THE SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION

Remarks by Alyson JK Bailes, Director, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy Annual Conference, Budapest, 5 February 2004

(Opening courtesies)
I have never forgotten the impact it made on me when as a 20-year-old diplomat in Hungary, back in the 70’s, I first heard the quotation from József Attila in which he celebrated Thomas Mann by saying that he had found:
“fehérek között, egy európait”.
I have been very conscious since then that we Europeans do not deserve any special moral status purely by reason of our origin, nationality or colour. ‘European values’ do exist and in my view are genuinely among the best and most advanced in the world. But we have to work very hard, individually and collectively, if we want to keep them present in hearts and minds and everyday actions and in particular, to defend them against intentional or unintentional damage from the ever-present forces of change.

It may seem strange to worry about this now, at least in the security context, when the tragic 20th century division of Europe is being overcome by an enlargement of the EU and NATO reaching as far as the frontiers of Russia and Ukraine, and when the EU has taken decisive steps towards developing an effective common security policy and effective means to implement it. The EU Security Strategy first drafted by Javier Solana and then adopted by the European Council last December is a document with genuine moral features. It focuses not just on threats that hurt us in our rich societies such as terrorism, but also on those which hurt the weak such as conflict, disease, environment collapse and underdevelopment. It proposes that the enlarged EU should actively seek to spread a cooperative, non-zero-sum security philosophy to its neighbours, not just because that could improve stability and thus help protect our own territory, but because it will help them and bring the day nearer when they could even think of joining the Union. It suggests that we need to look in our own societies as well as abroad for the roots of violence and intolerance, such as those bred by political and religious extremism or the unequal treatment of minorities. It defines the use of force clearly as a last resort, even in the context of protecting ourselves, and it states that the ideal way of dealing with the bad guys is to transform them into good ones.

I am proud that all 25 members of the enlarged Union have been able to commit themselves to these statements, but we all know that words are cheap. In my short talk here I would like, first, to draw attention to some general problems that may arise in developing the Union’s security policies, both internal and external, while maintaining due respect for democratic rights and for European values in general. Second I would like to make a plea - on both moral and practical grounds - for the enlarged Europe to become both a zone, and a champion, of effective arms control and disarmament (which is of course what my own Institute was set up to strive for). That also may seem obvious at first hearing, but it is by no means as easy as it sounds.

***
On the question of democratic values, let me start with a general point about institutions. Both the EU and NATO, as part of the accession process, demanded from the applicant states that they reach a number of general and specific standards of democratic behaviour before entry, including in practice their behaviour towards their neighbours and other Europeans. There was always a hint of double standards about this since the same demands had not, in practice, been enforced and in some ways still were not being enforced on existing members. Would a new country with the equivalent of the Northern Ireland problem or the Gibraltar dispute have been allowed to join the EU, or would a country resembling Turkey in all respects have been allowed to join NATO? I believe the high standards applied to new members can be justified since the enlargement was taking place in a new security setting, where the aim was not just to build up the Western camp at all costs but to bind the new members into creating stability, predictability and sound cooperative practices for the benefit of the whole continent. However, the contradiction will come back to haunt us after enlargement because the new countries will not in practice have the same democratic obligations and restraints imposed on them as full members as they did while in the waiting room. And no move could be made towards building more specific obligations within the EU and NATO framework without extending them to all the existing members, which I cannot imagine many of them welcoming.

Now, it might be argued that it was never really the EU’s or NATO’s business to define human rights and other democratic obligations, because we have at least two other organizations in Europe to do that, the Council of Europe and OSCE – as well as the overarching values of the UN. The problem, [as Secretary-General Kubis may already have pointed out,] is that we still do not really know how the dynamics of enlargement itself will affect either the operational focus or the authority of these two other institutions. There is a clear temptation for their Western members to press them to focus only on problems arising outside the territory of the enlarged NATO and EU. I guess we can all agree that that would be wrong in principle and perhaps also fatal, before long, for the institutions’ political survival. But unfortunately there is some precedent for it and it is not easy to imagine how the OSCE could, as it were, ‘re-occupy’ the whole of EU and NATO territory in a way which would focus fairly on the long-standing black spots in “old” member countries as well as possible relapses in new ones.

You could also say that it is unfair to assume the new members will behave any worse and create any greater problems that those our institutions have managed to live with in the past, and on the whole I agree with that. What I am concerned about is that the EU as a whole – just to concentrate now on one institution – is going to face pressures and temptations in the next years which might lead all of us to sell democratic values short, in different internal and external contexts. Just to raise a small sample of these questions:

• Will the new concerns about terrorism, and the overwhelming pressure from the United States for European cooperation, force us to strengthen the scrutiny of individuals and their personal data in a way which starts to infringe basic rights to privacy, as well as perhaps including discriminatory measures against people of non-European origin? Will we, too, start compromising on the proper rules of impartiality and protection for the innocent in terrorism-related arrests and trials? Could our demands for the private business sector to help us against terrorist money-laundering and dangerous smuggling start invading the rights of free economic activity and free competition which the OSCE as well as the EU is supposed to protect?
  
