By Paul Hockenos
There is also a lingering question of whether NATO is up to the job of keeping the peace in the North Atlantic area, its original raison d'etre. Today, the threats to European security are strikingly different from those of the Cold War years. They include ethnic conflict on Europe's frontiers, mass migration and refugee flows, energy crises, nuclear proliferation, and transnational terrorism. Particularly in Europe, many experts see security challenges in global warming, international trafficking, resource scarcity, and failing states. A recent EU study concluded that increased tensions over falling water supplies in the Middle East will affect the continent's energy security and economic interests. In addition, global warming will exacerbate poverty and spur mass migration from Africa. Neither NATO's instruments nor its framework is right for these kinds of problems. Under the Bush administration this did not matter -- it saw NATO's role exclusively as part of the war on terrorism. The August 2008 conflict in Georgia, however, underscored that there are still threats to Europe's security within and on its borders that the continent's powers will have to respond to with instruments other than pure force.
It is no secret that Russia feels deeply threatened by the alliance's expansion eastward, which it has consistently protested since the early 1990s. Moscow perceives as hostile the advance to its borders of a foreign military alliance that was designed to resist the Soviet Union and still sees Russia as a competitor. Although not solely accountable for Russia's authoritarian turn, NATO's expansion into East Central Europe --contrary to US and German promises to Gorbachev in 1989 -- has expedited the aggressive nationalism and assertiveness of Putin-era Russia. It has fueled a new arms race and aggravated a security threat in Europe that has far-reaching implications for the Europeans. Likewise, the further eastward enlargement of NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia, which Obama specifically advocated in his July 2008 Berlin address, will not engender greater security -- neither for Western Europe nor for Georgia and Ukraine. Admitting Georgia could draw NATO into a direct confrontation with Russia. Would the alliance really risk war with Russia over Georgia's breakaway enclaves in the Caucasus? Unlikely. The Georgians should have no illusions: they have already paid a high price for the false sense of security that American advisors gave to them prior to the recent conflict.
The European Union in the World
As great as the gap across the Atlantic has been in recent years, the United States still has much more in common with the Europeans than it does with new powers China or Russia. Europe could and should be America's closest partner in world affairs. But this relationship would be immensely different than the current one. It must be a partnership of equals across the Atlantic and this will require real compromises from the United States as well as the Europeans.
To make this possible, the Obama administration must begin to think anew about the European Union. For one, the Union is not teetering on the brink of disintegration, regardless of how some American commentators interpret its disunity on many issues and the recent failures to pass a constitution. Though institutional reform is absolutely necessary, even in its current condition the European Union is healthy, admired by the overwhelming majority of Europeans, and will continue to perform as it has in the recent past -- but no better than that until a constitution or new reform treaty is approved.
The European Union is already a major, capable power in world affairs. It has global interests and a sense of responsibility that goes beyond narrow self-interest. Its size and international economic might alone make it globally relevant, especially since much of the Union's power comes from its conditionally linked trade policies. The single market includes 450 million people, and ranks as the world's largest exporter of goods and the second leading importer worldwide behind the United States. When the ongoing financial crisis peaked this fall, President Bush's first call of help abroad was to the European Union. The Europeans also contribute over half the world's foreign aid to developing countries, including €300 million a year to the Palestinian Authority, triple the resources the United States provides. Diplomatically, the European Union has led international negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program since 2003. In 2004 European diplomacy helped bring about a peaceful resolution to Ukraine's Orange Revolution and, more recently, European negotiators brokered a peace in Georgia that sent peacekeeping troops and monitors to the Caucasus. Its greatest success by far has been to stabilize the Western Balkans in the aftermath of the wars of the 1990s. Thus, even though European Union foreign policies are in their infancy, they already make a significant contribution to global security.
Although the European Union in its various incarnations has long been involved in matters beyond its borders, this took new form in 1992 with the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Since then, its ability to engage in the wider world was boosted significantly, first with the 1999 European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) and then with the 2003 adoption of the European Security Strategy. ESDP endowed the European Union with military capabilities, enabling it to launch its first mission in Macedonia in March 2003. For the first time in the Union's history, the European Security Strategy defined a strategic orientation for the European Union to engage in the world's trouble spots by combining aid, diplomacy, trade, and force. Some of the programs and missions that have emerged from the European Security Strategy include police force training in the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan, the rule of law mission in Kosovo, training Iraqi judges, and security sector reform in Congo.
