Peace Without Money, War Without Americans

Can European Strategy Cope?

Sven Biscop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317082743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

Britain and France were surprised at having to convince the US of the need to intervene in Libya in 2011. The French intervention in Mali in 2013 confirmed the picture; Washington will support European action, but only if and when Europe takes the initiative. Just as the focus of American strategy is shifting to Asia and the Pacific, vital interests in the European neighbourhood require resolute action. Autonomy is being forced upon Europe, but it is an autonomy constrained by a lack of means as, following the financial crisis, defence budgets across the EU member states are slashed. The ramifications of the Arab Spring and the crisis in Ukraine pose challenges of an enormous scale for the EU and its members. Peace Without Money, War Without Americans is the double challenge that European strategy-makers face. What can be expected from strategy at a European level? Can Europe cope?

Chapter 1
Strategy-Making in Europe: Raiders of the Lost Art

Nobody could predict the Arab Spring anyway, or the crisis in Ukraine, or the civil war in Syria, so why should one need strategy? One has no choice but to make it all up as one goes along, reacting to unpredictable events. Let us not waste time therefore on drafting strategic documents, which with 28 Member States around the table will be extremely difficult. This is still the view taken by many practitioners of foreign and security policy, both in the capitals and in Brussels. While it indicates an understandable frustration with often cumbersome and tedious negotiations, this position also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the function of strategy.

It is true that practitioners as well as academics rarely predict anything with any degree of success or precision. If one keeps predicting the same thing over and over again it may eventually come true, but that does not really count (and, in any case, people usually tire so quickly of Cassandras that even when they turn out to be right they are still ignored). In reality, the revolutions that are predictable are those that do not happen, for if I can foresee them watching from afar from my comfortable seat in a think tank or a university, then so can those who they seek to dethrone. But strategy does not aim to predict anything in the first place. The point of strategy, rather, is to help the decision-maker define a course of action when per definition unpredictable events occur. How important is this for me? That is the question that strategy will help answer, and that answer will determine whether and what action has to be undertaken and which means have to be allocated to it.

The first rule of strategy-making therefore could be stated quite simply as: know thyself. Know your interests, and know your values. Values and interests are not in contradiction: your values will determine which kind of society you want to build and preserve, and that will in turn determine which conditions need to be fulfilled for that to be possible: your vital interests. Your values will further determine which types of instruments are deemed morally acceptable to put to use to that end. Strategy-making then starts with an analysis of the world, in order to identify the most important threats and challenges to one’s values and interests, so as to define ends, ways and means: setting priority objectives, choosing the instruments to achieve them, and allocating the necessary means.

Of course, when a crisis occurs and unpredictable events do turn out to be important because vital interests are directly at stake, urgency in combination with uncertainty and a lack of information will create friction. The fog of diplomacy or, in a worst case scenario, of war, is unavoidable. Yet that is still something different than mere improvisation, which is what decision-making without any prior strategy would amount to. To use a current example: Russian aggression against Ukraine would be seen in an entirely different light, and the response of the EU and NATO would be very different, had Europe not had the regional strategy that it has, the Neighbourhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership, and the strategic partnership with Russia. Similarly, the way Europeans understand and respond to the crises in their southern periphery are framed by the pre-existing southern Neighbourhood Policy and the Union for the Mediterranean with the southern littoral states. Best therefore to think about values and interest beforehand.

A fully-fledged strategic actor will not limit himself to reacting to events. He will also try and proactively shape events and developments. The other function of strategy therefore is to set out a limited number of overall objectives, in order to guide day-to-day decision-making and the allocation of the budget and other means. Finally, though some elements of strategy may remain secret, strategy also serves accountability and public diplomacy. It is a way of communicating how one sees one’s role in the world, in order to legitimize one’s actions vis-à-vis parliaments and citizens, and to create clarity vis-à-vis allies, partners and competitors alike. “Grand strategies are good for democracy” (Posen, 2014, p. 5).

Does one need to put all of that in writing? The more straightforward the decision-making system, the less necessary it is to codify strategy. A state where in the end the strategy is what the president (or the politburo) says that it is, can operate on the basis of an implicit strategy. Vice versa, a complex multi-layered foreign policy actor such as the EU has much more need of an explicit strategy, such as its 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS). The chance that the High Representative and 28 foreign ministers, not to mention the President of the European Council and 28 heads of state and government, all have the same implicit understanding of EU strategy is rather small. Freedman (2013, p. 614) is clear: “Not only does strategy need to be put into words so that others can follow, but it works through affecting the behaviour of others. Thus it is always about persuasion, whether convincing others to work with you or explaining to adversaries the consequences if they do not”.

