Session I & II: Change in North and the Regional Security

AN EMERGING EU FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY, 50 YEARS LATER

by David Fouquet

Historic diplomatic and political developments have been taking place in both Europe and Asia in recent months which could have a profound impact on international relations.

These shifts in Asia have been dramatic and widely observed across the planet. Cross Strait relations have become a major preoccupation in Washington, Moscow and most Western European capitals. The decomposition of the Japanese economy and subsequent political surprises have concerned both the Asia-Pacific region and much of the rest of the world. The agony of Indonesia as it struggles to adjust to new leaders and institutions are discussed and analysed in many Ministries. President Kim's diplomatic initiatives and voyage to Pyongyang not only earned him the Nobel Peace Prize but the admiration and support of much of the world population.

But quietly, almost inperceptibly, similar dramatic repositionings have been occurring in Western Europe that have the potential to fundamentally alter international relations and the world order. For the second time in a decade and only the third in close to 50 years, Europe is moving to assume leadership of its own security challenges.

To try to reduce it to more immediate and comprehensive proportions, more than 20 European countries, along with their transatlantic allies in North America, have embarked in the past two years on the definition and composition of a new defence and security capability that is still being heatedly debated in some states and circles. The primary objective is to move the EU collective involvement beyond the largely rhetorical role of the past into a more concrete, practice and effective presence that could be regarded as more influential than the sum of its parts.

The past and current security situation in Europe has some relevance to Asia and especially Korean participants.

There have of course been many allusions to the similarities between the division of Europe and the situation in Korea and regarding the means and institutions used in Europe that could provide help in this region. President Kim certainly emphasised this in his Berlin speech last year and in his contacts in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

A number of other participants and presentations will deal with other important elements of the possible European involvement in the security of the Korean peninsula, leaving this paper with the task of forecasting a more strategic vision while focusing on one aspect.

The more recent twin developments in both Asia and Europe have their more recent genesis in the past decade of change that witnessed the demise of the Soviet Union and most of the Cold War systems and doctrines. And they have their deeper historical roots in the institutions and mentalities of this cold war. Many of the institutions and paradigms that dominated our strategic and political relations for the past half century are only gradually being lifted, tested and possibly replaced.

Historical Burdens of the Cold War

A discussion of contemporary and future policy trends in European defence and security should therefore be preceded by a glance more than 50 years back in history. The first few years after the end of world war II in Europe and Asia seem to belong not just to another century but another era and mentality. The virtual partition of Eastern and Western Europe, the Marshall Plan, the NATO Alliance and European Coal and Steel Community had been launched, the Berlin Blockade, Greek and Yugoslav Civil War and a crisis in Iran had erupted and the Korean War was waiting to explode.

In the aftermath of some of these global ideological crises, political leaders and planners in Western Europe in the mid-1950s also began discussions and preparations for an autonomous European Defence Community which was drafted in treaty form, signed and debated, only to be rejected in France in 1954 and essentially erased from the collective memory for some 50 years. Other little-remembered developments, such as the request by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev also in 1954 to seek membership in NATO also passed into oblivion and the Cold War froze international relations for decades.

The NATO Alliance assumed the unchallenged role of organising the collective defence of Western Europe against the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact for the next half century. This type of alliance became the model for others such as the Central Treaty Organisation in Western Asia and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation in that region.

As these institutions, processes, members had their roles in those years, some only transient as it turned, those that continued entered into a new age that began in the early 1990s unaware and unprepared.

Whereas nuclear deterrence and other mechanisms functioned during the Cold War, the new period had a new unwritten and yet unexplored code. The series of conflicts in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union in the Caucasus, Tajikistan and elsewhere stood in stark contrasts to the imposed peace and coexistence of the cold war era and represented daunting challenges to the established institutions and capabilities.

Having been nominally prepared to counter a massive invasion for some 50 years, the Western countries proved to be incapable of readjusting their institutional and military capability to cope with a new generation and form of challenge-from collective defence to collective security. It was discovered that neither Washington or Europe had real and credible crisis prevention strategies or capabilities for the Post-Cold War era and to deal with internal and regional upheaval instead of external threat.

