Al-Qa’eda attacks on the United States which propelled the asymmetrical, ‘transnational’ threats of terrorism and WMD proliferation to the top of the whole West’s agenda. The new themes rapidly became linked with a renewed focus on the challenge of ‘failed States’ (Afghanistan) and ‘rogue States’ (Iraq), against which US proclaimed a need for military intervention to stop or preempt their cooperation with terrorists and/or their suspected development of WMD. This ensured that the new agenda would push, not just towards the strengthening of international and national measures for “internal security”, but also towards even sterner demands for the improvement and use of Western military deployment capability. The new twist was that in this case, the West might be starting military crises rather than intervening in those started by others; and that the US now stated an open preference for ‘coalitions of willing’ rather than the adoption of a joint NATO (or any other institutional) command. Nevertheless, US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appealed to NATO to adapt itself so that it could carry out operations worldwide against terrorist and rogue targets if required: and other Allies found the appeal hard to refuse because of the implication that the US’s whole attachment to NATO might otherwise be placed in question. Thus, in summer 2002 NATO adopted a policy accepting the possible need for operations world-wide, notably against terrorist targets, and at the Prague Summit of end-2002 NATO took a correspondingly large further step forward in military adaptation: with its new Response Force, new capabilities commitment focussing on deployable forces, and the start of a drastic command structure reform. By mid-2003, a substantial operational commitment outside Europe had been taken on in the shape of NATO’s support for a German-Dutch and then a Canadian command in ISAF (Afghanistan), and the idea of NATO’s taking on some similar eventual role in Iraq was starting to be canvassed.
The impact of all this on the balance of Euro-Atlantic cooperation was pretty complex and some of the consequences are still playing themselves out. First, since the latest NATO reforms have shifted the Alliance’s operational attention almost completely away from traditional, territorial common defence to the sphere of ad hoc crisis deployments, the potential overlap of NATO and EU role in the crisis management field (and thus the scope both for shifting of burdens and competition between them) has become virtually complete. Second, NATO has actually started to transfer to the EU the command of now well-established peacekeeping commitments in the European theatre, starting with the small Western force in Macedonia, while the EU itself has launched a police mission in Bosnia-Hercegovina and is considering one in Macedonia too. The impression of a gradual handover to the Europeans of responsibility for policing their own (conventional) security is heightened by the plans for further down-sizing and relocation of US troops in Europe. Third, however, the EU is conducting these new operations with NATO support so that the ‘dual use of assets’ principle is being tried out for the first time since its invention, and the EU is in a sense bolstering NATO’s credibility by showing that its tools and skills are still in demand. Fourth, in the actual business of combating terrorism and other ‘asymmetrical threats’ on European soil it is the EU that has been active, notably with the rapid introduction of common measures in the field of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) in the first quarter of 2002; and a constructive dialogue on these matters has developed between Washington and the EU organs in Brussels while NATO has in essence had little to add (other than on military-technical aspects like NBC defence).
The third wave of change in threat perceptions is only starting now and many analysts might still not accept or even be aware of it: namely the danger from non-military threats to human security such as the SARS epidemic, whose impact on the world economy and travel scene has so far dwarfed that of the Iraq crisis. The US itself has swung the spotlight back on AIDS as a challenge serious enough to be classed as a security one, and to this could be added other human and animal epidemics, the mounting costs of climatic change and instability, environmental degradation and one-off natural disasters, and the major swings in population levels and population movements which are likely to be triggered by all these forces acting on top of widening economic inequalities. The point to note in the present context is that NATO has never had and is unlikely to be given the competence to deal operationally with any of these matters, while the EU does have competence for them both insofar as they affect its own territory and as a player at global level. The EU and US thus relate to each other as partners, and sometimes (eg on the Kyoto Protocol) as antagonists, in bilateral and global frameworks which completely bypass the Alliance.
Even if we were to imagine that the US and Europe had not collided with each other over specific security-related issues in 2001-3, we would probably still be diagnosing the Euro-Atlantic system as facing conflicting signals and serious challenges today from these three sets of environmental changes. They have shifted both the base of NATO’s legitimacy and the focus of its day-to-day activity, perhaps for good, away from the defence of the Alliance’s own territory: with a speed that has left little time to ask—
(a) is this safe? Does it leave us relying too much on nuclear deterrence for NATO’s extended territory, and does that deterrence actually work against potential new aggressors?
