European Security and Defence Policy and Nato

European Security and Defence Policy

and NATO

Introduction

Since its creation in 1949 NATO was for a long time the exclusive actor that provided collective security in a military sense for Europe. This meant simultaneously that the United States remained to play an important role in Europe even after the Second World War. A clear, undisputed division of labour arose between NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC), with NATO being a military security organization and the EEC foremost focused on economic integration. Indeed, after the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, an initiative that came too soon, it took the European Union about fifty years to incrementally develop a security and defence policy. The Balkan Wars in the nineties were a decisive moment in this process. It made painfully clear that nor the European Union, neither its individual members had the capacity to handle regional conflicts in their own backyard. Besides the weakness of the EU forces compared to the US military forces and assets, it also showed Europe’s dependency on the United States. Since then, the EU has set up a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) and has started the process to create capabilities to support their ambitions. The development of ESDP is without doubt impressive. Notwithstanding the recent set up the European Union has developed structures and assets and has carried out crisis management operations since 2003. However, ‘the forces committed under the Headline Goal represent the first non-NATO military structure to emerge in post-Cold War Europe’^[1], and this has put EU-NATO relations under pressure. Some have argued that the European Union and NATO share so many members that there is not much to discuss in EU-NATO dialogue. However, what changes this picture is that only NATO has as a member the most powerful nation-state in the world: the United States. The US has been quite concerned that ESDP will become a competitor to NATO. Competition will emerge if the European Union and NATO will develop overlapping roles functions and capabilities. It is therefore inevitable and of utmost relevance to analyze the EU-NATO relationship and the dominant role of the US in order to investigate possible limits for the further development of ESDP.  

Since the Saint Malo declaration it seems that the European Union has made a lot of effort to ensure where it can that ESDP was never set up with the intention to replace or copy NATO. Most ESDP documents explicitly state that the EU will act in compliance with NATO, in other words: ‘the activities of the two organizations were to be complementary and not competitive.’^[2] However, competition might have already been visible in the case of Darfur. In response to a request from the African Union, NATO and the EU could not consent on a common mission, since that would decline the visibility of each organization. In the end two individual operations were conducted with the same objectives. This is a worst case scenario in which NATO and the European Union are openly competing with each other. Hence, the key question that will be addressed in this essay is: is the United States right in fearing that ESDP will develop in a way that will lead to competition between NATO and the European Union, with the risk that both organizations will turn mutually irrelevant?

Saint Malo and Decoupling  

The Saint Malo Declaration of 1998 by French President Jacques Chirac and the British Prime-Minister Blair, is often seen as the starting point for the creation of ESDP. This was the first statement in the history of European security and defence in which the words ‘capacity for autonomous action’ were used. This event was a seen as a fundamental breakthrough with the past and many felt that it would change European Union-NATO relations for good. It came with no surprise that this declaration immediately provoked a reaction from the United States. In direct response to the Saint Malo statement, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared her famous ‘3D’s, i.e. discrimination, decoupling and duplication, summarizing the major concerns the United States has regarding the development of an autonomous ESDP. With discrimination Albright meant that any discrimination against non-EU NATO (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Turkey, US) members had to be avoided. There were fears that the EU countries would form a front in the North Atlantic Council meetings that would threaten the unique position of the United States. In different ways, these three elements can all be linked to the debate if ESDP will become a competitor to NATO, of which the overlapping concepts decoupling and duplication are the most relevant.

The United States has taken in a very interesting position towards any European security and defence policies. One the one hand they urge their European partners for different reasons to expand and improve their security and defence assets. What for long time has been a challenge to the transatlantic relationship is the unequal sharing of the burden. The United States spends in relative terms much more of its GDP on defence than their European partners in NATO. Besides these quantitative gaps, another related problem is that of interoperationability. It has become more and more difficult for US troops to work together with their European partners in NATO, because of their technological superiority.  Furthermore it is in the United States’ own interest to have a strong European Union as partner, so that it can shift its focus from the European continent to regions that are far more unstable. However, European initiatives with regard to security and defence could only develop under the condition that it takes place within the NATO framework. For example ‘the WEU (Western European Union) had a ministerial council, a small secretariat, a consultative assembly, and a defence agency: but its military functions were integrated into NATO.’^[3]