In Europe and the entire Western Alliance there has been considerable debate, even acrimony concerning plans being formulated for a Common European Foreign and Security Policy or other variations. The process actually developed first within the Western Alliance for a European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), largely at the insistance of the British Government of the time and others, that NATO was the only institution capable and devoted to defence and security for the previous 50 years.

Headline Goals for Future European Force

In recent months much of the attention of Europe has been riveted on development of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy and more specifically the establishment of a so-called Rapid Reaction Force of some 60,000 by 2003, virtually ignoring some possibly more far-reaching actions than this symbolic one.

With what appears to many to be astounding speed, the EU member countries have agreed on the essential elements of composing this military force, but true to form have become embroiled in embarrassing political stalemates over some of the details.

The early stage of this process culminated with Member Countries last year designating unit contributions to this force despite the apparent incompatibility of NATO and neutral countries as EU members.

Despite the almost hysterical distortions of the opposition British press to portray this effort as a European Army that would undermine NATO, it would only be available for relatively limited missions in which NATO did not want to be involved. As agreed by NATO and European authorities in the past, this embryonic European force would deal only with the so-called "Petersburg Tasks" of humanitarian missions, search and rescue operations and peacekeeping at a lower level of manpower and intensity than NATO missions. Both NATO and Europeans had begun to move in this direction in the mid-1990s with the establlishment of a clearly defined European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) chain of command and capability within the NATO Alliance and the creation of the originally Franco-German Eurocorps, which has since been joined by military personnel from several other countries.

NATO in successive steps culminating at its 50th anniversary Washington Summit in 1999, had also detailed its willingness to collaborate and provide Alliance equipment which any such Europe action would lack, mostly American strategic airlift, satellite intelligence and other air assets. A European NATO Deputy Supreme Commander was designated to lead any separate European mission and a concept of Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) was adopted to serve as a framework for such actions. More recently, the Eurocorps headquarters, supplemented by NATO officers and assets, served as the headquarters for the NATO-led KFOR operation in Kosovo for six months as a test of such a mission.

The NATO military air operations in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, the first such massive military involvement of the Alliance in 50 years, also served to convince European Governments that they would have take a more prominent role in the conduct of such actions in the future. The early reluctance of the US to become involved, the US domination of the military operations and the inability of Europe to deal with challenge all helped to persuade prevailing political, press and public opinion in this direction. This roughly coincided with the change of direction on this question by the then new British Labour Government, leading to gradual agreements to create the proposed European military force and to move more resolutely toward a more coherent and dynamic European foreign and security policy.

Activism in the Balkans and Elsewhere

More recently, the inclination of the Bush Administration in Washington to openly display a hesitation about maintaining its recent presence in some European troublespots and emphasise as its prime responsibility for Asian crisis and conflict management while leaving Europe primarily concerned in its sphere of responsibility has also provided added stimulus for European commitment.

In recent months, the EU has also overcome some of the scepticism about its ability to become engaged in both hard and soft diplomacy and security issues, begun to establish an operational presence in some key areas and also shown that it can assume some of the international community burden in what was once forbidden territory.

These include a direct and dynamic diplomacy in regions ranging from the Balkans, the Middle East and North Korea, significant involvement in combating proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, conflict prevention, human rights and a number of other issues.

Crisis situations in Yugoslavia and the immediate region have been a major preoccupation of the EU, its members and public for the past decade, the early part of which was marked by humiliation and frustration for the emerging ambitions of EU foreign and security policy during a first attempt at European crisis management that the horrific Croatian, Bosnian conflicts erupted.