(b) what will be the effect on the internal impact of the ‘NATO experience’ both for older and, especially, new members? Is there not a danger of diluting the anti-nationalist, risk-sharing and democracy-building component which was half of NATO’s function from the outset? Or do we now in effect rely on the EU’s, much deeper and more intrusive integration process to take over this role, inter alia through the new principle of ‘solidarity’ proposed in the new EU draft Constitution for perils of a non-traditional kind?
Coming to NATO’s new chosen field of crisis management and its interface here with the EU, some of the more obvious questions are:
(c) given the new-found US mistrust of institutional frameworks for launching ‘serious’ interventions, is there a risk that the Alliance will now be limited to the role of a ‘tool-box’ for supporting follow-on operations and/or those which have been politically brokered elsewhere (NB that the ISAF support task was triggered by a German-Dutch, and the possible Iraq role by a Polish, request)? If so, will this not further erode NATO’s function as a forum for initial discussion and policy-making on shared Western challenges?
(d) will the EU gradually invade NATO’s new, global field of action as a provider of force frameworks for extra-European interventions as well (vide the Congo operation)? What will be the political limits and limits of principle on operations that the Europeans are prepared to undertake in their own name? (Could there be a pattern of phased role-sharing with a coalition followed by NATO followed by the EU??)
(e) can the Europeans actually find the resources to back up their widening ESDP ambitions, especially assuming they do pay a growing part of the manpower bill for Balkan tasks? And can the EU live up to expectations about its ability to coordinate truly ‘multi-functional’, interventions, given the continuing institutional and cultural dividing lines between its military, civilian and supranational components?
Last but not least comes the challenge posed to both institutions by further shifts in the threat agenda towards internal-security and ‘human security’ topics, for which military assets and defence competence are relevant only at the margin. The EU at present seems far better placed to maintain its credibility and even centrality in this field, and hence more likely to be the key player in an increasingly important sphere of US-Europe dialogue. NATO could of course in principle start a new policy focus on any or all of these topics: but that seems pretty far-fetched at present given the way the Alliance’s agenda has steadily been narrowed since 1994, due to an unrelenting operational focus plus a certain unwillingness to face divisive issues (like Missile Defence).
The Impact of US/Europe Tensions
These question-marks over institutional futures were not created, but very much sharpened, by the course of the Bush Administration’s security policy in 2002-3 and the trans-Atlantic and intra-European splits it helped to provoke. Significantly, neither the EU nor NATO placed Iraq on the agenda of any of its high-level meetings in 2002. Neither the proponents nor the opponents of the US’s intervention in Iraq ever suggested that it should have taken place under a NATO flag, or that an EU-led action could have been an alternative. The key phases of US/European interaction, both productive and negative, took place in the institutional setting of the UN or through ad hoc political channels. In other words: the traditional Euro-Atlantic organizations were neither the scene nor the subject of the Iraq-related West-West conflicts. The seriousness of the shock to them and the sudden sharpening of anxieties about their future came in two other ways: first through the very perception of their disengagement and irrelevance, secondly through the practical blow-back of these disputes on their unity and self-confidence. NATO suffered a very damaging blockage in early 2003 over proposed aid to Turkey in the event of an Iraq invasion, while divided and divisive actions by EU members and candidates led to widespread quotes and headlines about CFSP and CESDP becoming ‘a bad joke’. Not only did leading members of the EU make different practical decisions about sticking with the US or not when it went into Iraq without a specific UN mandate, but groups of states (‘the eight’, ‘the ten’) split ranks to declare their support for the US publicly, while Chirac and Rumsfeld both (from opposite sides!) deduced a basic difference of loyalty between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Europeans.
This set of problems has not only shaken up day-to-day politics and provoked much heart-searching in the media, but it has sparked an unusually frank and wide-ranging academic debate about its causes. Generally speaking, far more intelligent things have been written about possible reasons for US/Europe divergence than about why the Europeans split in the particular way they did. To start with the trans-Atlantic rift, most writers would agree that its roots go back to the end of the Cold War and even earlier, but that it has simply been brought into the open more sharply by the coincidence of a Right-wing US Administration having to deal with a new and vicious threat to the USA’s own territory. People taking this historical and evolutionary approach can point—
- in the longer term, to the lessons and the caution Europeans have learned from past colonial experiences and war experiences (including war guilt), which the US did not share
- since the 1950’s, the EU’s special culture of compromise, political solutions and interdependence, protected by a single equally applicable body of law, which makes it both less inclined to use violent solutions and more vulnerable to their backwash
- in the medium term, to the end of the Cold War and collapse of the USSR which left the US without a real rival to balance or restrain it and without the same practical reason to link its fate to the Europeans’
- now, to the US’s uniquely developed military power which allows it to strike remotely with minimal fear of retaliation: hence the impulse to block possible threats as far away as possible from US territory, and to attach equal importance to threats from every angle (no special reason for emphasis on Europe)
- and the special nature of the perceived challenge since 9/11, which allows the US to see itself as acting in self-defence (no higher law..) and at a level of good versus bad which transcends all formal institutional frameworks. (Inclination to unilateral action also bolstered by specific institutional experiences, eg impatience with NATO decision-making at the time of Kosovo, the difficulty of UN negotiations now…).
