The European Union in the Security of Europe

From Cold War to Terror War

Steve Marsh, Wyn Rees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136631016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the European Union's contribution to providing security in Europe amidst an increasingly complex and challenging environment.

In this new and comprehensive guide to the EU's role in security since the end of the Cold War, the authors offer an explanation of EU internal and external security regimes, and argue that the Union has become an important exporter of security within its region. However, the Union's rhetorical ambitions and commitments continue to outstrip its capabilities and it lacks both a common conceptualisation of security and a meaningful, shared strategic culture. Drawing extensively on primary sources the book examines the Union's relations with the US and Russia in a time of shifting geostrategic calculations and priorities. With the EU capacity for enlargement slowing, this text presents a detailed assessment of EU security policies towards Central Europe, the Mediterranean, the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe and South Caucasus.

European Union Security will be of interest to students and scholars of the EU, security studies, and international relations.

1

INTRODUCTION

The nature of security

‘Security’ is an inherently vague and indeterminate concept because it is a state of mind. In essence, it represents a feeling of well-being, an absence of fear.¹ For an individual or group to feel secure, there must be a lack of threat to their core values. A sense of insecurity leads to feelings of anxiety and concern and, at worse, can result in panic and irrationality. Security is therefore a prerequisite before other types of constructive and purposeful behaviour can occur. If there is no sense of security then it is unlikely that there will be confidence about the possession of property, the rule of law or the pursuit of peaceful endeavour. The absence of security can lead to societal paralysis.

Security is a relative rather than an absolute concept. A feeling of complete security is not achievable so each actor has to weigh up how much security is enough to satisfy their needs. The resources that will have to be expended to obtain the desired level of security have to be matched against the risks that each is willing to tolerate. Marginal increases in security may only be available at relatively high cost and an actor will have to balance these costs against other priorities. The extent of the threats that are tolerated will usually reflect the size and power of the actor concerned, although major actors also tend to have correspondingly large and diversified interests that have to be protected.

The process by which an issue becomes a security matter has been the subject of considerable academic study. ‘Securitisation’ involves raising an issue to a special level of priority, thereby justifying a high level of resources and an urgent response. Buzan, Waever and de Wilde have identified three stages in the securitisation process.² The first is the elevation of an issue that is perceived subjectively by a community to represent an existential threat to a referent object. The second stage is a speech act that uses the language of security in order to place a subject into this special category. This speech act is carried out by groups within the community that have both responsibility and authority for ensuring security. The third and final stage in the process is the acceptance of this language by a mass audience, with the result that it is granted legitimacy.

The nature of what is perceived to be at risk will vary according to circumstances. The traditional conception of security conceives of States, and their sovereign independence or survival, being put at risk by the military forces of other States. According to this model, the objective of the state is to preserve its own territorial integrity and autonomy of action. Security is thus understood as the preserve of the state – national security – with the aim of protecting its citizens and its homeland. The state is the sole, legitimate possessor of military forces for the purpose of guarding its domestic space from hostile incursion.

However, this approach fails to appreciate that States themselves can be the causes of insecurity. Military preparedness for defence can be interpreted as potentially hostile acts by neighbouring countries. States can misconstrue these as offensive preparations leading to a security dilemma in which each side seeks to counter the defensive preparations of others.³ A second dimension is that state repression can deny people the exercise of their rights or deprive them of their liberty. States may even use coercion against their own people.⁴ A third dimension is that weak or failing States lack the power to provide security for their own people. State disintegration and the inability to deliver basic social services may contribute to the undermining of the internal security of the state and to spillover security challenges for other States.

This has led to discussion of alternative referent objects for security, other than States. An alternative referent object that has been postulated is societal security.⁵ Focusing upon society helps to capture some of the non-military threats that can lead people to feel insecure. Societal security places emphasis upon values and sense of identity, as opposed to just territorial integrity, and these can be threatened by a variety of factors. For example, organised criminal activity puts societal security at risk, whilst at the same time co-existing in a parasitical relationship with the state. Similarly, large-scale immigration can generate feelings of insecurity in host societies that fear a loss both of self-identity and of employment prospects. Efforts to increase societal security can be measured in terms of upholding the rule of law, minimising corruption, maintaining the integrity of institutions such as the judiciary and the police, and preserving a sense of shared identity.

Another choice of referent object has been the security of individuals. Rather than concentrate on the security of the state or the more abstract concept of society, the focus of this approach is upon human beings. It has its origins in the work of the United Nations’ Development Programme Report of 1994 that assessed security issues that impact on individuals, such as health and welfare as well as poverty and disease.⁶ It also takes into consideration what threatens the well-being of people and draws a distinction between security that involves the threat of violence and a broader, non-military, concept encompassing freedom from want.⁷

This introduction aims to explore how the concept of security has evolved for the European Union in the post-Cold War period and to establish a context for the later empirical chapters in the book. The EU is a unique security actor because it is not a conventional state. Unlike a state, it does not have a central source of authority, nor does it possess traditional coercive apparatus such as armed forces or police. The EU exists at a level above that of its Member States, each of which retains national security policies. Nevertheless, a security role has been bestowed upon the Union by its Members as they have recognised their increasing interdependence and the need for a framework to aggregate their responses. This introduction sets out how the EU has been required to find ways, amidst its own process of development, of making itself capable of responding to a broader and more complex post-Cold War security agenda.

The end of the Cold War in Europe

During the Cold War, Europe was the focal point of superpower military confrontation with the armed forces of two major alliance systems drawn up on each side of the inner German border. The end of that confrontation represented a systemic shift in geopolitics as one part of the bipolar structure effectively imploded. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to an end the military stand-off between East and West that had dominated security politics for the last forty-five years. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe asserted their independence from Moscow's control, Russian troops found themselves resident on the soil of a re-united Germany and the balance of military power, that had rested upon the presence of both nuclear and conventional forces, appeared increasingly redundant. The relationship between the United States and Western Europe, hitherto one of European security dependency, now lay open to question. The continent was safer than it had been since the end of World War II with no likelihood of territorial aggression against any West European country. Yet how a new security system would emerge remained a subject of intense speculation.

The East–West balance had revolved around military threats to the survival of States. Paradoxically, the latter part of the 1980s had prepared the stage for a downplaying of the importance of military security. The implications of nuclear deterrence had made clear that no side could profit from recourse to war and had engendered a sense of stalemate. It was the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty that unlocked the stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union and paved the way for a radical change in relations. Its significance lay in three areas. First, the treaty resulted in the removal of a whole category of nuclear weaponry, of short-and medium-range, that was potentially de-stabilising to the delicate balance between the two sides. Second, it facilitated deeper reductions on the Soviet side, thereby challenging the traditional notion that arms control had to have equal impact. Third, the treaty provided for intrusive verification procedures by which teams of observers were allowed to visit military sites and oversee the dismantling of nuclear weapons. This helped to overcome the deep mistrust that had been built up over many decades.

Changes to the conventional military balance, in which Warsaw Pact forces had hitherto enjoyed a preponderance, complemented the reductions undertaken in nuclear weaponry. The Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty heralded massive reductions in the size of Eastern bloc forces before the treaty itself was overtaken by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. This change in the level of threat was exploited by West European countries which cut their defence spending and sought to realise a peace dividend. Transformations in the configurations of military forces have been achieved more slowly but the move towards smaller, professional armed forces has been inexorable. For example, in 1995 only five European countries had all-volunteer forces whereas ten years later the number had risen to sixteen.⁸

A crucial issue that sprang from the end of the Cold War was the future of East and West Germany. The treatment of Germany had been at the heart of the original post-war division between the three triumphant allied powers and it had been the focus of confrontation for the next forty-five years. The decision by USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the unification of the two halves of Germany was the single most important step in overcoming the Cold War antagonism. It was even agreed that a united Germany would continue to be a Member of NATO; thereby reassuring both former adversaries and allies that it would not be a threat to its neighbours. The former East German army (NVA) was folded into its West German counterpart and the overall size of the Bundeswehr was reduced to 370,000 personnel. The Alliance legitimised the continuation of allied forces on German soil and provided a mechanism for a continued American presence on the continent.

The European Community was well placed to adapt to these changed circumstances in Europe after 1989. Although it had been a civilian power during the Cold War, it had been intimately concerned with the security of its Members. The EC had been created as a peace project with the deliberate intention of rendering the use of force redundant amongst the States of Western Europe. Through the creation of supranational structures and the pooling of sovereignty, the interests of its Members had become so intertwined as to represent a ‘Security Community’. According to Deutsch, the EC had become a community in which the interests of all parties were resolved peacefully and competition was channelled through institutional relationships into economic affairs.⁹ Amidst the chaos and uncertainty that accompanied the end of the Cold War, the EC represented a source of stability. It symbolised the way in which democratic States had transcended military rivalry among themselves and developed a new form of multi-level governance in Europe.

How the EC would develop as a security actor became one of the leading questions facing the organisation. Through the 1993 Treaty of European Union there was a determination amongst its Members to integrate more closely economically and politically, but the ambitions of a future European Union in security and defence were unclear. It would come to depend partly upon the sorts of threats and security challenges that the EU would have to address. The institutions that the EU would construct in matters of foreign and security policy would in turn help to determine the sort of actor it would become. It would also be influenced by the extent to which the US envisaged playing a continuing leadership role in the security of the continent.