While previous Western attempts to restore order and stability in those regions and more recently Kosovo were dominated by Richard Holbrooke as personalising US diplomacy, the more recent challenges in Montenegro, Macedonia and Southern Serbia were more characterised by European and international teamwork spearheaded by the EU Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana. Images of the indefatigable Holbrooke shuttling between Balkan capitals and also complaining of his need to intervene in the Cyprus and Aegean disputes between Greece and Turkey while he claimed Europe slept are now a distant memory.

Instead, most crucial efforts at crisis prevention and management recently in the Balkans have been undertaken by Solana, sometimes accompanied by EU Commissioner for External Relations Chris Pattern, sometimes Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lyndh, sometimes Commission President Romano Prodi, sometimes NATO Secretary General George Robertson. While this also sometimes results in some confusion that blurs the claims of a single European voice, the message is gradually becoming clearer that whatever the configuration of the mission, it may be the only to be expected for a while as long as the American Administration is in the throes of a protracted policy review or has already decided that its national interests are not engaged.

Americans forces and diplomats supported these efforts discreetly in the background, sometimes at the risk of not engaging fully in the case of some of the border patrolling between Kosovo and Serbia. However, US intelligence and surveillance capabilities were reported to be fully engaged. Later, the US also announced some $3.5 million in police and surveillance aid to the Macedonian government to enhance the state of its border security.

Despite the visit to the region by Secretary of State Colin Powell and frequent declaratory backing from Washington, European institutions and leaders were visibly in the vanguard of this crisis prevention effort. During one phase in March, Solana was said to have made four trips to Skopje in a one-week period. American diplomats rejected such interpretations of the situation and emphasised that Washington was engaged and maintained its policy, along with the rest of the Western Alliance, to support a democratic Macedonia. But although NATO also played a significant role, it was evident that the new Administration in Washington was unprepared or unwilling to assume the visible leadership of such an effort. This also came against the background of previous high-level indications that a new US foreign policy would de-emphasise Europe and the Balkans.

While many of these European parties were relatively eager to show their new cohesion and subsequently grateful the immediate crisis was overcome, memories of earlier European diplomatic debacles in the region still haunt some of the participants. This unease was to some degree instrumental in the European efforts to widen the responsibility by backing the organisation of the first meeting of the Western five-nation Contact Group which had guided Allied and Russian collaboration in the Kosovo crisis and conflict.

An analysis in the Paris daily Le Monde on the subject inquired whether "Do the European have the political will to act together on the international scene and so balance, at least in some parts of the world, the sometime equivocal or manichean approach of the United States? The answer to this question is not automatic, and experience shows that the ambitions of some are almost always undermined by the collective impotence of Europe. All the more reason to underline that the 'Macedonian exception' constitutes an encouraging plunge."

Conflict Prevention Strategy Document

A major element underpinning this emerging EU common foreign and security policy is the formulation of a comprehensive conflict prevention strategy and programme. This vision, contained in a recent document released May 11 by the European Commission is essense a collation of recent, ongoing and some proposed activities. At its base are the extensive development, humanitarian and other EU aid programmes and funds involving either institution and democracy-building, rule of law including human rights, poverty-alleviation, support for non-governmental organisations, political risk analysis, early warning, preventive diplomacy, and failing to control a crisis, involvement in post-conflict rehabilitation. The strategy also involves international and regional cooperation, combatting drugs, organised crime, small arms proliferation and other root cause of disorder and conflict in a society.

While the approach is largely characterised by a compilation of previous and current actions, it seems to demonstrate a more holistic one triggered following early warnings of friction. It also strives to incorporate in a systematic fashion political risk assessment and conflict prevention into the decision making process of EU external relations. Also acknowledged are the bureaucratic sloath which often undermined the effectiveness of any EU political will and efforts in dealing with crisis situations.

The counter such past impediments, the EU institutions have been restructuring to establish the foundations of a functioning bureaucracy, diplomacy and military capability to attempt to cope with such crisis.