There are also more abstract and philosophical attempts at explanation which e.g. see Europe as having moved ‘beyond power’ in its own way of existence, and thus becoming unable to cope with security realities in an outside world where power still rules (a more subtle version of this theory contrasts European ‘soft’ with US ‘hard’ power.) From the European side it is alleged that the US is no longer a status quo power but is trying to redesign the world to its own model (vide the neo-cons’ trust in a democratic ‘domino effect’ in the Middle East, and the emphasis elsewhere on ‘regime change’). In fact, more logical to see the US as doing its utmost to defend the post-1990 status quo of its strategic dominance, by crushing possible saboteurs as it has already outpaced possible competitors. Europe is voluntarily and drastically changing its own status quo through enlargement and has plenty of its own ideas about winning over its neighbours and reshaping the world system: only, it wants to do so on a basis of legal regulations and of conflict avoidance which suits its own soft, rich, internally and externally vulnerable character.
Briefly note other possible levels of explanation though generally viewed as more trivial and/or less ‘respectable’:
- Christian and Jewish influence in US, impact on Europe of its Islamic and other non-Western minorities;
- ‘governance’ differences eg. influence of money and lobbies in US, dysfunctional aspects of President/Congress or intra-Administration relationships, weakness of the way the EU is governed (more than a normal international body but not yet a federation or quasi-state)
- the accident of personalities, hence the game of ‘count the really dangerous neo-cons’; often linked with reference to opinion polls showing very similar distribution of US and European opinion at grass roots
- the tendency esp. in Europe to ‘play to the domestic audience’ and to public opinion, often whipped up by one-sided media: in its turn, a symptom of not taking the real-world issue seriously enough
European splits in turn have been attributed to: failure of EU/CFSP to overcome historical differences of security policy and alignment including different commitments/loyalties in greater Middle East region; pro- and anti-US traditions, which seem to split along same lines as the periphery versus the core territory of Europe: lesser or greater awareness/realism about threats in the ‘big world’: readiness or reluctance to use armed force; personal rivalries (esp. Blair/Chirac) and different relative strengths of leaders versus their publics, etc. Would advise taking all these with pinch of salt: ‘big picture’ shows that all Europeans were on same line about virtually every principle and issue involved in Bush Administration’s policy except whether the case was strong enough to go to war with Iraq without a UN mandate, and they kept their unity on other CFSP issues, anti-US policies in the trade field, etc., throughout. Own preferred explanation is that Europeans’ different short-term choices reflect different degrees of realism about implications of US’s current might and different choice of tactics for dealing with it. In the event, bandwaggoning and calling names from the side-lines both proved of limited effect and Europe is now clearly in a sober mood of reassessment involving serious (irreversible?) steps to regain unity:
- new anti-WMD strategy and Solana’s general security strategy document
- Convention/IGC measures for stronger (esp. external) leadership and development of ESDP
- new Congo operation, and talk of others.
Of course, efforts being made to build bridges also across Atlantic too and at least some of them are consciously designed to try and repair damage to NATO: rapid agreements and emphasis on highlighting and expanding NATO’s role in Afghanistan; renewed speculation on a role in Iraq; some swing of opinion against a rapid NATO pull-out from Balkans; general revival of interest (even in France!) in potential of NATO to restrain and influence the sole super-power. Bearing in mind the Alliance’s past repeated successes in “re-inventing” itself, more than possible that it could actually draw an extra lease of life from these lessons and reactions, on top of the still-important new roles given it by enlargement. However, three general reasons to believe that NATO will have an even less central and crucial role in future Euro-Atlantic relations after this episode:
- further damage to atmosphere, trust and confidence on which NATO traditionally relied
- much of the US/Europe bridge-building even on traditional security issues is going on now outside NATO: vide US moves to gather more bilateral and multilateral support in Iraq, possible re-expansion of UN role there, US-EU cooperation over Iran and Middle East
- importance of other non-military threat categories in Atlantic relations freshly underlined by SARS and AIDS (on which US and Europe are actually pretty well in line, but no thanks to NATO).
