A Common Foreign Policy for Europe?

Competing Visions of the CFSP

John Peterson, Helene Sjursen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415170710
• eBook ISBN: 9781134697441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first book to explore the EU's record as a global actor since the creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1993 within the context of the Treaty of Amsterdam and recent decisions relating to NATO and EU enlargement. The chapters focus on: * the interface between EU foreign and trade policies* the EU's relationship with European defence organizations* its behaviour within the OSCE and UN* the institutional consequences of the CFSP* case studies of EU policies towards Central and Eastern Europe and the Maghreb countries.The editors draw the findings together to assess whether the EU has been successful as a global actor and consider the question: can the EU become a more credible, reliable and unitary global actor?

Part I: A framework for analysis

1: Introduction: The European Union as a global actor

John Peterson

The European Union’s (EU) enormous international power and frequent inability to wield it very effectively in the pursuit of European interests surely constitutes one of the most fascinating paradoxes of the ‘European project’. By its nature, the paradox invites lively debate and even describing it in this way may be contentious: it might be argued that the EU lacks ‘power’ in the hard sense of military or even diplomatic resources which it may deploy in pursuit of ‘European interests’, which are defined quite hazily when they may be defined at all. However, there is little doubt that the paradox, broadly defined, will bedevil the EU well into the twentyfirst century. As it enlarges its membership, the Union will become a macrocosm of progressively more diverse national interests. The creation of a single European currency, arguably the most audacious step in the history of European integration, threatens to accentuate the gap between the EU’s promise and performance as a global actor.

There is no shortage of analyses of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) (see Forster and Wallace 1996; Hill 1996a; Holland 1997; Regelsberger et al. 1997a; M.E.Smith 1998). Most support the conclusion that the CFSP has been crippled by three fundamental defects, none of which can be repaired in any simple way. The first is a lack of identity. It is plausible to suggest that a ‘common’ foreign policy cannot, by definition, exist as long as there is no ‘European public’. As one EU official puts it:

If a minister wants to raise his profile, which as a politician he must do, he will be addressing his home audience exclusively. Most of the problems come from this basic fact. What we need is a public face for our policy, but that is still a long way off.¹

A related problem is one of interests. Even if the EU’s identity crisis of the late 1990s was only temporary (a big ‘if’), there remained ‘little evidence that the European identity that began to emerge in the 1980s was based on any particularly strong notion of…identifiable European interest(s)’ (Allen 1996:290). If such interests ever existed, they were far more likely to exist in a Cold War context, when it was relatively easy to narrow differences between national policies vis-à-vis the Soviet bloc. The new foreign policy challenges of a post-Cold War world—particularly in the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa—invite far more diversity in terms of national interests among the EU fifteen. After 1989–91, if foreign policies were national currencies, an analogy could be drawn to a shift from fixed exchange rates to free-floating currencies (Allen 1996:292).

The CFSP’s third defect—its weak institutions—has dominated both academic analysis and diplomatic energies, even if it is arguably less important or fundamental than the first two defects. The negotiations leading to the Maastricht Treaty, which gave birth to the CFSP, produced a number of compromises that manifest themselves in awkward or unworkable institutions (see de Schoutheete 1993). Most subsequent analyses linked the CFSP’s ‘weak institutionalisation and marginal policy output’ (Forster and Wallace 1996:412). The Amsterdam Treaty, agreed in mid-1997, held out little prospect of solving the CFSP’s institutional problems, despite enormous firefights about institutional reform in the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) which preceded the Treaty.

Still, lively debates have arisen concerning the EU’s performance as an international actor since 1993. A number of CFSP joint actions—the ‘stability pacts’ initiative in Eastern Europe (Ginsberg 1997a), the administration of the Bosnian city of Mostar, the promotion of democracy in South Africa (Holland 1995) and the EU’s salesmanship of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (Müller and van Dassen 1997) have been at least partial successes. Holland (1995:556) insists ‘that the EU has made significant progress towards successfully performing the role of an international actor’.

While ‘CFSP studies’ may be a somewhat crowded field, the present volume seeks to make an original contribution in at least two ways. First, it examines the CFSP at a crucial juncture in the EU’s evolution, when enlargement, Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and the ratification of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty dominate an unusually packed EU agenda. Second, while offering competing visions of the CFSP, all of the book’s contributors confront three essential themes:

• The ‘capabilities-expectations’ gap (see Hill 1993). To what extent did the transition from European Political Cooperation (EPC) to the CFSP raise expectations of the EU that it simply is incapable of fulfilling?
• The nature of the EU’s foreign policy process. How has the CFSP altered EU decision-making on external policy questions and with what effects?
• The EU’s external role. What are the main determinants of the EU’s ability to wield its influence as an international actor?