Documents like the ESS operate at the level of grand strategy (framing all dimensions of foreign policy or external action), and put forward broad long-term goals, which have to be translated into more specific functional and regional strategies. But such strategies do not remain valid for ever. Many of the policies that operate under the aegis of the ESS, and the Neighbourhood Policy is just one of them, have been overtaken by events. One cannot carry on as if there has been no Arab Spring, no Ukraine crisis, no US pivot, and no rise of China. A review of the overarching grand strategy, the ESS, is long overdue therefore. The new High Representative, Federica Mogherini, is to be commended for helping to break the deadlock in the official European strategic debate, which for years had been limited to the rather unproductive question: shall we or shall we not revisit the ESS? Finally, in June 2015 Mogherini was mandated to complete a new strategy by June 2016. Few Member States showed great enthusiasm even then, however. With a few exceptions, most capitals in the course of 2015 just rather grudgingly came to accept that a strategic review can no longer be postponed. One of the underlying reasons is that many European states are simply not used to making strategy anymore.

European Strategy: Implicit, Impeded, and Inevitable

Most if not all European states do have a certain concept of strategy. Even my own country, Belgium, counter-intuitive though it may be, has a grand strategy. Belgium may not use the term “grand strategy” or even just “strategy” in official parlance, but implicitly, subconsciously even, it does have one. History has taught that the powers of Europe either talk each other to death in Brussels meeting rooms or fight each other to death on Belgian battlefields. From a Belgian point of view, the choice is quickly made, hence its drive to promote European integration, especially among its immediate neighbours, France and Germany. That is now so engrained that it is rarely explicitly discussed; it has become part of Belgian strategic culture. But it is a grand strategy, for it concerns the very survival of the country. Seventy years after the end of World War Two the prospect of war among Belgium’s neighbours seems remote, unimaginable even, but from the perspective of world history, it is but a short period. Just 14 years shorter, in fact, than the period that elapsed between the independence of Belgium in 1830 and its invasion in 1914. Deepening European integration remains a relevant grand strategy for Belgium’s national security therefore. But it is hardly relevant to the crises around Europe, in its eastern and southern neighbourhoods, to give just one example. Belgian grand strategy is still linked to the national territory. But Belgium is now part of a single European market and of a currency union, hence it should worry about threats to the Union as a whole, which are acute, and not just about direct threats to its own territory, which are very unlikely.

Many EU Member States are in the same position as Belgium. Their historical experience has generated a deeply engrained strategic orientation: invasion and occupation for Belgium, the Winter War for Finland, partition and abandonment for Poland, defeat for Germany, etc. But they have not adapted their strategic thinking to the fact that as EU Member States what are indirect threats to their own territory are in fact direct threats against the Union – and therefore against themselves. For most of the Cold War, European capitals were actively incentivized not to think strategically: Washington or Moscow, depending on which side of the Iron Curtain they were on, did the strategizing for them and rather preferred not to have independent-minded allies. Few Member States have emancipated themselves from that mind-set of subservience, however, even though the Cold War is now more than a quarter century behind us.

The problem goes even deeper than that. Because European integration has been so successful that war between EU Member States has pretty much become a practical impossibility, within the Union geopolitics and defence do not really matter any longer. As a result, many capitals have forgotten how to think in geopolitical terms altogether. Unfortunately, this impairs their analysis of the world around the EU, even if they were to attempt to address it strategically, where most actors do still think in exactly such terms. For most capitals outside Europe, Stalin’s question – “How many divisions has the pope?” – remains very acute. If Europeans do not realize that, they will never be able to correctly analyse their own strategic situation.