To support both the military and civilian elements of this strategy, new staff have been recruited and restructured. The EU CFSP system is in the process of absorbing the defence and military capacity developed in the long-vestigial Western European Union (WEU). New bodies representing the military and diplomatic thinking of the EU member countries have been installed in a new facility in Brussels, and new planning and early warning cells established within that framework. This staff is expected to number some 140 civilian and military personnel, but for example the early-warning cell involves only some three persons. Work is currently underway to evaluate the deficiencies of the proposed 60,000 force and a 10,000 strong European standby police force is also being developed to deploy to crisis areas requiring such personnel rather than military forces.

To assist in this process, the EU Commission has funded a Conflict Prevention Network of outside think tanks and experts to provide outside advice, begun to develop a set of political risk indicators comparable to long-used economic or social statistical indicators and begin drafting specific country strategy reports.

Proliferation, Human Rights and Preventive Diplomacy

To illustrate the extent of the development of various aspects of EU foreign policy, the EU Commission recently formulated a strategy paper on human rights policy and relations with other countries and the EU institutions have become heavily and actively involved in weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation and threat reduction programmes.

The human rights document advocates and vigourous and integrated insertion of human rights and democratisation in its aid programmes and relations with other countries. Many of its treaties with other states already include such human rights clauses and on occasions aid has been suspended for perceived violations. It also calls for closer monitoring of the situation in foreign partners and evaluation of the impact on human rights conditions in aid recipients.  

The EU has also sought to institute human rights, democratisation and rule of law dialogues in its contacts with third countries, the most visible being in countries such as China, Russia and Burma, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Plans are to identify target countries and to concentrate on such issues as good governance and the rule of law, abolition of the death sentence, combatting torture and impunity, creation of international tribunals and combatting racism, xenophobia and discrimination against minorities and indigenous populations.

Some human rights advocacy organisations, however, voiced their scepticism about the ability to reconcile such objectives with the commercial and political "realpolitic" of the EU member states.

While the US is still much more heavily committed financially to assisting Russia and other former Soviet states in destruction of nuclear weapons and materials and chemical weapon, the EU has also become actively and financially engaged as well. Other elements of this involvement include assisting, financing and managing efforts at retaining or retraining scientists formerly involved in Soviet WMD projects to keep them from selling their talents to other countries and other projects aimed at aiding the conversion to civilian activities of former Soviet "closed cities" also involved WMD or other military activities.

While the EU is not involved in arms control negotiations or other direct activities in this field, its members have sought to formulate common positions in negotiations such as the recent work on the protocol to the chemical weapons ban treaty to assure compliance.

While the EU emerging common foreign and security policy has been acknowledged to have been somewhat Eurocentric and focused on regional flashpoints such as the Balkans, its involvement in preventive diplomacy has also become visibly more engaged in regions such as the Middle East and North Korea.

High Representative Solana and other emissaries have become active and visible in the Middle East peace process and in the Mitchell Commission which followed recent flareups and made recommendations. This has come after decades of virtual exclusion with the exception of individual forrays by EU Foreign Ministers.

The recent development of an EU presence in the diplomatic dialogue with North Korea is a significant illustration of the new collective foreign and security policy. Although, at times embarrassingly disunited at some early stages and criticised by some as an example of such meddling, the contacts with Pyongyang and the recent summit visit might be regarded as a more concrete attempt to play a useful role.

Despite the irritation expressed by some American commentators, including Henry Kissinger, toward the European initiative toward North Korea as a spontaneous interference in affairs of primary concern to Washington, the voyage had nothing improvised and was the result of a lengthy process that began with Swedish and Finnish diplomacy long before such thoughts reached inside the Washington Beltway. Planning for the visit had also begun before the advent of the Bush Administration as a natural extension of the earlier diplomatic openings and the European participation in the Korean Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) and appeared from Europe to have been welcomed by most in the region at a crucial time.

Prospects for the Future

Although progress on EU development of its foreign and security policy has surprised some sceptics, several challenges have surfaced that could represent major impediments that could grow destroy the effort much as the European Defence Community treaty was wrecked nearly 50 years earlier.

