Jacques Delors once called the EU an ‘unidentifiable political object’. Myself, I feel that some of its more elusive features may have a lot in common with such special idioms of European culture as irony, paradox—and at times, even tragicomedy. The building of Europe seems to proceed by leaps and contradictions: and we are living now through just such a contradictory and catalytic period, where out of a great tragedy here in Spain might come a unique chance to build a new constitutional platform for the Union’s next stage of advance.
Another special product of the European political culture is Euro-pessimism (do we ever hear of Americano-pessimism, or even Afro-pessimism?). Our sense of irony easily expresses itself in a self-critical version of Europe’s security history, somewhat as follows. The founding bargain of Monnet and Schuman did end war among West Europe’s own states, but the EC/EU throughout the Cold War hid under the US/NATO defence shield; in the 1990’s the US and NATO had to step in to rescue the EU from its failure in the Balkans; and now the EU has failed again to deal with another set of new (trans-national, asymmetric) security challenges by doing much too little and too late, collectively, against terrorism. Now, it may be quite natural for people outside Europe to interpret history that way, but I myself feel it would be taking self-criticism too for us to accept their story uncritically. The story could also be told like this: the founder-members of the European Communities not only killed off war between them but built a unique new community among themselves, interdependent, interpenetrative and partly supranational, which has turned into the most sophisticated machine the world possesses for building both prosperity and peace. In the Cold War the Europeans did do a huge amount and took real risks for their own defence, but they happened to do it through NATO rather than the EU: while the latter built the economic strength that helped to pay for the defence, and the civilisational model that eventually seduced the Europeans of the East into joining us. NATO may have won the war in the Balkans: but it is the EU which is now taking over, not just the specific peacekeeping missions there, but the task of making peace permanent by leading the states of the region towards full integration. While NATO and the EU are enlarging in parallel to reunite our continent, it is EU expansion that provides by far the deeper, the stricter and the more irreversible process of change.
As for the ‘new threats’ agenda, I would accept that the EU’s integrated and border-free community has created a system uniquely open to exploitation and attack by new-style terrorists and indeed other transnational menaces. We have not paid nearly enough attention to the special vulnerabilities that go with integration, or done nearly enough to protect Europe’s people (and the rest of the world) against the consequences. However, now that we have been given such a dramatic and tragic wake-up call, I think it can be argued that the dangers created by globalization and by abuse of trans-national processes can best be analysed and dealt with by equally globalized, trans-national, integrated, law-based and universally applicable solutions. Trying to tackle terrorism and proliferation the opposite way, by the essentially pre-modern methods of military force and political coercion, certainly does not seem to have had very impressive results lately.
There is another and perhaps simpler way to express all this. Powerful actors in the world exert power also in the intellectual dimension, by determining the security ‘agenda’ and the language in which it will be discussed. They will naturally define strength in terms of those things they have most of, like military forces, and they will define the most important challenges as the ones they can hope to solve with those same weapons. Less dominant actors with different kinds of strength need a lot of self-awareness and self-confidence if they are to resist this semantic pressure, and to stand up against direct criticism and mockery of their performance (of the kind we now associate—in relation to European ‘powerlessness’—with Robert Kagan). Europe is doubly handicapped here, both by the newness of the phenomenon it represents and by its lack of a fully realized, united and articulate identity. Nevertheless, it is my conviction that without the EU’s security contribution not only Europeans, but the whole world would be the poorer. Like Moliere’s ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ who did not realize that he had been speaking prose all his life, the EU needs to become more aware and explicit about what it does at the same time as becoming more effective.
And if there ever was a right time in history to make this effort, it is surely now. Europe is broadening its territory dramatically through enlargement. It is broadening its security coverage rapidly in generic terms, through a meeting of two processes: the EU moving into the territory of traditional security operations, on the one hand—notably through ESDP—and the fashionable focus and objective balance of security shifting, on the other hand, into non-traditional and non-military areas which fall more squarely into the EU’s core competence. Last but not least, the Union is going through a major constitutional upheaval in which the instruments and methods, not just the substance, of its security policies can and should be critically reviewed. There have been signs of a real political will to make changes, even painful ones, for the sake of greater unity and effectiveness and stronger political leadership in the Union’s external action. Whether the intention can be properly upheld and translated through the long and difficult process of implementation is something we can for the moment only wonder and hope about.