The exceptions are of course Britain and France. As nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council they have maintained a global outlook and an expeditionary posture in their armed forces as well as military bases across the globe. Both countries have a strategic culture in which the use of force is an acceptable instrument of statecraft, and both have an intricate national strategic process, producing regular defence reviews and white books to give direction to their military instrument. But while British and French thinking does not suffer from the same self-imposed limitations as that of most other Europeans, their means to implement whichever strategy they elaborate have become very limited indeed. Possessing a nuclear deterrent, Paris and London are confident that they can defend the national territory. But neither France nor the UK alone can have any significant impact on security in Asia, for example. Even France and the UK together could not pacify Libya: US assets were required to undertake the air campaign in 2011, and EU means would have been required to stabilize the country afterwards. In the end therefore, even the UK is but an off-shore Belgium, as I heard an American academic put it, to the consternation of his British co-panellists: it does not have much more freedom to pursue grand strategy alone than my own country.

Most do not have a strategy, and those that do do not have the means to implement it: is not the logical conclusion to pool both the strategic reflection and the means at the EU level?

That is not what the Member States did, however, at least not quite immediately. The European Union came into being in November 1993, when the Treaty of Maastricht entered into force and the preceding European Economic Community (EEC) was absorbed into a more overtly political Union, with the aspiration to pursue a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In 1999 a politico-military arm was added to the CFSP, equipping the EU to undertake autonomous military operations and civilian missions: originally the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), it is now known as the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The ESS was only adopted fully ten years later however. Even the fact that the creation of the ESDP made the use of force possible under the EU flag did not prompt a debate on strategy. Instead, Member States purposely avoided any strategic debate, for the good reason that they knew very well that it would be impossible to agree because of their widely different views on the degree of autonomy of EU policy vis-à-vis the capitals themselves and vis-à-vis the US. That did not halt progress in other dimensions of foreign and security policy: Member States often pragmatically agree to disagree on one aspect, which allows them to take the issues forward on which they do agree. Thus the institutions of CFSP and CSDP were created and important foreign policy initiatives launched, such as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (1995) with Europe’s southern neighbours.

Indeed, the absence of a formal strategy does not necessarily mean that all action is un-strategic. During the first decade of the CFSP, an implicit “European way” of doing things emerged from the practice of EU foreign policy-making, characterized by cooperation with partner countries, conflict prevention, and a broad approach through aid, trade and diplomacy. The origins of this approach go back very far, for it has roots in the external relations of the EEC. Although it had no formal competence in foreign policy, the Community developed dense trade relations across the globe and built up a network of delegations more encompassing than the network of embassies of any of its Member States. This implicit concept of strategy – for one cannot call it a fully-fledged strategy – steered the development of EU partnerships and long-term policies such as development. It proved entirely insufficient when the EU was confronted with crisis. It was the failure of the EU to comprehensively address the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s and again in Kosovo in 1999 that drove the institutional development of the CFSP and the CSDP. Even perfect institutions will not deliver though if there is no strategy for them to operate on.

That insight finally came to the Member States of the EU in 2003. That year the US invasion of Iraq created a deep divide within Europe, between those who wanted to stand by their most important ally no matter what, and those who felt that even an ally cannot be followed when it so clearly violates one’s own principles and, as would turn out all too soon, acts against one’s interests. British Prime Minister Tony Blair seemed to have been captivated entirely by the regime-changing interventionism of the neo-conservatives advising US President George W. Bush, to the extent even of copying his messianic rhetoric. Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt hosted a summit of Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg, all vehemently opposed to launching a war on flimsy evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq (the alternative motivation, to bring democracy, was put forward only post factum, when the Bush administration had to concede that no WMD were to be found). But whatever Europeans thought, it did not matter. This was the great lesson of the Iraq crisis (apart from the fact that one cannot change a regime, let alone a society, at gunpoint): when Europe is divided, it has no influence. Neither side in the European debate had any impact on American decision-making whatsoever. From this originated the unexpected drive to finally organize a formal strategic debate in the EU and to produce a strategic document. EU Member States had to heal the wounds which the at times very emotional debate about Iraq had left. Codifying the consensus on elements of strategy where it existed was at the same time to project an image of unity to the outside world again. Finally, this was a form of messaging to the US (Biscop and Andersson, 2008). Those who had supported the US-led invasion of Iraq wanted to signal to the Americans that Europe was still an ally and that it cared about the same threats and challenges as the US. Those who had opposed the invasion wanted to make it clear that caring about the same threats and challenges does not imply addressing them in the same way.