Details being negotiated between the EU and NATO on the use of NATO assets, mission planning and the decision-making process have revealed divisions that could divide rather than unite. Turkey has insisted that as a member of the NATO Alliance positioned in most of the potential regional crisis scenarios, it be assure a substantial role in any EU action although it is not an EU member. While the EU has sought to find a compromise, the issue is not unrelated to other essentially extraneous issues ranging from the question of Turkey's membership in the EU, the concern of some in the EU over an influx of Turkish migrants and workers, long-standing dispute over the status of Cyprus and even the difficult political and economic conditions in Turkey.

Mutual concern and suspicions also exists on both sides of the Atlantic that the EU project could be seen as a replacement or a weakening for NATO and that at some point the leadership in Washington will either directly challenge it or undermine it in more insiduous ways. The former could take the form of encouraging Turkey to continue to raise objections and the latter could take the form of either rejecting the use of NATO-US assets critical to a proposed EU mission or rejecting some other key element.  

One such potentially explosive element is the question of planning authority for the proposed EU force and missions, which the US, NATO and many members in both NATO and the EU regard as essential to be responsibility of NATO. While they argue that NATO has the experience and expertise and that to place such authority in a new and separate EU body would amount to wasteful duplication that would sap badly needed resources, some in France and others counter that it is not sensible and dangerous to have the planning conducted in another institution which showed itself to be deeply divided and inappropriate during the Kosovo campaign.

Key tests of some of these unresolved issues could erupt anytime in the form of a Balkan crisis, potentially leading to new conflicts and disasters that might discredit the emerging EU effort and plans. These pending disputes and other deficiencies in capacity and political will could prove the EU role be either unprepared or incapable of dealing with actual crises in Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo or other flashpoints.

The Asian dimension

When asked recently regarding the possible role of such EU capacities in Asia, the EU High Representative began by listing other priorities in the Balkans and the Middle East. On other occasions in Asia, he has indicated that his regular present in the region proved that the EU is not Eurocentric.

Neither is an adequate answer to a question that is nevertheless has received the beginning of a perhaps more relevant answer in the recent EU demarches in North Korea, its continuing participation in such bodies as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEM process and more direct involvement in countries such as East Timor, Indonesia, Cambodia and others.

The Belgian Government, which will succeed the Swedish Government in the presidency of the EU Council in later 2001 has indicated it would favour the formulation of an EU strategic doctrine that defines its interests and roles in global security. Although Asia may have been relegated to a less prominent role by some, it appears evident that the EU is already involved, albeit in a limited way, in some security actions in Asia. While respecting the sensitivities of some Asian states about sovereignty, the concept of global security is a gaining awareness just as much as the global economy and the proposed strategic doctrine could be an appropriate time to explore such an EU role.

Yugoslavia, KEDO and East Timor may have rewritten some of uncodified rules of Europe's international relations. It would probably be unrealistic to expect Europe to treat Asia and the Korean Peninsula as a leading priority for its still embryonic and sometimes awkward Foreign and Security Policy. It is also unlikely, to say the least, that there will be unanimity among Asian nations to welcome excessive outside involvement. But freedom of travel in the South China Sea, relations across the Straits of Taiwan and stability in the Korea Peninsula are planetary issues of crucial importance to Europe and the west. For a period, the EU involvement may largely be limited to a financial one or in the provision of technical or other assistance. Peace guarantees, monitoring compliance and other tasks are among others that Europe could be involved in for a relative distance, leaving the implementation to others from the region.

At the end of the spectrum, the suggestion by Dr Zbigniew Brzezsinski some three or four years ago recommending a movement toward a Eurasian security framework is worth recalling. While such a dialogue involving NATO and perhaps other security institutions, such as the OSCE and the UN along with perhaps ARF, could be envisioned in the aftermath of the NATO operations in Yugoslavia, there is not only merit but even urgency in global discussions on security issues.

To close on an unusual and provocative note, it was announced recently that France's new nuclear aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, would sail to Asia and a number of Asian ports in a few months, accompanied by a support force made up of several European navies.