  
• Will the concern about border security and other aspects of Schengen, driven by worries about immigration and the greater exposure of the EU’s new borders as well as by terrorist-related considerations, make our frontiers “harder” than they should be against peaceful and productive traffic and drive below the minimum the protection that should be offered to genuine migrants and asylum-seekers? Is there a risk that security-related restrictions could be abused as an additional way of curbing movement of labour between the new and the older member states?
  
  
• Could our societies become even worse than they have been in the past at respecting and integrating non-European immigrants because of the anti-terrorist scare and new signs of intolerance to foreign cultures (such as the “veil” controversy in France), combined with the fact that we probably will have to import larger numbers of such people to make up for Europe’s shrinking populations?
  
  
• Will NGOs and popular movements, including research-oriented bodies, be able to survive in the new EU and NATO member states when sources of funds linked with the accession process, like PHARE, start to dry up? Are Western-based networks and grant-givers doing enough to reach out to these countries to ensure that at least comparable non-governmental checks and balances are maintained there to those available on “old” EU territory?
  
  
• In EU external policy concerning Russia, how are we going to avoid on the one hand the pitfalls of excessive hostility from new EU members and of slipping back on the standards of protection for Russian-speaking minorities; and on the other hand the temptations to overlook Chechnya and perhaps even to back solutions in our “new neighbourhood” area that place considerations of control and (supposed) stability before self-determination and democratisation - cf. the West’s confused initial reactions to the Georgia crisis! - in the pursuit of a kind of Realpolitik partnership between the growing EU and its Russian hinterland?
  
  

One could add many other questions, including one that particularly interests me about how to ensure that the EU’s new military activism abroad does not drift back into neo-colonialism. But let me say a few closing words, as promised, about arms control as well.

***

First, we tend to assume that excess weapons are no longer much of a problem for our continent. On the contrary we are all being told to build up our defence capabilities again and to take strides forward in defence industry collaboration - for instance through the new EU armaments agency – to make the EU an effective and respected player in military crisis management. But there are at least three things we should be concerned about, if we want our continent to have the same clean and responsible image in arms management that we strive for in everything else.

First, there are still an awful lot of left-over and surplus weapons, ranging from tanks down to rifles and bullets, stocks of landmines in several countries, and old military bases remaining in Europe that have not been properly secured and accounted for since the end of the cold war and which we have no plans for destroying any time soon. The EU is part of a Global Partnership to destroy WMD-related materials on Russian territory but is hasn’t yet widened its vision to countries like Ukraine, let alone to conventional weapons – which as we know from the “small arms” debate can still do a lot of harm if they leak into the wrong hands especially in conflict regions. The OSCE and NATO are doing something to chip away at this problem but they cannot channel major resources. I suggest it is high time for the EU to consider how it could help.

Secondly, the problem of leakage to conflict regions, ‘weak states’ and ‘rogue states’ does not only arise from left-over weapons but from failure to restrict the export from Europe of new weapons and of weapon-related technologies, including WMD technologies. There is a justified scare at the moment about an international “Wal-Mart” in nuclear materials and technologies and we have to admit that a good part of what is in circulation today started out from Europe at some time in the past. Today the EU has a state-of-the-art system of governmental export controls both for WMD and conventional weapons, and the new member states are obliged to impose the equivalent standards as soon as they become members. But have they all actually built up the necessary enforcement machinery, and have they all properly briefed and enlisted their private business sectors, and are we sure the restrictions will bite properly on multinationals (including ones of non-European) origin) which may operate in many different EU countries? Couldn’t we be doing more, as well, to get similarly strong export controls adopted by our new neighbours? This is something that CEID and my own Institute are going to work on together in the Balkans, and I would like to see the challenge given much more priority in government-level policies too, including the policy of the EU as a whole.

Last but not least, the EU needs to be an arms control power at world level, to balance and give legitimacy to its increasing ambitions in the military sphere. Up to now the Europeans have been tempted to leave the really hard challenges eg of nuclear proliferation for the US or, at best, for NATO to deal with. Now they have to start finding their own answers, if they don’t want the US to be left alone to offer the same solutions – actually as it turns out, the wrong answer for the wrong question – that it applied last year in Iraq. The recent success of three EU foreign ministers in promoting a peaceful solution for the Iranian WMD problem was a sign of what could be done: but that kind of action needs to be made much more - and more visibly - an action by the Union as a whole, using all its powers of persuasion, traditional diplomatic connections, and practical sticks and carrots. The EU should be tough on the bad guys in this field and also tough on the good guys in the US if we are convinced they are tackling things the wrong way, eg by weakening international arms control treaties.

This is an excellent example of how complicated things will get, but also of how important and potentially valuable it is for us to develop a distinctly European approach, if we really want to be “európaiak a fehérek között”.