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At purely institutional level, conclusion would be that the EU’s own relationship with the US is going to have to bear much more strategic weight in future, but also that important parts of the Euro-Atlantic dynamic will be channelled through other, global and functional organizations – logically enough, given the more global character of the issues involved and the wider range of “Western” or potentially pro-Western actors who need to be involved.
So (rather belatedly): what about the broad question of where we go from here in Euro-Atlantic relations overall? It depends on two sets of assumptions about (a) how wide the trans-Atlantic gap in security perceptions, methods and values will actually be – I think it is pretty clear that the underlying interests will continue to overlap enormously – and (b) what approach each side will adopt to handling the challenge.
On the first, extremely unlikely that Europe will turn back from integration and in fact a larger and larger group of countries will be affected by this culture, perhaps gradually including Russia itself, so the interesting question is how the integrated Europe’s security philosophy will itself develop. Current signs offer a least a possibility that it will be more realistic, power-aware and power-based, which could lead to European thinkers not just speaking more of the same language as the US (at least on specific security threats), but behaving more cautiously and constructively towards the US itself in the realisation of just how great a force (for good or ill) its military and economic might represents. If the EU manages to create more of a “single voice” and quick reaction capacity in external affairs, the mode and speed of US/European dialogue could also improve. On the US side, the continuation and strengthening of the present anti-institutionalist, preemptive, unilateralist line is a possibility but not the only one and possibly not even the most likely. Corrective influences could include:
- lessons from reality (as now in Iraq) over the limited impact and the costs of purely military methods of problem-solving, and the need for others’ skills to solve those parts of the problem that can’t be solved by force
- the reality of US economic and financial interdependence with the rest of the world and the importance of cooperation on issues like SARS
- the limited strength even of the US’s great economy and internal concerns over the budget and trade deficits associated with maximal military spending, as well as the economically counter-productive nature of some “homeland security” measures
- limited US public tolerance of manpower losses and lasting burdens of responsibility abroad
- loss of faith in the President himself and/or other key individuals (perhaps for reasons quite unconnected with Iraq).
NB however that even if these forces provoke some kind of swing back or correction in US policy, we can’t jump to conclusions about what the result will be (eg return to past modes of internationalism or limited-liability realism): more likely to be a quite new mixture marked especially by those lessons and impacts of 9/11 that can’t be wished away.
As to the second question of relationship-handling, this is often discussed in terms of whether the Europeans will accept that the world is uni-polar under US leadership and they have to be part of the US team, even if with a mind of their own on some issues: or whether the world is becoming or can be made multi-polar with Europe acting as a clearer counterweight and alternative to the US. This set of expressions has become quite emotionally loaded, and it also fails to do justice to the real complexity of the situation especially when other large players outside NATO and the EU are taken into account. It looks particularly unrealistic when you translate it into terms of European politics, because the one thing the Iraq crisis has shown extremely clearly is that the EU cannot be united either on a simple pro-US or a simple anti-US line. It also tends to leave aside the lessons of economic relations, where the US and Europe are actually more equal in weight already and have some very sharp disputes, but where they are all the more aware of their shared interest in preserving an institutional framework (the WTO) to manage their relationship and in keeping the world generally moving towards an open, regulated free trade system. This suggests that even if the EU does develop more independent thinking and more independent capacities to deal with a range of security problems, including those where a difference of interest and outlook might push it in a different or even an opposing way to the US, both sides are likely to retain an interest in keeping their differences under control and allowing cooperation to continue simultaneously in other less divisive areas. What is genuinely open for speculation at the moment is what the chosen methods of control will be, among the alternatives of
- an overarching framework of international regulation (involving e.g. rethinking the UN’s role)
- old and new institutional frameworks and practices like those discussed just before
- traditional power politics and power play: incentives and threats, bargaining and trade-offs etc
- a “compartmentalizing” approach that allows the relationship to be run by different methods, as well as having a different positive or negative flavour, in different spheres of trans-Atlantic interaction
- a mixture of all of these.
Some closing words of advice for those trying both to understand, and to manage, this extremely complex (and important for world security!) set of challenges:
- avoid fatalism, including the temptation to project mechanically from current trends: the great strength of Western civilisation up to now has been its flexibility and capacity for self-renewal, while at national level “it’s politics, stupid”
- don’t listen to what the other side of the Atlantic says about itself and its policies, watch what it does
- try to keep injured emotions and sensibilities out of it: this is a grown-up game in a very tough setting, where we have responsibilities to many others than ourselves
- always expect the unexpected!
SIPRI Update, October 2008