The security dimensions of EU enlargement

Wider Europe, weaker Europe?

David Brown, Alistair Shepherd, David Brown, Alistair Shepherd

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162847
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The changing nature of security, the enlargement of European institutions and the evolving functions of the EU have been key developments in post-Cold War Europe. This book blends these three crucial developments in a sophisticated and illuminating manner. It assesses the impact of EU enlargement on both pre-existing security arrangements and key relationships with the EU's new partners and 'neighbours'. It also investigates both hard and soft, and internal and external security issues, ranging from military intervention to terrorism and from organised crime to human rights. From this it concludes that enlargement has both positive and negative implications for European security. Completing the analysis, this study examines the evolving security relationships with key states, regions and international organisations in the EU's 'neighbourhood'. The examination of relations with Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, the Greater Middle East and the Balkans provides a sense of the direction in which European security politics is moving.

1

EU enlargement and NATO: the Balkan experience

Martin A. Smith¹

During the 1990s, both the EU and NATO enlarged their memberships: the EU by taking in Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995 and NATO by admitting the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland four years later. These two enlargement processes were not officially linked. In the wake of the developing EU enlargement process in the early 1990s, NATO members had apparently contented themselves with the inclusion of a paragraph in their own 1995 ‘Study on NATO Enlargement’ (the document that can be said to have officially begun NATO’s enlargement process). The study stated that:

The enlargement of the two organisations will proceed autonomously, according to their respective internal dynamics and processes. This means they are unlikely to proceed at precisely the same pace. But the Alliance views its own enlargement and that of the EU as mutually supportive and parallel processes, which together will make a significant contribution to strengthening Europe’s security structure. Thus, each organisation should ensure that their respective processes are in fact mutually supportive of the goal of enhancing European stability and security. While no rigid parallelism is foreseen, each organisation will need to consider developments in the other.²

In fact, the EU and NATO enlargement processes during the 1990s were characterised by what Smith and Timmins have called ‘incremental linkage’.³ Although not formally or structurally linked, it was apparent that a move forward in one institution’s enlargement process would, within a relatively short period of time, produce an ‘answering call’ from the other, in terms of a corresponding move. As a result, in practice, neither institution’s enlargement dynamic was allowed, by its member states, to move decisively ahead of the other.

On the NATO side, the main impetus for the creation and maintenance of this informal incremental linkage came from the US and its Atlanticist allies in Europe. They were motivated, firstly, by concerns that, if EU enlargement was allowed to proceed into Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkan region significantly ahead of NATO’s own enlargement process, then what US officials had called ‘underlapping security guarantees’ might develop.⁴ In other words, EU members might find themselves being drawn into conflicts in these relatively unstable regions and, not having an established system of security guarantees through the EU itself, might then call on NATO to intervene, even though the states directly concerned might not themselves be NATO members. In addition, there was also, undoubtedly, a sense at the time of what might be called ‘institutional Darwinism’, namely a feeling that the two institutions were in a kind of competition with regard to embracing non-member countries in Europe. It was felt that there would be potentially debilitating consequences for the ‘loser’ if one was allowed to get too far ahead of the other in this ‘great game’. Hence, there was an innate reluctance to allow either to do so. In sum, the motivation behind the development of incremental linkage was essentially competitive, rather than co-operative.

Enlargement in the new millennium: incremental linkage continued?

The very fact that the most important enlargement rounds in the histories of both organisations were completed within one month of each other, in the spring of 2004, lends weight to the proposition that the member states of both institutions remained concerned to ensure that neither got significantly ahead of the other in the enlargement stakes. An examination of key agreed statements by EU and NATO ministers provides additional support for the contention that incremental linkage between their respective enlargement processes has been maintained into the twenty-first century.

Within less than a week of each other, in December 1999, the two institutions’ senior decision-taking forums – the European Council and the North Atlantic Council (NAC) respectively – committed their members in principle to moving ahead with enlargement. The European Council declared that ‘the Union should be in a position to welcome new member states from the end of 2002, as soon as they have demonstrated their ability to assume the obligations of membership and once the negotiating process has been successfully completed’.⁵ Four days later, the NAC, meeting at foreign minister level,⁶ reaffirmed NATO’s ‘commitment to remain open to new members’. It added that ‘the Alliance expects to extend further invitations in coming years to nations willing and able to assume the responsibilities and obligations of membership’.⁷ The EU’s declared choice of 2002 as the target year for signing accession agreements with prospective new members was also significant. In April 1999, at a summit meeting called to mark NATO’s fiftieth anniversary, its members’ leaders, having agreed that the door remained open to further enlargement, also stated that they themselves would ‘review’ progress towards that goal ‘no later than’ 2002.⁸

Thus, by the beginning of the new millennium, the members of both institutions had established an in-principle commitment to moving ahead with further rounds of enlargement within a directly comparable timeframe. The rhetorical (and practical) pace quickened from 2001. In June of that year, the European Council declared that ‘the enlargement process is irreversible’ and reaffirmed the 2002 date for the completion of accession negotiations. These types of EU statements had also begun to add another date – 2004 – as the deadline for the new members to actually join the institution and assume the obligations of membership (this date was chosen so as to enable them to take part in the European Parliament elections due that year).⁹ Thus was born the de facto 2004 deadline for the enlargement of both institutions’ memberships. At the end of 2001, NATO members duly issued their answering call. They declared at their December foreign ministers’ meeting that the next NATO summit, in Prague in November 2002, would ‘launch the next round of NATO enlargement’.¹⁰ It duly did do, with a stated commitment that the NATO process would be completed by May 2004.¹¹

During 2002, as anticipated, both the EU and NATO officially identified those states that their members wished to invite to join the ranks and invited them to conclude negotiations on accession.¹² There were multiple points of comparison between the would-be new members on the respective guest lists. Both the EU and NATO had identified the three Baltic States, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria as candidates for accession. In addition, the EU was also negotiating with NATO’s three newest members: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Their accession would enable the EU to catch up with NATO, in terms of enlarging into former Soviet bloc territory in Central Europe. The only differences between the EU and NATO were that Cyprus and Malta were negotiating for membership of the former, but not the latter.

It is clear from this brief discussion that distinct, informal but, at the same time, noticeable and important linkages between the two enlargement processes were in evidence through the 1990s and leading up to the 2004 enlargements. In spite of this, the absence, to date, of formal linkage between them has concerned some observers. For them, this deficiency opens up the possibility of what Adrian Hyde-Price has called ‘antinomies’ developing in relations between the EU and NATO and in their overall approaches to Europe’s security challenges.¹³ The discussions in the sections that follow aim to assess whether such antinomies are, in fact, observable. They will focus on what has been Europe’s most significant region in terms of security challenges and international responses since the end of the Cold War: the Balkans.

The Balkans: competition or complementarity?

The region under consideration here is, in NATO parlance, generally referred to as ‘South-eastern Europe’ and, in EU speak, as the ‘Western Balkans’. Essentially, these descriptors cover the successor states of the former Yugoslavia,¹⁴ together with Albania. Other neighbours, being either EU and/or NATO members or slated to join, are usually diplomatically excluded from descriptive association with these strife-prone states.

NATO’s interest in this region can be traced back to 1992 and the first deployment of its collective military assets in support of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) during the civil war in Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH). During the course of the 1990s, its military contribution became extensive. In 1995–96, a multinational Implementation Force (IFOR) of 60,000 troops was deployed to Bosnia, within a NATO command and control framework, to help police the implementation of the recently signed Dayton peace accords. A further 40,000 soldiers were sent to Kosovo as part of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) in June 1999, following Operation Allied Force, the coercive air campaign which forced the Serbs to relinquish de facto control over that province.

Following early, abortive, diplomatic efforts to prevent the break-up of Yugoslavia degenerating into civil war in 1991–92, the EU was relatively quiescent in the region until the end of the NATO-Serb conflict over Kosovo in mid 1999. Thereafter, it became significantly more proactive. Firstly, in June 1999, the ‘Stability Pact’ was launched for the states of the region, embracing negotiations on security, democratisation and economic reconstruction.¹⁵ Later that same year, Javier Solana, who had been NATO Secretary-General during the Kosovo conflict, was appointed to be the EU’s first ‘High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy’. He displayed a strong personal interest in the Balkan region and, by the summer of 2002, was reported to be spending about 60 per cent of his time dealing with it.¹⁶

In every sense, the 1999–2004 round of enlargement played an important role in bringing the EU closer to the Balkans than it ever had been before. In 2004, Slovenia became the first former Yugoslav republic to join both the EU and NATO. NATO also admitted Bulgaria and Romania, neighbouring states of the former Yugoslavia, both of which are also slated to join the EU in 2007. As part of the process of preparing the ground for enlargement, the EU sought to further enhance its relations with the former Yugoslav states. The main fruit of this renewed interest has been the so-called ‘Stabilisation and Association’ process. This holds out the ultimate prospect of states in the ‘Western Balkans’ being allowed to join the EU, on condition that they prove willing to make extensive reforms to their economic and political structures and are co-operative in helping to apprehend remaining indicted war criminals from the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.¹⁷ NATO, for its part, has declared that ‘the door remains open’ to future enlargements and has specifically identified Croatia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) as states that are working towards eventual membership.¹⁸

The cumulative effect of this state of affairs is that the Balkan region has increasingly been emerging as the place ‘where theory becomes reality in the NATO–EU relationship’. The same analyst also rightly added that ‘whatever the discussion in Brussels is regarding NATO and the EU, the place where the relationship is most put to the test is the Balkans. A smoothly functioning relationship there will have positive ramifications at a more political level.’¹⁹ That is why it is appropriate here to assess the nature and character of contemporary EU–NATO activities and relations in the Balkan region.

Until the end of the 1990s, the two institutions essentially had little formalised contact ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: security and enlargement into the twenty-first century
• 1 EU enlargement and NATO: the Balkan experience
• 2 The implications of EU enlargement for the European security and defence policy
• 3 The impact of enlargement on the EU’s counter-terrorist framework
• 4 The external shield of internal security: the EU’s emerging common external border management
• 5 EU enlargement and organised crime: Transdniestria as a case study Graeme
• 6 Enlargement and human rights law: norms and realities
• 7 An assessment of the Baltic States contribution to EU efforts to prevent proliferation and combat illicit arms trafficking
• 8 Russia–EU relations: opportunities for a security dialogue
• 9 Russia–EU relations and the Chechen issue
• 10 A leap forward to Europe: the impact of the ‘Orange Revolution’ on EU–Ukraine relations
• 11 The EU and Turkey: bridge or barrier?
• 12 EU Enlargement and security in the Mediterranean region
• 13 A successful Stability Pact: European Union policy in South-east Europe
• Conclusion: the security implications of EU enlargement
• Select Bibliography
• Index