This window of opportunity was not wasted. Javier Solana, then the High Representative, was tasked with producing a first draft, which a small team around him elaborated and which he then proposed to the Heads of State and Government meeting at the European Council in June. Then the EU introduced an interesting innovation in the drafting process. Instead of discussing points and commas, working one’s way up through the hierarchy of CFSP bodies, which is the normal procedure for the elaboration of official EU foreign policy texts, Solana had three seminars organized, where the same officials could give their input on the draft, but alongside representatives from national parliaments, from key allies and partners, and from academia and civil society. Having participated myself, I can testify that as an academic one really felt to be part of the debate. Perhaps only because they happened to echo what important capitals felt, but many comments and suggestions made at the seminars did find their way into the final document. In some corners Solana was criticized for circumventing formal procedure, but his approach created a much greater sense of ownership and produced a text that, unlike most EU documents, is short and free of jargon, and actually readable. His method was later copied by NATO, when it revised its strategic concept in 2010. The final document was formally adopted by the European Council as the European Security Strategy in December 2003. A strategy was born.

The Positive Strength of European Strategy

If “know thyself” is the first rule of strategy-making, then the first question when writing a European strategy is: what is Europe? The answer was put as perceptively as concisely by the great British historian Tony Judt (2005, p. 793), who at the end of his magisterial Postwar concluded: it is the “European Social Model”.

Through a combination of democracy, capitalism – or the free market, if capitalism sounds too aggressive – and government intervention at the European and at the national level, Europeans have constructed a very distinctive model of society. Being distinctive is not an objective in its own right – North Korea is very distinctive too but that does not make it a model to emulate – but Europe really is distinguished by its egalitarian aspiration, what Judt (2005, p. 793) calls “a sense … of the balance of social rights, civic solidarity and collective responsibility … a social consensus … regarded by many citizens a formally binding”. What is more, the European social model really works: Europe is the most equal continent on the planet, providing the greatest security, freedom, and prosperity to the greatest number of citizens. Security: every citizen has to be kept free from harm. Freedom: every citizen needs to participate in democratic decision-making (which is a duty as much as a right), has to have his human rights respected, and has to be equally treated before the law. But prosperity as well: every citizen has a right to a fair share of the wealth that his society produces; not an equal share, but a just one. Security, freedom and prosperity are the three core public goods to which every citizen is entitled. They are inextricably related: unless one is provided with all three, one cannot enjoy any single one of them. It is no good being rich if one risks getting shot at the moment one steps outside one’s door; vice versa it is little consolation that one’s country is free from any military threat if one is dying of hunger. Providing these public goods is the responsibility of government, at all levels, from local through regional and national government up to the EU level.

Things are far from perfect (every single European living below the poverty line is one too many), and there are many differences in how the social model is organized between one Member State and another. Care should be taken that new Member States in Eastern Europe move in the same direction rather than diluting the model, while reforming and deepening it in countries like the original six that founded the EEC. But the aspiration is real and shared. In 2009, the Member States even formally codified it in the Lisbon Treaty, which amended Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and added equality and solidarity to the list of values on which European integration is based:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between men and women prevail.

What many have forgotten is that the construction of this social model was, and remains, an inherent part of the European project. Everybody is familiar with the founding myth of the EU: after the end of the World War II, in order to prevent for ever more that another world war would start in Europe, the founding fathers, in their great foresight and wisdom, launched upon a path of integration between states that would make war between them a practical impossibility. The mantra has been repeated so often that we have become bored with it, which obscures the fact that the plan has worked. In view of the history of Europe, assuring peace between the members of the EEC/EU is an incredible success.

But: this is only half of the story. At the same time as they started the process of European integration, the countries of (western) Europe made a quantum leap in the establishment of the comprehensive welfare state. For a reason: they had learned that without the social buffer of the welfare state, democracy could not cope with severe economic crisis and the resulting political upheaval. In the 1930s, as a result, in the majority of European countries democracy had collapsed and given way to various forms of authoritarianism and fascism, which inevitably led to war. Already during the war statesmen began to devise a post-war social model that sought to prevent the lure of the strong man solution from threatening democracy ever again. The Beveridge Report, for example, which formed the basis for the British welfare state, dates from 1942. In the Belgian case, the decrees on social security were elaborated by the government in exile in London and implemented immediately upon its return to Brussels in the second half of 1944, even before the country had been liberated in its entirety. For the founding fathers, the social model was an inherent part of their peace project. It is not a luxury product, something that is nice to have when things are going well and can easily be discarded as bal...