SIPRI Policy Brief: South Ossetia and Abkhazia
REGIONAL SECURITY AGAINST NEW AND OLD THREATS: EUROPE AS MODEL, LABORATORY OR WARNING?
Speaking Notes for Alyson J.K. Bailes, Director, SIPRI
8th New Faces Conference, Karlsberg Slott, 30 September 2005
The only article I ever managed to publish in the ‘NATO Review’ was called ‘Sub-Regional Organizations: the Cinderellas of European Security?’. Even today, my own devotion to the study of regional security processes is driven partly by my feeling that they are still treated as Cinderellas by all too many other people: and I suspect that one of the reasons is a certain suspicion of intellectual fuzziness around the subject. For a start, in French and English and in Brussels-speak we have the confusion between a ‘region’ within one country and a ‘region’ made up of several countries. Traditional ‘regional studies’ are something different; and we should be wary about the words ‘regionalization’ and ‘regionalism’, which belong more in the field of economic and social analysis and can carry negative overtones. What I assume we want to talk about here are active and deliberate processes of multi-state regional cooperation, connected in some way with security, which are typically led by national governments but often most successful when they involve other layers of society. And here we come to the second part of the problem, which is that when such processes succeed, they tend to produce frankly boring results. Conflicts between states stop; other conflicts are contained and the impact of other threats reduced; the biggest fights that take place are word-fights between weary politicians after all-night meetings, and the most painful disputes are over how to share out the profits or over how many more members to let into the club. You do not have to be wildly macho or the old, military-obsessed kind of security analyst to feel that studying North Korea may be more interesting than Vietnam nowadays, or Ukraine more interesting than Slovenia, after the bland influences of ASEAN and the EU respectively have done their work.
As GK Chesterton once wrote, however, an arrow that hits its target is actually far more surprising and exciting, and should be more emotionally moving, than one that misses. I have argued throughout my time at SIPRI that we need to devote more effort to studying what works; and it’s in that spirit that I’d like to pick up two particular issues now—
whether and how the practice of regional security cooperation has adapted itself to the quickly changing constellation of security challenges; and
what is the significance of the European Union, the oldest of what I would call the ‘new generation’ of regional organs, for the other (steadily multiplying) efforts at security-through-integration that are going on around the world.
I will also comment briefly at the end on issues raised by the apparently unstoppable spread of the regional security virus for the larger picture of world security governance.
‘Old’ and ‘New’ Security, ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Regionalism
During the Cold War, the security scene in Europe was dominated by two equally matched superpowers and two blocs who were each others’ military and ideological enemies. This confrontation cast its shadow over most other parts of the world, with equally polarizing effects. The dominant security worries were about open war between states and groups of states, and there were four basic ways that regional cooperation could try to cope with this:
by binding local states together so that at least they would not fight each other;
by binding them together to balance and deter the enemy—these first two functions of course combined by NATO, but also for a while by CENTO and SEATO in Western and South-East Asia;
by creating a structure around two opposing blocs that reduced the risks of their competition and allowed some cooperation as well: a role quite successfully played by the CSCE and then the OSCE in Europe;
to keep a group of states out of the main confrontation and shield them from its effects: this was the role of the Neutral and Non-Aligned Movement, but it is quite a rare variant and doesn’t require all the members to come from the same region.
Now, the major changes that have taken place in the security agenda during the last phases of the Cold War and since it finished will be well known to you all. There are 3 points I would particularly pick out:
the shift from risks of inter-state conflict to intra-state conflicts, with their dangers both for security and humanity; this has gone together with a rise in positive and active military cooperation, even between former opponents, and with a demand that the more fortunate states of the world should not just look after their own security but help in exporting it to others;
the growing prominence of worries about non-traditional threats ranging from terrorism, crime and WMD proliferation, through various kinds of natural catastrophe and disease, to social and economic problems ranging from starvation to infrastructure collapse;
new awareness of the interconnectedness of all these threats and risks, both in their causes and effects, and the multiple vulnerability it creates both for richer and poorer communities,
In the early 90’s people used to wonder whether these changes would make old-style defensive alliances like NATO redundant. By now we have seen, not just that old alliances can learn new and more constructive tricks, but also that the new environment has offered new rationales for regional cooperation. To mention just two,
states can get together to ‘export security’ more effectively, in all its different forms just mentioned;
and they can get together against all the new non-military varieties of challenge and threat: to protect their own lands and peoples against them, and to make a stronger input to the global policies and responses that they demand. (In the economic dimension, we may note the parallel issue of how far regional integration can help its participants to deal with the notorious challenges of economic globalization.)
The question of democracy, and of reform and transformation more generally, has also come into the picture in a big way. Even old-style groups like NATO created pressure on their members to be democratic and to behave democratically towards each other. With today’s wider security agendas it has become more obvious how security, good governance and democracy are related: apart from anything else, many new challenges need the willing and effective help of private actors right down to the individual level, which is problematic both in weak and oppressive states. So we find the enlargement of institutions like NATO, the EU and ASEAN—and even their less integrated ‘partnership’ frameworks—being used consciously as way to promote democratization and reform in neighbouring states and through key strategic dialogues like that with China. We find the new African Union, in its admirable basic documents, linking together seamlessly the ideas of conflict avoidance and control, of democratic governance, and of sustainable development. We find a new explicit recognition among both conflict management experts and development analysts that bringing a weak or wounded state into a stable framework of security cooperation with its neighbours is one of the best ways to boost its progress and ensure a lasting recovery.
New threats for the integrated regions cannot, however, be countered with old tools and I would highlight four new practical demands that they have brought to the fore:
unlike military alliances, multilateral security approaches to the new agendas demand relatively high and constant inputs of money and other resources, and are pushing towards increasing centralization and collective use of these;
challenges involving non-state actors and individual persons can only really be mastered with the help of individually applicable laws and norms, formulated within states as well as between them;
the interconnectedness of many of the threats gives an advantage to groupings that can combine military competences with other security ones, and both of these with political, economic and other functional capacities;
respectable regional organizations, as much as nations, are increasingly called on to show their relevance to the whole world both by ‘exporting security’ and by collaborating on the universal generic challenges.
The European Union
All these last four desiderata—resources, legislative capacity, multi-functional competence and global outreach—are all combined at least in theory in the European Union. No other European body has them all: NATO doesn’t have any significant collective budget or law-making capacity, and OSCE has only 1 of the 4, i.e. multi-functional competence. I think people in other regions see just as well or even better than we do the importance both of having these tools and of combining them for the right security effect – even if for their own regional organizations, this is still much more of an aspiration than a viable programme.
In this situation, the EU seems to be providing both a model and encouragement for other regions to move ahead and go deeper in integration, and a lot of food for thought on what what not to do or on what could be done better.
In reality, though, how useful can the EU be as a source-book for regional design in quite different regions of the world? Problems of widely different cultures, histories and economic levels might come to mind, but I’m not sure that that is the real point. Culturally similar and culturally diverse groups of states, and groups that are all poor or all rich or rather mixed, can achieve and have achieved workable forms of security community. If we need to offer warnings about the ‘exportability’ of the EU model, I think they belong at a broader level of analysis. I have already hinted at one of them, i.e. that our Union has been working in the field of true integration longer than anyone else, and like any pioneer is bound to have run straight into all the traps that others should learn to avoid. Among other things, it created a single market and an almost single immigration space long before it realized how those arrangements would expose its citizens to transnational threats like terrorism, crime and disease, let alone set about developing collective responses to those challenges. It started off with a complicated set of institutions and was slow and often clumsy in redesigning them to deal better with new demands, notably including the demand for tight cross-functional coordination and for a single face and voice in dealing with the outside world. Here I would like to highlight, however, two other sets of issues that are very much alive in debate among Europeans themselves.
First is the question of how larger and smaller states can work together. The West Europeans in the 1940’s decided to conduct their military cooperation with the USA, which indeed was the only way to keep the Soviet threat at bay, but they set up their deeper economic (and eventually political) cooperation only among themselves. The subsequent story of the EU suggests that progress in integration is relatively easy in a region that has no single dominant state but a balance among two, three, or more larger ones; and this same diagnosis could be supplied in broad terms to the relative success of the Latin American organizations, the African Union and ASEAN. But the EU as such doesn’t offer any answers—and NATO has never really found a permanent and satisfactory one—on how to build successful cooperation where there is one much larger state in the neighbourhood and it cannot simply be excluded from the exercise or treated in the older style as an enemy. That is the challenge with Saudi Arabia in the Gulf Cooperation Council, with India in South Asia and with China in the East, and also in the former Soviet space where Russia’s attempts since 1990 to re-create a security community have never really delivered the goods either for itself or for others.
Secondly and last is the problem of popular consent and support. All regional structures dealing with security need to be led by national governments so long as the prime formal, and practical, responsibility for security lies at the governmental level. But it is all too easy for cooperation then to become the property of élites and to develop in a ‘club’ atmosphere from which ordinary people in the region, as well as those outside, feel excluded. For the results, you need only look as far as the debacle over approval of the draft EU Constitution: but there is a broader point that organizations claiming to protect and promote democracy can risk their whole credibility when their own stake-holders find them undemocratic. The EU has plainly not solved this challenge and other regional groups should ponder hard on its lessons. Of course effective security work has its own disciplines, and it will rarely make sense to hand over operational control to parliaments, let alone to delegate further. But what the EU’s leaders, and all other regional leaders, do need to think about is a combination of informing and consulting ordinary people better about the security aspect (and all other aspects) of regional integration: and mobilizing and engaging them better especially in the newer areas of security creation and emergency control.
A ‘World of Regions’?
A last word on what all this means for the global security structure and security governance. Today we have one super-power and it is not in any real sense ‘regionalized’. Indeed many Americans see regional organizations as a challenge to themselves, a deliberate attempt to balance and limit US power or to make the world more ‘multi-polar’. As I see it, the EU and all the more successful regional groups exist first and foremost to meet their own people’s needs; and they often realize that those needs can best be met by constructive cooperation or complementarity with the USA. Any more defensive points in their thinking are likely to be about avoiding American bullying or divide-and-rule tactics on their own territory, or being able to make their case against the US when necessary in fora like the WTO—which is hardly unreasonable. In the big picture, however, it is clearly harder to find ways of running the world that are efficient and fair to everyone when we have such a messy combination of single (non-integrated or imperfectly integrated) big powers; a few successfully integrated or integrating regions; and other regions like the greater Middle East, South Asia and East Asia where states of more modest size are creating dangers for themselves and the world precisely because they haven’t yet found or even sincerely tried to find a working regional formula. Shouldn’t those of us who believe in the regional method be trying a good deal harder, if nothing else, to tackle that last problem and to find some better way of talking to the US about it??