The Routledge Handbook of European Security

Sven Biscop, Richard Whitman, Sven Biscop, Richard Whitman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136226946
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new Handbook brings together key experts on European security from the academic and policy worlds to examine the European Union (EU) as an international security actor.

In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, the EU has gradually emerged as an autonomous actor in the field of security, aiming to safeguard European security by improving global security. However, the EU's development as a security actor has certainly not remained uncontested, either by academics or by policy-makers, some of whom see the rise of the EU as a threat to their national and/or transatlantic policy outlook.

While the focus of this volume is on the politico-military dimension, security will also be put into the context of the holistic approach advocated by the EU. The book is organised into four key sections:

• Part I – The EU as an International Security Actor
• Part II – Institutions, Instruments and Means
• Part III – Policies
• Part IV – Partners

This Handbook will be essential reading for all students of European Security, the EU, European Politics, security studies and IR in general.

Part I The EU as an international security actor

1 European Security Institutions 1945–2010 The weaknesses and strengths of ‘Brusselsization'

Jolyon Howorth

DOI: 10.4324/9780203098417-1

A ‘security institution’ can be anything from a treaty-based alliance such as NATO to a small European Council Secretariat working-group such as the Committee on the Western Balkans (COWEB). Hundreds of such institutions contribute to the management of European security. The common feature behind all of them is their underlying purpose: cooperation in the field of security between sovereign member states and/or their agents. The underlying assumption is that each institution offers a positive-sum outcome. The post-World War II history of such institutions nevertheless reveals a tension between two contrasting approaches to security: Europeanist and Atlanticist; externalized and internalized (Cleveland, 1966; Schmidt, 2001). For the greater part of the Cold War period, Atlanticism and externalization held undisputed sway through NATO. However, prior to 1954 and since the mid-1980s, attempts to create internalized Europeanist institutions have competed with, while nevertheless simultaneously attempting to cooperate with, the NATO model. This double dichotomy was brought into focus as early as 11 November 1944 during a meeting in Paris between Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle suggested to Churchill that, whatever the differences in the wartime experiences of their two countries, when faced with the new reality of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers, they henceforth shared objective strategic comparability, and probably identical interests. De Gaulle proposed a Franco-British security partnership – both to put Europe back on its feet and to help shape the contours of the emerging world order (de Gaulle, 1959: 63–4 and 367–78). Churchill listened attentively before informing de Gaulle that, unlike France, which effectively had only a European option, Great Britain also had an Atlantic option, from which the country fully intended to benefit (Churchill, 1954: 218–20). Thus were evoked, even before the war ended, the two dimensions of that double dichotomy which has divided European policy-makers ever since.

During the closing months of World War II, blueprints for the creation of a West European security bloc had been developed in a number of European countries – Norway, Holland, Belgium, France and Britain (Young, 1984: 5). Notwithstanding Churchill’s response to de Gaulle, virtually all these different projects attributed to the UK, in association with France, the responsibility for leading such a European security arrangement. At first, the British seemed keen. In the immediate post-war years, Britain saw closer association with the Continent as essential – albeit limited to military and security issues (Young, 1984: 7). Most ‘continentals’ on the other hand were already thinking in terms of economic and even political integration. The institutional process which would eventually lead to the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 was tentatively set in motion. The Franco-British Treaty of Dunkirk (4 March 1947), essentially directed against a hypothetical resurgent Germany, was the first formal post-war agreement between two European nation-states (Greenwood, 1989). By the spring of 1948, both the launch of the Marshall Plan (5 June 1947) and the Soviet take-over of Czechoslovakia (February 1948) had transformed the European security situation. The German ‘problem’ had been overtaken by the Soviet ‘threat’. Europe needed to close ranks. The Treaty of Brussels (17 March 1948) marked the first major step on the road to European integration, involving as it did economic, social, cultural and security dimensions. Although the term ‘Brusselsization’ was coined only in the 1990s (Allen, 1998) the phenomenon first appeared as early as 1948.

The Brussels Treaty was impelled by both an internal European logic (it made eminent sense for the European nation-states to put an end to their centuries-long civil war) and an external American logic (the Marshall Plan was conditional on the European recipient states coming together to cooperate on optimal spending of the US stimulus money). In this way, the externalization/internalization dichotomy was hard-wired into the very origins of the European security-institutional process. That dichotomy was reinforced by two consecutive events, one featuring externalization, the other internalization. The first was the European effort, between 1948 and 1949, to persuade the USA to enter into an entangling alliance, the result of which was the creation of NATO (Cook, 1989; Acheson, 1987). The second was the parallel effort, between 1950 and 1954, to establish a European Defence Community (EDC) (Fursdon, 1980). While European nations (including France and the UK) proved prepared to pool and indeed even to alienate sovereignty in the US-underwritten security institutions of NATO, they ultimately proved unwilling (especially France and the UK) to share sovereignty in a purely European institutional arrangement such as the EDC. Instead, they built on the 1948 Brussels commitments through the 1950 creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the first supranational institution of the future EU. According to its architect, Jean Monnet, the ECSC’s avowed aim was, by pooling the raw materials of conflict, to ‘make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible’. However, the early promise of internalized security institutions faded with the 1954 defeat of the EDC. The dynamic created by the ECSC was instead to lead to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which prioritized integration through markets and economics. At the same time, under largely British diplomatic pressure, the security dimension of the Brussels Treaty was subsumed under the 1954 Modified Brussels Treaty, whereby West Germany and Italy joined NATO (Deighton, 1997). Throughout the remainder of the Cold War, therefore, any prospect of internalized European security institutions was off the agenda. The first tussle between the two contrasting approaches to European security awarded game, set and match to the externalized Atlanticist model. The internal, Europeanist efforts implicit in Dunkirk, Brussels and the EDC would have to wait until the 1990s to be offered a second chance.

Beyond the Cold War: reviving internalized European security institutions

The institutional arrangements offered by NATO were never perceived by Europeans as entirely satisfactory (Freedman, 1980). External dependency on the USA generated internal demotivation, which simply exacerbated the dependency. France, indeed, found this vicious circle so unsatisfactory as to warrant withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command structures (Vaïsse et al., 1996). But for as long as the Soviet threat persisted, the Europeans seemed in no position to guarantee their own security. This situation began to change in the 1980s for three reasons. First, as a result of growing recognition that dependency and demotivation constituted a potentially lethal cocktail in the context of an increasingly unilateral American administration. In his first term, Ronald Reagan seemed prepared to risk limited nuclear war in Europe. In his second term, he seemed prepared to abolish nuclear weapons (along with their perceived deterrent value) altogether (Halliday, 1986; Mann, 2009) – without consulting the European allies. Second, Europe’s mood changed as a result of a renewed sense of confidence in the European project in light of the Single European Act (1986), the proposed single currency and continued EU enlargement (Keohane et al., 1993). This resulted in the creation of the European Council Secretariat, a Brussels-based agency geared to harmonizing various aspects of the EU’s foreign policy initiatives. Third, change came as a result of the ‘Gorbachev phenomenon’ which seemed to usher in a qualitatively new period of transcontinental détente (Grachev, 2008).

All these elements provided the impetus for a renewed attempt to create an internalized, Europeanist set of security institutions. First, between 1983 and 1987, came the ‘revitalization’ of the Western European Union (WEU), that semi-dormant security institutional structure dating from the 1948 Treaty of Brussels. In its ‘Platform of The Hague’ (October 1987), the WEU boldly declared that ‘we are convinced that the construction of an integrated Europe will remain incomplete as long as it does not include security and defence’ (WEU, 1988: 37). Under the terms of the Treaty of Maastricht (1991), the embryonic EU launched a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) which designated the WEU as the key agency for the harmonization of security policy. Alas, the WEU proved to be too limited militarily and too unwieldy and ineffectual politically and institutionally to take on the challenges of the post-Cold War world (Howorth, 2007: 160–7). WEU was quietly put out to grass at the Franco-British Summit of Saint-Malo (December 1998), a summit which gave a major boost to Europe’s security-institutional arrangements by launching the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) (Howorth, 2007). A decade later, the Treaty of Lisbon ‘converted’ Saint-Malo by introducing the definitive institutional structures of EU security policy. After Lisbon, ESDP became the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).¹ In what follows, I shall trace the evolution of the EU’s security-institutional ‘architecture’ from the late 1980s to the present.

Prior to the 1998 Saint-Malo summit, there were no fewer than eight European institutions with inputs to EU security policy, some of which continue to this day to exert influence. At the highest level stand the three monthly European Council meetings of heads of state and government with ultimate decision-making and political responsibility for all policy areas, including security policy. It was agreed in the Maastricht Treaty (1991) – and was subsequently confirmed by the Treaty of Nice (2000) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) – that security and defence policy would be conducted by a special intergovernmental pillar of the EU in which the heads of state and government and appropriate ministers, voting unanimously, would take all ultimate policy decisions (De Schoutheete, 2006; Werts, 2008). Below the European Council came the General Affairs Council (GAC), which was renamed the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) by the Lisbon Treaty. This body meets monthly and comprises the EU’s 27 foreign ministers. It is, in practice, the main decision-taking body for the bulk of foreign and security policy (Hayes-Renshaw, 2006; Cross, 2011). Traditionally, the meetings of the GAC/FAC have been prepared by the Committee of Permanent Representatives(COREPER), formally comprising the ambassadors (referred to in this context as permanent representatives) of the member states to the European Union. This committee, the third of our longstanding foreign and security policy institutions, meets at least once a week in Brussels, and has traditionally enjoyed considerable influence over the policy-shaping process (Lewis, 1998; Cross, 2007). Any items on which the permanent representatives agree unanimously are normally adopted by the FAC without discussion. However, as we shall see below, COREPER’s influence over security policy has waned since the advent of the new post-Saint-Malo institutions of security policy, particularly the Political and Security Committee (PSC).

A fourth body of some significance used to be the Political Committee (PoCo) comprising the political directors of the member state Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs). This agency derived from the informal process of European Political Cooperation (EPC) whereby, from the 1970s onwards, European foreign ministers and political directors would hold monthly meetings to discuss policy coordination (Nuttall, 1992). However, as with COREPER, much of PoCo’s security and defence remit was, after Saint-Malo, taken over by the PSC – made up of 27 ambassadors from the member states (see below). Occasionally the PSC is still convened at the level of the political directors but the institution as such has ceased to function in its traditional guise. The fifth pre-1999 institution is the Council Secretariat, which dates from the Single European Act of 1985 when it was felt necessary to establish a permanent secretariat to coordinate the foreign policy implications of the EU’s growing trade and economic relations with the rest of the world. The Secretariat, which involves some 2,500 officials from across the EU, supports and advises both the European Council and the FAC. The sixth institutional input traditionally came from the rotating Presidency of the EU, which, prior to Lisbon, assumed responsibility for galvanizing and even initiating foreign and security policy during its six-month term of office. However, although after Lisbon the rotating presidency continues to exist with respect to most policy areas, in the field of foreign and security policy its powers of initiative have been overtaken by the creation of the key Lisbon institutions we shall examine below. In addition to these six separate agencies of intergovernmentalism, there is, of course, the supranational European Commission (EC), which has been largely responsible for the delivery and implementation of foreign and security policy through its Directorate General for External Relations (Relex), which contributes to policy formulation and works closely with other DGs such as EuropeAid, Development, Trade and Humanitarian Aid; and the European Parliament (EP), whose specialist committees on foreign affairs (AFET) and security and defence (SEDE) have continued to play an oversight role of growing importance (Duke, 2002: 127–30). One further institution technically pre-dating Saint-Malo² is the post of High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (HR-CFSP), which from 1999 until 2009 was occupied by Javier Solana and, since Lisbon (in an upgraded form), by Catherine Ashton. We shall assess this institution below under the Lisbon institutions.

The post-Saint-Malo institutions

One might have thought, given this multi-level and already extremely cumbersome decision-making apparatus, that the advent of ESDP and the call in Saint-Malo for ‘appropriate structures’ would have presented a golden opportunity for wholesale institutional rationalization. However, the intergovernmental conference leading up to the Treaty of Nice (2000) was already in train and was essentially concentrating on the institutional consequences of the major EU enlargement planned for 2004. Therefore Nice simply added four key new institutional agencies to the already complex nexus we have just outlined. These new institutions have proven to be extremely important.

Political and Security Committee

The most important of these was, and still is, the Political and Security Committee (PSC), which was enshrined in the Treaty of Nice, modified by the Treaty of Lisbon, under Article 25:

[A] Political and Security Committee shall monitor the international situation in the areas covered by the common foreign and security policy and contribute to the definition of policies by delivering opinions to the Council at the request of the Council or on its own initiative. It shall also monitor the implementation of agreed policies [and] shall exercise, under the responsibility of the Council and of the High Representative, the political control and strategic direction of the crisis management operations referred to in Article 28B.

The PSC as an institution was first convened on an interim basis in March 2000, becoming permanent in January 2001. It was aptly described in the first detailed scholarly studies of its activities as the ‘linchpin’ (Duke, 2005) and as the ‘work-horse’ behind ESDP decision-making (Meyer, 2006: 116). The 27 permanent representatives, with the rank of ambassador, meeting twice to three times a week in Brussels are involved in monitoring the international situation, formulating security policies and overseeing the implementation of those policies. However, an important caveat is immediately in order. Despit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures, maps and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The EU as an international security actor
• Part II Institutions, instruments and means
• Part III Policies
• Part IV Partners
• Bibliography
• Index