In the rest of my short time today I will talk through these last three points in more detail, and try to get closer to the real nature and balance of the challenges for the Union in the fields of traditional security; new dimensions of security; and what we might call the Union’s own security governance.
It may seem strange to give first place to traditional security when all continental Europe is just in the process of being reunited within both the EU and NATO,making our own part of the world definitely uni-polar; and Russia is finding a way to live with the process at least without open violence. But first of all, there are still challenges in this field for Europe itself which it would be dangerous for us to overlook or minimize in our enthusiasm for new agendas: and, secondly, if Europe wants to protect its interests and project its values in the wider world, it will be operating on a scene where violence is still rife and even the ‘good guys’ cannot always avoid the use of force.
I am one of those who regard enlargement itself as a great success for European security, giving us not just a 25-country zone of guaranteed peace but the chance of using harmonized internal security measures across this huge territory to combat the newer breed of threats. It provides the clearest possible evidence that, not just in the 1950’s but today, integration is the best tool the world has ever discovered for conflict prevention. However, enlargement also widens the spread of our security responsibilities and brings Europe’s frontiers closer to some still very unstable areas:
- it leaves a number of stubborn internal security challenges still unsolved on the territory of the ‘old West’, like Northern Ireland and Basque extremism;
- it puts beyond question that we will have to solve the problems of Balkan instability too by full European integration one day, but it leaves Europe holding what is still a very noisy and violent baby in that region (as shown by the latest incidents in Kosovo);
- it has brought back into sharper focus some of the dilemmas of Europe’s new-style relationship with Russia, where we still seem to lack a clear and convincing strategy on either side (Europe not being clear whether it wants a strong or weak Russia and how far it should or can try to ‘integrate’ the post-Soviet territory; Russia still not quite sure if Europe is where its destiny lies, and not understanding what an ambition for integration would really cost it in terms of internal and external behaviour change, and certainly not ready at present to pay the price);
- enlargement makes it impossible for us to ignore the unresolved problems of the Caucasus region and Central Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa: but Europe has hardly begun to think about what policies would best serve the sometimes conflicting aims of stability and democratic reform in these regions, or to face up to the kind of resources it would need to invest to have any real influence on outcomes there.
This is not to mention the security dilemmas over the continuation of the enlargement process itself, including the very immediate challenge of Cyprus and the not-so-far-off question of what it would cost us in security terms either to extend our European protection as far as Turkey’s Asian borders, or to leave Turkey outside. One other traditional security dimension which I do want to mention, however, is the problem of the still considerable burden of armaments (and military installations, etc) left over on Europe’s territory from the cold war. These stocks are costly to maintain, bad for the local environment and health, dangerous if they fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists, and often very damaging if they are sold off abroad without due care and responsibility, for instance to regions of crisis. The problem is certainly worst on Russian and other former Soviet territories, but there are large holdings of weapons, landmines, ammunition and even some CW materials also within old and new NATO member states. The G8 have adopted a ‘Global Partnership’ programme to work together on destroying the WMD-related materials in Russia, but there is no grand plan for the other materials and precious little resources available at a time when most Europeans are squeezing out every penny they can for new and better defence capabilities. I would argue that traditional arms control and arms disposal policies are very far from being outdated in Europe in face of these continuing challenges—and others, like the fact that we have never achieved any arms control solution or even a minimum of transparency for the problem of short-range nuclear weapons on European soil. I am personally very concerned that the latest dispute between Russia and NATO over the CFE Treaty—a measure of restraint on conventional forces which underpins the whole post-cold war military settlement in Europe—is being played by both sides in a spirit that gambles with the survival of one of our very few multilateral arms-control agreements still surviving today.