While the EU could engineer the institutional arrangements, it was a harder task to infuse its Members with a common security culture. The EU is, in reality, host to a variety of co-existing strategic cultures. France and the UK, for example, have sought to act as global military powers, projecting military forces to far-flung theatres in support of their national interests.¹⁰ In contrast, a country such as Germany, despite possessing sizeable military forces, has been reluctant to employ its capabilities due to the painful legacy of its actions in the Second World War. There are countries within the EU, such as Ireland, Sweden and Austria, that have long adhered to neutralist positions.¹¹ This spectrum of approaches is evident in the amount of money that EU Members have been willing to allocate to defence, their involvement in military procurement projects and their levels of participation in major military operations. While it is true to say that the Union has taken steps towards a more collective security culture, and even published a European Security Strategy in 2003,¹² it has nevertheless struggled to achieve rapid progress.

In spite of the fact that there was no overt threat to national territories following the end of the Cold War, military security challenges did not disappear altogether. The EU found itself confronting a new security environment, one in which conflict was actually more likely. This was due to the instability that was left behind after the termination of East–West rivalry. Russian troops were in the process of being returned home during the early years of the 1990s, but there was plenty of opportunity for friction with former Soviet republics that had asserted their independence. Tensions with the Baltic States were especially marked due to the presence of large numbers of Russian nationals, and this led to conflict between Russian forces and Latvia. Relations between Russia and Ukraine were acutely sensitive because of strategic missile sites in Ukraine that were returned to Russia, arms industries on Ukrainian soil and the naval base in the Crimea. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were historical sources of tension between some countries that could have led to conflict. As for the Balkans, there were multi-ethnic States such as Yugoslavia that had been held together artificially. Such States as these were at risk of collapsing into civil and ethnic conflict with major implications for neighbouring countries in Europe.

With the risk of major inter-state war having receded, civil and ethnic conflicts represented the sorts of complex emergencies that were more likely in post-Cold War Europe. Unlike the mass mobilisation wars of the twentieth century, these would be intra-state conflicts with ill-defined causes. Western forces would not find themselves fighting well-defined enemies on a distinct battlefield but rather paramilitary organisations amidst a conflict in which their countries did not have vital interests at stake.¹³ With no immediate threat to their own territories, EU countries would be faced with ‘conflicts of choice’ rather than necessity. The conflict zones were likely to be situated amidst the civilian population and would involve the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. These conflicts would generate regional instability that could spill over onto the territories of EU Members, and could result in the exodus of large numbers of refugees into Western Europe.

Such conflicts present major challenges for the military forces of EU Members. Having configured themselves for high-intensity warfare during the Cold War era, these new sorts of conflicts call for different types of forces trained in different ways. Intra-state emergencies require forces that can be transported to a war zone far from their own countries. These forces need to be relatively lightly armed and adaptable as they are unlikely to be engaging with the armed services of another state. Most importantly, they must be highly trained and capable of acting in a controlled fashion as they will be operating within a highly charged political environment. Restraint over the use of lethal force is vital if the interventionary force is to be part of the solution to the crisis rather than just one of the protagonists.

It has thus been necessary for European forces to prepare for a broad range of contingencies. They may be called upon to engage in a number of tasks that range across the spectrum of conflict. At one end of the spectrum, a symbolic show of force may be designed to prevent hostilities from breaking out in the first place. At the other end, interventionary forces may be required to engage in war-fighting in order to stop an armed group from achieving its strategic objectives. The purpose may be less the defeat of an adversary and more the cessation of hostilities and the restoration of stability. Alternatively, if protagonists have fought themselves to a point of exhaustion or they have been coerced into a cessation of hostilities, an interventionary force might seek to enforce a peace and police a hard-won agreement. The post-1990 period has presented a broader array of conflict scenarios in which EU forces could be called upon to engage.

Post-conflict societies have usually experienced deep-seated trauma and the arousal of enmities between ethnic communities. Outside interventions in such complex emergencies demand long-term engagement rather than just short-term military action. The task is to help rebuild the societies concerned and prevent a return to violence. The EU has been particularly suited to such tasks,¹⁴ drawing upon its history as a non-military power and the diverse strengths and skills of its Member States. The Union has been at the forefront of efforts to develop a capacity for hybrid operations in which it integrates military and civilian agencies to assist in the reconstruction effort. This demands the integration of financial aid, technical assistance, policing skills, judicial and administrative instruments and the oversight of elections. It also draws upon expertise from civil agencies and non-governmental organisations. Since the Feira European Council in 2000 a Committee for the Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management (CIVCOM) has been formed within the European Council and capability conferences have been convened to provide a range of non-military resources.¹⁵ For example, the European Gendarmerie Force (EGF) based in Vicenza, has been assembled as a quick reaction force for ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The European Union in the Security of Europe
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The nature of security
• 2 The EU and internal security
• 3 The EU and external security relations
• 4 The US, European security and EU–US relations: ‘The indispensable nation’?
• 5 Russia, European security and relations with the EU: The underprivileged strategic partnership?
• 6 EU enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe
• 7 The EU and the Eastern arc of instability: The Western Balkans, Eastern Europe and Southern Caucasus
• 8 The EU and its Southern Mediterranean neighbours
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index