There is the common misperception among Americans that Europe is somehow pacifist -- at best a check-writer and post-conflict rebuilder for US-led interventions. Though not pacifist at all, Europe does indeed think about military force differently than the United States. The point of intervening in crises is to restore security and then reconstruct conflict-ravaged societies, providing them with sustainable economies and adequate governance. This approach is aimed at preventing crisis-prone countries from failing and, among other unwanted byproducts of instability and poverty, from becoming breeding grounds for terrorism.
Since the 1990s, the European Union has had limited armed units at its disposal, usually under national command, that have been deployed as far away as Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Gaza-Egypt border, and Indonesia. Also available, though so far unused, are combat contingents organized in flexible, mobile "battle groups" of 1,500 troops. For the most part though, the European Security Strategy envisions employing armed force in peacekeeping or post-conflict missions together with civilian components. Troop deployments, for instance, have provided security for elections and state-building projects. Forces under European command have presided over disarmament in Macedonia, supported internationally run elections in Congo, and monitored the cease-fire in Aceh. European Union peacekeepers that replaced the NATO-led force in Bosnia in 2004 have taken on monitoring and training exercises.
Soft Power: Regime Change from Within
Although it now has global reach -- and a handful of successes in faraway trouble spots -- the European Union is still most effective in its own neighborhood and periphery. This is where it exercises its legendary soft power best. With the leverage of incentive and reward, the European Union has nurtured democracy in former right-wing dictatorships on the Mediterranean and formerly communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. This transformative power is presently the driving force of reforms across the Western Balkans and in Turkey as well. In the process of aligning their policies with European criteria, all the Western Balkans states including Serbia have made enormous strides since the wars of the 1990s. Despite powerful domestic opposition, Turkey passed a spate of constitutional reform packages designed to bring its policies into conformity with European standards: Ankara's military budgets are now under civilian control, capital punishment is outlawed, and torture in prisons has been halted. EU parliamentarian Daniel Cohn-Bendit calls the EU-led process of Turkey's liberalization "the miracle on the Bosporus."
The European Union's soft power also reaches into a vast periphery stretching from Morocco and Egypt through Jordan to Armenia, Moldova to Ukraine. These countries may never join the European Union, but are nevertheless willing to make compromises and meet basic European Union norms to take advantage of aid and preferential trade, as well as the perks of training for justice officials, environmental projects, and new roads and infrastructure. These projects that fall under the umbrella of the European Neighborhood Policy are not philanthropy, but rather hard-boiled security policy. At a cost of $12 billion dollars since 2004 (and another $18 billion over the next six years), the logic is that by bringing these countries into its orbit and transforming them into well-governed allies, the European Union helps create conditions that keep terrorists -- as well as immigrants -- at bay. It simultaneously ensures that its energy corridors in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and the Mediterranean remain open and governed by friendly nations. The dozen current European Neighborhood Policy countries include problem states that are generally high on the West's watch-list such as Lebanon and Algeria, and could in the future include the likes of Syria, Libya, and Belarus.
Unity First
Before the European Union becomes a global power on a par with its economic might, there are institutional reforms that it must undertake and hard decisions ahead for the member states. Foremost, European foreign policy is hampered by its requirement of unanimity in decision making. As a union of 27 countries (and counting) it must find a way to institute qualified majority decision-making in more fields. The proposed constitution or its scaled-back successor, the Lisbon reform treaty, would have done exactly this, as well as endow a foreign minister (or "high representative") with special powers and a diplomatic service of its own. Structured cooperation in the defense domain would have upgraded EU military capacity. But in 2005 and 2008 voters in the Netherlands, France, and Ireland shot down these treaties for reasons that had little to do with their foreign affairs provisions. The way forward now is still not clear.
In terms of security and defense policy, the European Union's glaring "capabilities gap" -- the gulf between the hardware that members have and that which European security policy needs --leaves it largely dependent on NATO and the United States. Despite the European Security Strategy's comprehensive concept, the continent's military forces are limited and still largely those built up during the Cold War, outfitted for a continental land war rather than peacekeeping in Africa. Much of its manpower and hardware is not deployable outside of Europe, something that the Germans, for example, learned the hard way in the Hindu Kush.
For years Washington had opposed -- and actively blocked -- European efforts to strengthen its military defense components on the grounds that it undermined NATO. But this attitude seems to have softened in the past decade. At the NATO summit in Bucharest last year both NATO and US officials publicly encouraged the Europeans to pick up the pace of defense planning, a request that implied the United States is no longer willing to provide security for Europeans in a world order with so many other priorities. It might also have meant that Washington is ready for Europeans to play a greater role in maintaining international security, a first step in a new partnership. The French EU presidency made bolstering European military capabilities one of its priorities, while at the same time formally integrating France into NATO. European defense experts say that the European Security Strategy correctly points the way ahead. Europeans simply have to act on it together, something a new US administration should encourage even more clearly.