However, I need to move on here to a second class of security challenges: the now well-known ‘new threats’ of terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and the phenomena of international crime, ‘rogue’ state and ‘weak’ states that are intimately tangled with these menaces and help to keep them alive. There can hardly be any doubt now that Europe is painfully exposed both to the more traditional kind of terrorism associated with specific conflicts, and the new breed of ‘super-terrorism’ associated with Al-Qaeda which operates at trans-national level and chooses its safe havens, its tools and its targets following a truly global strategy. The WMD threat may sometimes seem less close, except in the form of possible terrorist or criminal use of individual weapons, but in fact Europe is within the ranges of far more missiles held by unreliable states and capable of delivering WMD than our American allies are. In fact, the use of such weapons anywhere in the world—say, in the Middle East or a conflict between India and Pakistan—would have such massive, political fall-out, undermining the world’s whole legal and strategic order, that whether we managed to stay outside the physical fall-out zone or not would hardly help us a great deal.
You may well say that I am preaching to the converted about this set of threats, both here in Spain and in Europe more generally. The developments of the last few years in US policy, their knock-on effects on the agendas of Western institutions, and our own hard experience have brought us to a point where both individual nations and the European Union are giving top priority to establishing new coordinated defences, devoting new resources, and developing explicit new strategies to combat these shared challenges. And if Europe overall has been rather slower than the USA to gear itself up for the struggle, that need not mean that our resulting policies are worse. While Americans often seem to ‘externalise’ the problem, hoping that terrorism can be kept away by going out and hitting it in distant places, the European Security Strategy first drafted by Javier Solana admits that we also have to deal with an enemy within. We have to work to ensure that our own political and social systems do not foster terrorism (or condone violent extremism of any kind), that our uniquely open frontier-free markets are not open also for criminals and terrorists, that we control our weapons industries and dual-use producers and our technology tightly enough to ensure we never again help to leak WMD products and technologies to other regions. While the USA has placed an excessive and, it is now clear, misguided faith in the ability of military force to destroy terrorist networks and their sponsors, European strategies prescribe a mix of military, internal security, political, economic, social and psychological measures to deal both with today’s manifestations of terrorism and with its future seeds. While the US has lately been very reluctant to work in multilateral frameworks and under legal restraints, the Europeans since the earliest days after 9/11 have favoured creating new multilateral competences, new central authorities and universally binding regulations, in the EU framework but also in other specialized and sub-regional settings, culminating in the latest set of measures agreed at last month’s European Council. This approach in essence adapts well-established EU principles of harmonization and collective responsibility to deal with the new threats, and its philosophy is most clearly expressed in the new EU ‘Solidarity’ commitment first drafted as part of a new EU constitution but brought forward and adopted separately last month.
In my view it is absolutely the right way to go:
- first, because trans-nationally applicable laws are the best way to deal with the trans-national nature of the threats themselves, and to leave the terrorists and WMD smugglers no hiding place
- second, because the idea of solidarity and universally applicable laws helps overcome the objective differences in awareness and experience of terrorism between different part of Europe and reduces the risk that the less ‘conscious’ regions, like Scandinavia, will become weak links in the chain
- thirdly because the solidarity commitment can be seen as a modern-day equivalent (or at least supplement) for the collective defence promises given in NATO fifty-five years ago: it pledges the Europeans to stand together against the threats that now challenge their control of their territory and their citizens’ survival, just as much as a Communist armed attack used to threaten those things in the past.
Last but not least, I believe European policies have grasped the great importance of moral consistency and legitimacy when tackling globalized threats, in a way that the present US Administration has often been criticized for failing to do. We are not only trying to take weapons from other people (or stop them acquiring them), but are ready to accept tighter controls on our own exports and our WMD-relevant manufacturing capacities. We positively welcome new arms control measures in this field that would constrain us as well. We do not claim the right to act lawlessly, without international mandate, against offenders in other parts of the world while insisting that the rule of law is one of the things we are most concerned to protect against terrorists at home. We do not claim that we are fighting for democracy when we go into action against rogue states or try to clean up weak ones, while at the same time taking internal measures that damage important human and civil freedoms in the name of anti-terrorism, or propping up undemocratic rulers abroad just because they promise to be tough on terrorists. I believe it is vital to maintain these features of consistency and sophistication in European policies against the new threats—and not just because they place us in a better moral position. All the evidence suggests that they will be more effective than measures based on contradictions and double standards can ever be in solving the actual problem—especially in the medium and longer term.