Each of these themes is developed in successive sections below. A final section outlines the plan and approach of the book.

THE CAPABILITIES-EXPECTATIONS GAP

The Maastricht Treaty was intended to mark a break with EPC, which operated with few rules in an ‘informal, ‘club-like’ atmosphere’ (M.E. Smith 1998:4). The CFSP would be far more formalised: Title V of Maastricht stated that the topic of a ‘joint action’ had to be approved by the European Council (acting unanimously), although actions could then be implemented on the basis of qualified majority voting (QMV). The Treaty was notable in its vagueness, but ‘joint actions’ appeared to be quite specific measures which required the expenditure of resources. In contrast, ‘common positions’ seemed to imply an alignment of national policies but not necessarily the use of resources or any ‘action’.

Far from marking a true break with EPC, the Maastricht Treaty revealed the ‘contradiction between the ambitions of EU member governments to play a larger international role and their reluctance to move beyond an intergovernmental framework in doing so’ (Hill and Wallace 1996:5). The Treaty contained brave rhetoric about the EU’s ‘spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity’ and promised a policy ‘covering all aspects of foreign and security policy’. Ultimately, however, it left unaltered EPC’s commitment to action by consensus only. At least in its early years, the CFSP was confined to a relatively narrow set of actions on which the EU’s Member States could agree. It was not preoccupied with a much wider array of foreign and security policy ‘aspects’ than was the case under EPC.

In an influential and prescient article, Christopher Hill (1993) predicted that the creation of the CFSP would exacerbate an emerging ‘capabilities— expectations gap’. Part of the problem clearly was the Maastricht Treaty itself, which held out the promise of a true revolution in European foreign policy-making. The EU, it seemed to say, would construct a truly common foreign policy. Yet, a senior US official’s view was typical of the diplomatic world’s rapid disillusionment with the CFSP:

We see that the Union is trying to do more than in the past under the CFSP and we understand people are still learning how to make it work. But our experience of working with the CFSP has been very rocky. The problem is one of expectations: if the CFSP had been announced as a marginal advance on EPC, there’d be no problem now.²

Clearly, the EU failed fundamentally to equip itself to meet the outside world’s expectations, which were raised by the Treaty’s brave rhetoric stating that Member States would ‘support the Union’s external and security policy activity actively and unreservedly’ and that the CFSP would ‘strengthen the security of the Union and its Member States in all ways’. A persistent problem was the Maastricht Treaty’s new ‘pillar’ structure. Several CFSP actions (under ‘pillar II’), such as a common position on relations with Ukraine, were successful mainly because European Community (‘pillar I’) instruments were deployed effectively (Community funds were deployed to help pay for the closure of part of the Chernobyl nuclear plant) with the European Commission taking the lead (see Peterson and Ward 1995). However, the EU remained incapable of doing much of any importance that involved speedy coordination across pillars.

Moreover, CFSP decision-makers often became preoccupied by seemingly petty disputes surrounding precedent and procedure, as opposed to action. Finance was a particularly persistent problem. Maastricht’s Article J. 11 left the Council to decide later how to finance the CFSP, an issue which preoccupied the entire CFSP machinery for much of the first year of its existence in 1994. In particular, EU policy in Bosnia suffered considerably from delays caused by budgetary and related wrangles over, first, humanitarian aid and, later, funding for civilian reconstruction. To the outside world, the CFSP began to symbolise long delays, a convenient excuse for avoiding action and rigid, unalterable policy positions once they were agreed.

The gap between the EU’s capabilities and the rest of the world’s expectations is partly a consequence of the EU’s lack of capacity for leadership. The ‘preponderant’ role of the Council Presidency (Nuttall 1993: 315) which existed under the old EPC, was left essentially unchanged by the Maastricht Treaty. As such, the first six months of the CFSP’s existence were badly hampered by the unilateralism of the Greek Presidency: Greece imposed an economic blockade on Macedonia without consulting its EU partners and distracted the Union’s attention from the seriously deteriorating situation in Bosnia. Woodward’s masterful (1995: 396) analysis of the war in the Balkans highlighted the costs of collective EU decision-making:

Europeans threw away valuable resources to influence the outcome, such as the enormous leverage held by the European Community in 1989–90, when alternative paths to European membership were critical in the behavior of Yugoslav politicians, or in 1991 when the EC chose to recognize Slovenia and Croatia—spending its most powerful weapon—and to ask nothing in return. They also wasted time when there was little time to waste.

