In December 2003, the EU heads of state agreed a global strategy paper which said:
As a union of 25 states with over 450 million people producing a quarter of the world’s Gross National Product (GNP), the European Union is a global actor; it should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security.Drawing a sharp contrast between Europe’s ‘zone of security’ and the insecurity and conflict that characterises most parts of the world, it noted both the ‘critical role’ the USA has played in creating a peaceful Europe and the ‘dominant position as a military actor’ which America now occupies in the post-cold war world. ‘Nevertheless, no single country is able to tackle today’s complex problems entirely on its own.’
European states collectively punch below their weight in world politics. The twenty five members of the EU currently provide five of the UN Security Council’s members (three of them on a rotating basis), and 40% of the UN’s budget; the EU-25 is a significant voting bloc in all international organisations. Collectively, these states spend 160bn Euros on defence, second only to the USA, and deploy some 45,000 diplomats. They spend around 80bn Euros per year on economic assistance to third countries – more than the United States or any other group of states. But they do not often act collectively, either in defence or in foreign policy, in promoting economic development or in preventing conflict. There remains a deep reluctance, in all capitals, to move beyond the declaratory diplomacy of European Councils towards effective common policies.
Part of the problem is that the European region itself seems relatively peaceful and secure. The end of the Cold War led to the withdrawal of Soviet forces from central Europe and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. The disintegration of Yugoslavia spilled refugees across Western Europe, dragging initially-reluctant EU governments to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, and to send forces to stabilise Macedonia and Albania. The Western Balkans remain a concern, and a political, financial and military commitment; but they are not seen as presenting an immediate threat. Conflicts outside the European region spill over into the EU in surges of refugees – from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran and Iraq – and occasional terrorist attacks; but are not yet seen as primarily threats to Europe or responsibilities for Europe rather than domestic problems. Even measures against extremist terrorism has had only a limited unifying effect.
Until 1998, successive British governments had blocked the development of coherent European defence arrangements. The Western European Union was used as a mechanism to prevent true European capabilities from emerging. The feeling among British political leaders was that a stronger, more independent, European defence capability threatened to undermine NATO. The UK wanted the USA locked in to European security through NATO. The UK policy change in the autumn of 1998 was a watershed in the development of an EU defence capability, and led to the Anglo-French accord at St Malo in December. This in turn allowed a succession of summits and meetings through 1999 to enable the formulation of real aspirations at Helsinki at the end of the year. The Helsinki Headline Goals looked to a deployable EU force of some 60,000 that could be assembled within 2 months and deployed for a year.
Coincidently, Europe had recognised how dependent it had become on US military power earlier that year in Kosovo. The European members of NATO had promised to rectify their military weakness through the Defence Capabilities Initiative (DCI) of the Washington summit in April 1999. Yet subsequently, little has been done to provide these promised enabling capabilities.
The following year, the development of the EU institutions and the commitments progressed well. Nevertheless, real military activity continued to be done in the Balkans through NATO, and, for the UK, bilaterally in Sierra Leone, or through the United Nations in East Timor, or bilaterally with the US over Iraq no fly zones. This was not surprising given that the EU had not yet declared an operational capability and the organisation was still at the planning stage. It looked at the time as though there was some reluctance for the EU to push ahead with liaison arrangements for NATO, which was curious given the acknowledged dependence on NATO for shared assets.
2001 was not a good year for the fragile emerging European arrangements. The second commitments conference at the end of the year was having to deal with the missing enabling capabilities and how they would be brought into being. These gaps included logistics, force protection, air/sea transport, combat search and rescue, precision weapons, command and control, surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance. But the real change of focus came with the attacks on Washington and New York on 11 September. NATO simultaneously showed both its cohesion and its impotence. The invoking of Article 5 for the first time was a powerful political signal of support for the USA; but the reality was that the US would not use NATO to prosecute its war on terrorism. Such European contribution as there was for the operation in Afghanistan, and the subsequent pursuit of Al-Qaeda, was done on an exclusively bilateral basis with the US. As we see now in Afghanistan, this continues to this day with NATO doing the reconstruction tasks and the US led coalition doing the warfighting.
The sidelining of NATO, the new terrorist threat, and the large rise in US defence spending might have been expected to put a new sense of urgency into developing usable European capabilities. In fact the reverse seems to have been the case. The Europeans have looked inward at their own national security, and most show little enthusiasm for the new US power projection strategy. They have been demoralised by the scale of the increase in US defence spending, which makes the prospect of matching American technology and being interoperable seem even more difficult. Nor are they happy at the prospect of a division of labour, which leaves Europe doing the nation building (in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and perhaps eventually in Iraq) while the USA does the quick in and out high intensity campaigns.
NATO was aware of this danger and members made a number of bold undertakings at the Prague Summit in November 2002. NATO looked to reduce the list of 59 DCI weaknesses to a handful, in the hope that members would at least address the most important. A parallel EU exercise through the Helsinki Headline Goal process is trying to put pressure on EU members to fill these same gaps. The approaches are still fragmented. NATO also backed the establishment of a NATO Response Force (NRF), which would provide a very fast (perhaps within a week) deployable modern military force of up to 20,000 troops. These initiatives remain unlikely to be sustained without a coherent European view on how and when they might be used. The experience of 2003 over the Iraq conflict has made this even more difficult.
The EU and NATO were both damaged by the diplomatic wrangling in the run up to the operation. With the exception of the UK, even those EU nations which supported the US led intervention provided little in the way of military capability for the combat phase of the Iraq operation. The US has formulated its national strategy to deal with the way that it sees the future of international security. NATO was, and is, still working to its 1999 strategic concept, which badly needs updating. In theory, the EU was still preparing its defence capabilities under the Helsinki Headline Goals against a template of the Petersberg Tasks, which reflects the world of 1992. In early February 2003 UK Prime Minister Tony Blair met with President Chirac of France in Le Touquet. Despite the public arguments between the two leaders over Iraq, they reinforced their St Malo agreement to advance ESDP and encourage new defence capabilities. But on 29 April as the Iraq combat campaign was ending , the leaders of Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg met and launched a new EU planning capability to be housed at Tervuren in Belgium. This was seen as a deepening of the divide between pro and anti US camps in Europe. The US, supported strongly by the UK, had always argued that there was no need for the EU to duplicate the planning facilities available at SHAPE, as these could be used for EU as well as NATO operations. A successful transfer of responsibility in Macedonia from NATO to the EU gave hope that ESDP was at last getting practical. The agreement to deploy an EU force to Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo was taken in May 2003. This operation gave an example of the EU deploying well outside the immediate European area without help from NATO.
Finally, at the EU Summit in Rome in early October 2003, it was announced that the EU would after all take over from NATO in Bosnia. At the EU foreign ministers meeting in early May 2003, it had been agreed that the EU needed to develop its own strategic doctrine. This strategy was agreed by EU members on 12 December 2003. This was an important step in the process towards producing appropriate capabilities. The EU security strategy contains many strands which echo analysis in the US national strategy. While new threats from terrorism, proliferation, failed states and organised crime are identified, the EU responses are more concerned about using the international system than pre-emptive military force. The work that was then needed was to translate the strategy into military and other requirements.
Although the Helsinki Headline Goals were declared formally met in 2003, the EU operational capability across the full range of Petersberg tasks was still limited . A new 2010 Headline Goal was adopted at the Brussels European Council in June 2004 and its essence captured in the statement:
"Member States have decided to commit themselves to be able by 2010 to respond to with rapid and decisive action applying a fully coherent approach to the whole spectrum of crisis management operations. This includes humanitarian and rescue tasks, peace-keeping tasks, tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking. As indicated by the ESS this might also include joint disarmament operations, the support for third countries in combating terrorism and security sector reform. The EU must be able to act before a crisis occurs and preventive engagement can avoid that a situation deteriorates. The EU must retain the ability to conduct concurrent operations thus sustaining several operations simultaneously at different levels of engagement.”
The new Headline Goal 2010 outlines a process for achieving these objectives with some specific milestones:
• to be able to rapidly set-up an operation centre ;
• to establish the Agency in the field of defence capability development,
research, acquisition and armaments (European Defence Agency) during
2004.
• to implement by 2005 the creation of an EU strategic lift joint coordination;
• to develop (between some Member States) a European Airlift command by 2010;
• to complete by 2007 the establishment of the Battle Groups ;
• to acquire the availability of an aircraft carrier with its associated air wing
and escort by 2008;
• to improve the communications compatibility by 2010;
• to develop quantitative benchmarks and criteria for national forces
.
The now almost dead European Constitution would have done much to keep this impetus going. But despite the failure to achieve ratification for all member states, the building blocks for the European Security Strategy are making progress. The European Defence Agency is up and running. The European Defence Agency has been described by its Chief as a dating agency. It tries to fix co-operation between states on both procurement and planning. It can only move with the consent of states and this has proved problematic.So-called Battle groups are forming. These Battle Groups are deployable and sustainable for 120 days and are sized at around 1500 troops at 15 days notice. A more realistic and perhaps usable force than the 60,000 troops originally envisaged. However a modest aspiration for the 2 million or so military personnel employed in the EU.