There is, however, one last set of security challenges for which Europe has not gone so far in developing common strategies or has adopted them only piecemeal. I mean the problems often loosely grouped together as ‘human’ or ‘functional’ security: human and animal diseases, accidents and natural disasters (including those that may now be multiplied by climate change), other effects of environmental degradation and pollution, the breakdown of critical infrastructures like energy supply and the networks of transport and communication, cyber-terrorism, the interruption of various strategic supplies from other parts of the world, uncontrolled migration, or the consequences of Europe’s rapidly looming and quite serious population deficit. Recent experiences with foot-and-mouth disease, AIDS and SARS and ‘bird flu’, electricity cuts and floods and significant numbers of the deaths in European heatwaves have underlined that these are also trans-national, ‘asymmetrical’ threats of a kind that hit rich and open societies particularly hard and can cause death and suffering (and economic damage) on a very large scale. They cannot be deterred and ‘fought’ like traditional threats of humans origin, and it is not practical to seal our continent off from them with some kind of Maginot line. They can only be contained and dealt with effectively by extremely open and wide-ranging international cooperation based on standardized commitments, starting with Europe’s neighbours but extending globally in the case of truly global systems like disease control and energy supply. Another important point for policy-making is that the private business sector, which has already come much more into focus as a necessary partner for tackling terrorist financing and proliferation threats, is often the prime actor and first line of defence in functional security areas such as infrastructure operation, the management of cyberspace, and energy supply. I would like to see much more discussion both within national communities and at the European level of how Europe’s interests and vulnerabilities in these fields could be accommodated into much wider, multi-functional security strategies for the future, including a thorough re-thinking of priorities for resource application, new models for public-private sector collaboration, and the question of how best to educate and mobilize the affected populations themselves.
By now it should be clear that the most important challenges for European security are not ones that can be met by action within the limits of European territory, or by Europeans acting alone. As Solana put it so clearly in his strategy paper, ‘The European Union is, like it or not, a global actor; it should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security’; and ‘With the new threats the first line of defence will often be abroad’, What those threats are has, hopefully, been demonstrated enough by what has already been said, but I would like to point out also how exposed we are to world conditions in terms of Europe’s economic strength and competitiveness. The EU produces a quarter of the world’s GNP and over a third of its trade: we are heavily dependent on outsiders both for sources of import and markets for our exports. We import 40% of the total goods we consume in Europe, but as much as 50% of the energy we use—and that figure will rise to 70% by 2030. The present EU countries together had 327 milliard* Euros of overseas investments in the year 2000. The Euro is increasingly being used as an international currency beyond our own borders.These facts force us to put great effort into the maintenance of a working, open and equitable world trading system notably through the WTO. They force us to take a share of interventions in any serious monetary crisis wherever it occurs, like the last one in Asia. But they also have consequences in the more traditional security field, giving us a stake in the stability and security of our major customer and supplier countries. They give us a non-idealistic motive to work against poverty and depopulation and to prevent or stop crises even in remote regions where these are sensitive for the world economy. They would oblige us to take a strong interest in the US’s policies and to support any US actions which protect its own and our economies even if we had no alliance relationship across the Atlantic at all. Finally they force us to pay special attention to world transport and communication routes: to be tough against hi-jacking and on aviation security, and to be ready to send out our de-mining vessels and gunboats again if we face threats to safe passage for shipping in one of the world’s many strategic straits.
As stressed by Solana, however, Europe also has responsibilities overseas and these start with the formal and informal bonds surviving from the colonial period. They include playing our part in combating global challenges to which our own activities have contributed, like ozone depletion and climate change, or the excesses of an unregulated arms trade, or those manifestations of terrorism, proliferation, crime and disease which hurt other people even more than ourselves. We also have both a need and responsibility to uphold the law-based, market-based, information-based global order in general. Europe needs an orderly world to export to and import from, but also to shield itself as a large and rich but strategically exposed and continually expanding entity. A world governed by force, even force wielded most powerfully by friends of ours, would be one where Europe could not compete effectively in the short term and might not survive in the longer term. But if we find this easy to agree with, we must also be ready to do the harder thing: to go out and fight for the international order when it is attacked, and to invest resources and effort in bringing as many countries as possible round to accept and support that same order as our partners. In this sense, Europe’s readiness to take part in international peace-keeping missions, to help rebuild after natural disasters anywhere in the world, and to try to rescue countries from the poverty that breeds disorder and despair is not a matter of high-minded altruism but a price that we pay to be able to go on living our own lives as we wish.
I have very little time left over to talk about the million-dollar question of how Europe and the Europeans are supposed to do all this. And I make no excuse for devoting that little time to talking about institutions: because institutions are for Europeans both a practical instrument and the expression of a philosophy of security, the philosophy that says that nation-states still bear a central and irreplaceable responsibility but that they cannot solve modern problems by acting either unrestrained or alone. The trick is to make sure that our institutions adapt and grow to serve this agenda, not get things upside down so that our agenda is distorted to serve them. The pace of institutional change actually seems to be accelerating in the 21st century, especially in Europe—although other regions of the world are also taking very interesting steps to build local security communities which perhaps we ought to be watching more seriously. NATO has more or less given up devoting any practical energy to the defence of European territory and is focussing on becoming the best source of tough and efficient international peace missions combining US and European forces in the world at large. This serves the US agenda but it also serves the European one, in that we would prefer to see the US acting in an institutionalised multilateral framework more often than outside it. It is, however, quite a limited ambition, since NATO increasingly seems to provide the material tools for handling crises rather than the forum where the initial political difficulties in reaching US-European agreement are overcome. Moreover, NATO has only rather limited and specialized expertise to offer on the terrorism/WMD group of new threats and little or no part to play on the larger group of functional and human security threats which I mentioned before. I think we have arrived at the point in history where we must recognize that the EU, already the chief partner and competitor for the USA in the economic field, is fast becoming the Europeans’ chief policy instrument for coordinating responses to a wide range of ‘new’ and still newer threats, and will consequently become a more important interlocutor for the USA in the security field as well. Where the challenges are truly global, and even finding a US/European synthesis is only a first step to negotiating solutions, I believe that the UN (with its agencies) will reveal itself yet again as the indispensable institution, and that a proper recognition of the growing importance of both trans-national and non-military threats must logically reinforce its authority.
The European Union, as I hinted at the beginning, now finds itself engaged in a kind of ‘fuite en avant’—a rush forwards to keep up with the speed and scale of new security responsibilities being laid upon it. It has to dig deeper within its own territory to find defences against the new threats that fester within its societies, and it has to tackle far more seriously than in the past the job of building a common front and common action towards the world outside its borders. Adapting Europe’s uniquely developed integrative method of security to the new challenges demands:
- coordination across all 3 former pillars of the Union, across its different organs, and across the boundary between collective actions and the remaining competences of member states
- discipline especially by governments to stay within the limits of agreed positions and avoid trying to escape from agreed rules even when they pinch the most
- more resources to some extent at the European centre, but certainly to be used in a better coordinated and prioritised way within national states and functional sectors
- more specialization and differentiation of roles in the sphere of European military operations, but not only in that sphere
- and stronger, more political, more consistent leadership for the Union as the single political and security entity into which it is now rapidly evolving.
I pick out these points because we can all immediately see how difficult and painful they are to accept, not just for national governments and publics but for EU officials who have been accustomed to different ways—and perhaps even for academics! A Europe of 25 or more states with a common currency and competences across the whole security spectrum can never again be governed and led like the economic community of the 6 and the 9. Nostalgia is natural but it is not a good guide: and at bottom, is only another variant of the Euro-pessimism I talked about at the beginning. Instead of the self-critical cynicism of a premature middle age, what Europe perhaps needs most today is a positive sense of antiquity—a pride in how much we have achieved and how much we have survived—coupled with something of the eternal child that sees the adventure in challenge and the challenge in adventurous change.
____________________________________
* Milliard = 1000 million. Trade statistics are from Eurostat and WTO sources, arms trade data from the SIPRI Yearbook 2002.
SIPRI Policy Brief: South Ossetia and Abkhazia