To try to avoid a repetition of the EU’s humiliation in Bosnia, Jacques Santer appointed no less than four Commissioners with external policy responsibilities upon his investiture as Commission President in 1995, while insisting that he himself would act as an overall coordinator for external policy. Yet, Santer’s self-appointment as the EU’s top ‘external ambassador’ may even have acted to worsen inter-institutional squabbling over the CFSP. It was followed by a (mainly) French initiative to create some type of High Representative—a ‘Monsieur PESC’, after the French acronym for CFSP—in 1995. The Commission President’s own staunch resistance to the idea was shared by several Member States (such as Belgium and Italy) in the 1996–7 IGC. Eventually, divisions were papered over by an agreement to make the Council General Secretary also the ‘High Representative for the CFSP’, while preserving the external representational role of the Council Presidency on CFSP matters (with ‘M.PESC’ ‘assisting’ the Presidency). The appointment of M.PESC seemed likely to raise expectations among the EU’s interlocutors, who would finally be given their coveted ‘one phone number to call in Europe’. The danger was that the official at the end of the line might have little or no power to commit the EU.

INSTITUTIONS: THE DEBATE THAT NEVER ENDS

The CFSP’s institutional weakness is perhaps best appreciated by comparing the Maastricht Treaty’s provisions for foreign policy with those set out for Economic and Monetary Union. As Michael E.Smith (1996:2) has noted, ‘[w]here EMU involves a clearly-defined goal, criteria to achieve it, a timetable for changes, sanctions for defectors, and a new central institution with a firm mandate for its operations, the CFSP lacks all of these’. It may go without saying that the same methods and institutions used to encourage economic integration, and reap its benefits, are not readily applicable to foreign policy. Nor is there any clear or united social constituency for a truly common EU foreign policy: ‘though some argue for the political benefits that CFSP would bring, few societal transacters find its absence costly. There is therefore minimal social demand for integration in that policy domain’ (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1997:309).

However, institutionally, the Maastricht Treaty made the Commission, General Affairs Council, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) responsible for decisions within both pillars I and II, with a view to encouraging more coherence in EU external policy. The Treaty institutionalised exchanges between COREPER and the socalled ‘Political Directors’, or top Foreign Ministry officials with CFSP responsibilities. Yet, the framework has not eliminated rivalries between COREPER and the Political Directors, and may even have worsened them. An enduring problem is that the CFSP ‘reflects the traditional foreign policy activities of Foreign Ministries which are gradually being marginalized’ (Nuttall 1993: 311). What comes under the rubric ‘foreign policy’ has both expanded and become more compartmentalised in the 1990s. National foreign ministries generally do not exert control over increasingly salient financial, economic, trade and development aid policy instruments, many of which come under the remit of the Commission and pillar I. Especially in larger EU Member States, the CFSP actually accounts for a rather small share of what might legitimately be considered ‘foreign policy’.

What does remain pillar II ‘turf’ is jealously guarded by foreign ministries. EU Political Directors are based in national capitals, have direct lines to their Foreign Ministers and thus usually have ample opportunity to circumvent COREPER. In a majority of EU Member States, the Political Director is officially a superior of its Permanent Representative. It is little wonder that the single institutional framework has been ‘too weak to overcome the practical problems…which arise each time the Union wants to use more than one policy component to deal with a particular issue in international relations’ (Rummel 1996a:4).

The Maastricht Treaty also sought greater coherence by linking foreign policy with defence (or ‘security’) policies, specifically by making the WEU ‘an integral part of the development of the Union, to elaborate and implement decisions and actions of the Union which have defence implications’. New steps to facilitate closer links between the Union and WEU included moving the latter’s secretariat to Brussels (from London) and shortening the length of its Presidency from one year to six months to coincide with the length of the EU Council Presidency. In a broader sense, the EU took on security policy ambitions in a new system of ‘interlocking institutions’ (i.e. the WEU, NATO, the OSCE, the UN, etc.) which, it was hoped, could cope with new problems of European security. Yet, the war in ex-Yugoslavia revealed clearly both the EU’s inability to play a pivotal role in Europe’s defence institution mix, as well as the problem of multiple institutions which wield effective veto power over each other in the absence of any clear hierarchy.