All proposals for more capable European forces require serious investment. The European Security Strategy Paper called for more resources for defence. While European nations are to a greater or lesser extent restructuring their forces, there is little sign that new money will be made available for expensive enabling capabilities. Defence budgets at best are held level in real terms, and this is insufficient to fund either major new capabilities, or maintain force levels over a period of time. Yet plans for specialist contributions, such as the NATO Response Force proposal of 2002, will need early funding if they are to be achieved. In addition, the range of modern enabling capabilities identified during the original Helsinki Headline Goal process, and the subsequent 2010 targets remain unaffordable by individual nations.
There is limited consensus among European governments, or national parliaments, or national media, on the character or gravity of external threats to European security, or of the most appropriate European responses to them – or even on how far European governments should shoulder the responsibility for responding to them. There is almost no public debate across national boundaries about Europe’s collective global role. This leaves foreign and defence ministries drafting collective declarations in a vacuum, with little attention from their press and parliaments, and less support within national politics for confronting awkward choices about resource allocation and international commitments. Worse, there is a sense in which the illusion of common European policy provides an alibi for inaction, especially within smaller states; their ministers travel to Brussels, agree on common policies, and then return home without accepting that national actions are crucial to implementation
There are three complementary pressures on European nations to start taking forward sharing some force elements. First, pooling offers the opportunity for lower overhead costs, and the resources released might then be used to fund new capabilities. Second, joint owned-joint operated forces would make the new enabling capabilities more affordable on a shared basis. Thirdly, pooled forces would drive moves towards greater interoperability and common doctrine and equipment. In time it might even lead to more sensible procurement practices.
There is one other consideration which could increase the attractiveness of pooled capabilities to European governments. The experience of the Afghanistan campaign has increased doubts about the relevance of NATO to future high intensity campaigns even when there is consensus for action. The only NATO contribution to the 2001 intervention was its one joint owned joint operated) force: AWACs. All other contributions to the US operation in Afghanistan were arranged on a bilateral national basis. If Europe is to be seen as a relevant partner with the US when planning future operations, it would benefit not only from fielding European capabilities which were able to operate alongside US forces, but also by fielding them as joint owned joint operated capabilities. This would mean that Europe would be in the loop over any decision to use such force elements.
This paper has tracked the significant milestones on the road to a more coherent European Security and Defence Policy underpinned by useful military capabilities. The trendline is more difficult to plot. The key players in making progress are France and the UK. Each has historically adopted a more global approach to security and has tried to provide the necessary national military capability to underpin that global policy. Working together, they can drive forward a more effective EU military capability. Germany may play a more important role once it restructures its forces, and given the shifting political fortunes of the leaders of the big 3. There are signs that it is at last prepared to bite this bullet. The danger is that the restructuring will merely turn into cost cutting.
The lack of agreement on a new EU Constitution is a negative factor for progress on ESDP. Enlargement of the EU complicates the future decision making process, but small countries as well as large are sensitive about their sovereignty in the defence area. Reform of the EU institutions is perhaps more necessary in the field of security than anywhere else. The division of responsibilities between Council of Ministers, Commission and Parliament does not make for a coherent, transparent and fully democratic approach to security policy. It looks as though it may be many years before this problem is solved. This is a pity as the unique nature of the EU having levers in military, aid, civil society and justice ought to give it a special role to play in promoting internation stability and conflict prevention.
Progress for the EU has been slow, but the building bricks are there. The Euopean Security Strategy document gives the start of a common strategic approach. The experience of real operations are informing the development process, and shows that the EU is prepared to act either with NATO or on its own. Nor does the EU feel constrained to act only near its borders. The military security dimension remains a key issue for Europe in its future relations with the US. To be cast in the role of sweeper up after America is not an enticing prospect. Without addressing the shortfalls in military capability, EU member states will find themselves less and less able to operate individually or collectively to support their common interests. Nor will they have a strong voice in where and how future operations are conducted.
The need for an EU defence budget to manage such a system is urgent. Recent squabbles over funding for the EDA research proposals are not encouraging. Member states might start this process by allocating a small proportion of their defence budgets to a common fund to start producing useful capabilities on a supranational basis.
The best hope for a progressive development of ESDP comes from the increasing complexity of operational tasks which the EU is prepared to undertake. Macedonia, Bunia and Bosnia perhaps point the way ahead. Doing real military tasks will provide both experience of working together and confidence in what can be done. Over the longer term the costs of defence will force even the least willing governments into greater integration of military capabilities. I remain cautiously optimistic, although I fear that the UK will not play as full a role as it should, given its attachment to the US.