A New Trans-Atlantic Alliance
There are a number of security-related fields where Europeans have something to offer the United States in a new trans-Atlantic alliance. The first is climate policy, which the Europeans place firmly in the category of geosecurity. The European Union has proactively taken the world lead in efforts to curb global warming, and the Obama administration must catch up with and join the Europeans in accepting drastic and mandatory cuts in emissions. The EU targets include a 20 percent reduction in European greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, compared with 1990 levels, or a 30 percent reduction if other developed nations (like the United States) agree to take similar action. European objectives also include increasing the use of renewable energy to 20 percent of all energy consumed. If the United States throws in its lot with the Europeans, the partners would have that much more leverage to convince the world's other leading polluters, the "dirty dozen" who account for 80 percent of the world's carbon emissions, to do the same. The United States could work hand-in-glove with the European Union to design a successor treaty to Kyoto, which expires in 2012.
Energy security is another domain where the United States could partner effectively with Europe. The United States and Europe together account for 40 percent of worldwide energy consumption and have already pledged better coordination to manage energy sources. Europe has set an ambitious goal to reduce its overall energy use by 20 percent by the year 2020. EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso has called for a Strategic Energy Dialogue between Europe and America. He has underlined the potential for increased EU-US energy collaboration across the globe, including development of hydrocarbon resources in the Caspian and Central Asian regions, and cooperation to improve energy efficiency.
A third place where the new Obama administration should seek trans-Atlantic cooperation is in arms control and nuclear disarmament. The goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons is etched in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and has recently been pushed by an unlikely group of former US defense and state department officials including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn. They have urged the United States to lead the world toward nuclear disarmament by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which would halt all testing of nuclear weapons, render nuclear forces less ready to launch on short notice, and eliminate tactical nuclear weapons, including US bombs stationed in Europe. The European Union would be the perfect interlocutor to engage Russia in this process, a country to whom this idea would be a particularly hard sell. Progress on scrapping nuclear arms -- or at least making deep cuts in global stockpiles --would also give the ongoing EU-US negotiations with Iran additional leverage to convince Tehran to halt its nuclear program. A first step would be to rejuvenate the NPT, one of the arms control mechanisms lamed by the Bush administration. This, together with the ratification of the CTBT might encourage India and Pakistan to step back from their nuclear arms race. There will have to be a new agreement to extend or replace START I (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) which runs out in December 2009. Although much of the original pact mandating cuts in United States and Russian nuclear arms is now outdated or redundant, a new accord could institutionalize strict verification requirements and impose other weapon limits.
Also, if the Europeans move forward with a substantial new European security project, it should include both Russia and the United States. A proposal of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies is to involve the European Union more actively in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and finally give the successor institution to the Helsinki Process a central role in security from the Atlantic to the Urals, perhaps even investing it with a permanent European Security Council consisting of prominent members, including the European Union, Russia, the United States, Turkey, and Ukraine, as well as non-permanent members, including the Central Asian states. Whatever shape the European security architecture takes, it will be counterproductive unless Russia is part of it. This goes for missile defense as well. The Russians have floated ideas for a European Security Treaty that would address arms control, drug trafficking, organized crime, terrorism, and irregular migration. Sarkozy was the first European leader to support it publicly. In the post-Cold War years the Western victors dictated its plans to Russia without heed of its sensibilities. That strategy has backfired disastrously. As problematic as Russia is, the Atlantic allies have to take it seriously and include it in security plans.
The truth is that NATO is just one of the post-World War II institutions that no longer meets the needs of today's world. The last decade has witnessed a striking displacement of power, away from the United States but also away from the West as a whole. The current implosion of the western-led financial system has only expedited this shift. When the new global powers begin to assert themselves, as indeed they are increasingly doing now, the United States and the Europeans will realize how much they still have in common. They will thus have to think innovatively about questions like security in a way that they failed to do in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. If the Euro-Atlantic relationship is going to continue to be a special one, then it has to be on the basis of a partnership of equals, with the United States making important concessions to the Europeans and the Europeans finally stepping up to take care of their own security requirements. One thing is certain: Given the daunting challenges of the 21st century, the United States and Europe are going to need one another more than ever.
*A version of this essay appeared in the Winter 2008/2009 edition of World Policy Journal.
Paul Hockenos is editor of Internationale Politik-Global Edition. His most recent book is "Joschka Fischer andthe Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History o fPostwar Germany".
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