The debate about recasting the EU’s security role did not reach a conclusive end-game at the 1997 Amsterdam summit. Insiders were astounded at the way in which the summit broke up in the early hours of the morning without a convergence of views on EU-WEU relations, but with a new Treaty article (J.7) apparently ‘agreed’. Under its new and impressive Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the UK was closely involved in the drafting of the Treaty article after it managed to block a protocol favoured by a majority of Member States setting out the stages and a timetable for actual integration of the WEU into the European Union.

Since the rather high-minded days of the early 1990s, it has become clear that a truly independent ‘European Security and Defence Identity’ (ESDI) would be enormously expensive, requiring an investment of between 4–7 per cent of EU GDP over a period of years. Thus, the CFSP will not be backed by a defence capability either soon or easily. Yet, the Amsterdam Treaty’s commitment to ‘foster closer institutional relations’ with the WEU, as well as a separate protocol committing the EU to new ‘arrangements for enhanced cooperation’ with the WEU, are ripe for different interpretations by different Member States. Eventually, a renewed French-led drive to enhance EU-WEU cooperation is almost certain, particularly if France’s rapprochement with NATO remains stalled, as it was after the election of a Socialist-led French government in 1997. The point is that the question of the EU’s relationship to the WEU refuses to go away.

The Amsterdam Treaty gave a rather clearer response to another pressing institutional question: how could the EU ever have a ‘common’ foreign policy without a common planning and analysis capability? A new Treaty declaration mandated the creation of a ‘policy planning and early warning unit’. The decision reflected nearly unanimous dissatisfaction with the CFSP Directorate, which had been created in 1993 and integrated into the Council General Secretariat. The Directorate consisted of about twenty-seven officials, half of whom were seconded from national foreign ministries. As such, particularly in Bosnia, the EU had ‘no independent capacity of analysis and briefing’ (Nuttall 1994:19). Meanwhile, national positions seemed woefully ignorant of both historical antecedents and present realities:

Where the decision-makers could get (and wanted) solid advice, based on expertise…it was normally from military experts—who strongly warned against military intervention—rather than from specialists on Yugoslavia…For instance, none of the EC Ministers of Foreign Affairs, meeting in Lisbon on 6 April 1992 to recognize Bosnia-Herzegovina, apparently had a competent aide to tell them that April 6 was the anniversary of Hitler’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1941. As the attack started with a bombardment of Belgrade, it was to be expected that the Serbs would interpret this meeting on that date as a very ominous signal, which certainly seems to be the case judging from the reaction of the Serbian mass media.

(Wiberg 1996:208)

The new policy planning unit (under the authority of ‘M.PESC’) which brings together officials from the Council, the WEU, Member States and the Commission, is at least potentially an important institutional step forward.

Similarly, the CFSP’s budget was subject to new Treaty provisions, which essentially formalised what already had emerged in practice. During its first three years, a total of three-quarters of all expenses related to the CFSP joint actions had been funded through the Community’s budget. The creation of a specific CFSP line in the EC budget received formal blessing in the Amsterdam Treaty. All Member States seemed keen to avoid a rerun of the negotiations on humanitarian aid for Bosnia: even after it was agreed unanimously that most of the sum would be financed through the Community budget, a long and unbecoming argument arose over how the tiny sum of 24 million ECU (to be paid through national contributions) would be divided between contributing Member States.

Of course, the most hotly-debated issue of institutional reform in the IGC was the CFSP’s formal decision-making rules. The Amsterdam Treaty offered a small sop to integrationists by allowing that once the European Council had unanimously agreed ‘common strategies’, joint actions and common positions based on them could be agreed by QMV. The idea of allowing ‘constructive abstentions’ to CFSP actions received strong Franco—German support during the IGC, and thus appeared in a new article (J.13) of the Amsterdam Treaty. On the other hand, new provisions allowing constructive abstentions were riddled with qualifications, allowing joint actions to go ahead despite abstentions only ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I: A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS
• PART II: EU EXTERNAL POLICY: POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND INSTITUTIONS
• PART III: CASE STUDIES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY