Towards A European Army?

By Robert Cooper

Lecture delivered at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, 3 June 2004.

Read John Keane's remarks on this Lecture, here

Text is also available in PDF and WordDoc.

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The title of this lecture is in the form of a question: “Towards a European Army?” Question mark. The most important part of the title is the question mark. I can tell you the answer straight away. NO I am not sure whether the title should mean: “Is there going to be a European Army?” Or whether it means: “Should we be going in the direction of creating a European Army?” In either case the answer is NO.

This is not just a personal view – though some of the remarks that follow do reflect only personal opinions and experience. It is what the Heads of State and government stated clearly first at Helsinki : “The Europen Council underlines its determination to develop an autonomous capacity to take decisions and, where NATO as a whole is not engaged, to launch and conduct EU led military operations in response to international crises. This process will avoid unnecessary duplication and does not imply the creation of a European army. ” They then repeated more or less the same at Nice.

Armies belong to states. If you want a European army you have first to create a European state. And that is not the direction we are going in either. The basic unit of political account in Europe remains the state – the nation state if you will – though I always hesitate to use that term in a country of at least four nations - the state which has elections, parliaments, which taxes its citizens, provides them with health care, courts, police, prisons, education, street lighting and many other things, and which remains the primary focus of loyalty and identity of its citizens. It is this state which owns the armies too and which will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It is the twenty five states sitting around the table who make the decisions in the European Union. That is true in the end in all areas of importance. In foreign and security policy it is true for virtually everything.

Democratic control is important in all areas but it is especially important in control of the military and the use of force. That control rests with the member states of the European Union, just as it rests with the member states of NATO or of the United Nations. If someone is going to send troops into

harms way it has to have the sanction of the Bundestag, the Cortes, the

Riksdag, or Westminster – or whatever national procedure is appropriate.

The European Union has nor abolished nation states or reduced their sovereignty. Instead it has provided them with a legal and political framework that governs their relations with each other and, to some extent their relations with other countries. Men are not less free because they live in a framework of law which gives them rights and obligations. In fact they are likely to be more free in such a framework than in a state of anarchy. “Nasty brutish solitary and short” you will recall was Hobbes' view of life in those conditions. Freedom is created by law. Without law there is no freedom. Something similar is true of state sovereignty. States also are not less sovereign because they accept mutually binding ties instead of living in the anarchic society that has been characteristic of this continent over many centuries. In the post-war period the states of Europe have achieved greater freedom peace and prosperity within the framework of the EU than they ever had before. Maybe you could even say greater sovereignty.

Although a European army is not on the agenda the European Union framework does provide for a security and defence policy, and I believe that this makes sense. Indeed I believe that a higher degree of integration in this area is in the interests of Britain and of Europe .

The European Union was not originally intended to be a defence union. It was not even designed to have a foreign policy. In fact it was designed to put an end to all that. What over the centuries has been the biggest threat to Europe or to European countries? The answer is other European countries. Foreign policy in the traditional sense in Europe meant Britain against France , France against Austria , Spain against the Netherlands , and so on. The central purpose of the European Union was to get away from that sort of politics by creating cross border economic linkages. Monnet deliberately kept Foreign Ministries out of the negotiations that led to the EU because he wanted to escape the tradition of foreign policy that emphasized borders threats and separateness.

As it happened the post war situation and the United States made this easy. And some credit should go to Josef Stalin too. For forty years after the end of World War II the central foreign policy issue was the Cold War, and the central body for handling the problems of the Cold War was NATO. Those issues were mostly to do with arms control, deterrence, weapon systems, reactions to instability in the East. There were side issues of course: Britain and France were liquidating colonial empires and getting into various difficulties doing so; but the East/West conflict lay at the heart of policy and that was handled with the US through NATO. Although there were differences of nuance – which at times could lead to bitter debates – the interests of the Europeans and those of the US basically coincided throughout this period, at least as far as policy in Europe was concerned. Thus by a lucky chance just as Europe was being organized to be without a foreign policy it found that it did not need one.

The institutions of the EU were thus never designed for foreign policy or military affairs. This is a problem that I have to deal with on a daily basis. Foreign and defence policy requires quick decisions and quick action, a culture of security, maybe of secrecy. The political culture of Europe , as it has grown up, is primarily legal and revolves around plugging away at issues – sometimes over years - until a compromise is found. It all takes place more or less in public. This is unusual, perhaps even unique. There have been few associations of states which did not have some element of security compact or alliance in their raison d'etre.

All this came to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall and the crisis in the Balkans. With the end of the Cold War, east/west relations ceased to be the dominating concern on both ides of the Atlantic . At the same time Europe - and with it NATO - ceased to be central to US policy. This is not a surprise. The Cold War was an exceptional moment in American as well as European history. It would be natural for the US to revert to a more flexible alliance policy, avoiding the permanent entanglements that George Washington warned against. No one is going to abolish NATO and it will still be useful to both the US and European allies – as we have seen in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and through Partnership for Peace – but at other times you will get reactions to it like Donald Rumsfelt's “It didn't even cross my mind” when someone asked if he had thought of using NATO in Iraq. The mission defines the coalition: sometimes the coalition will be NATO, sometimes not.

With the crisis in Yugoslavia came a problem that Europeans cared about and America , initially at least, did not. We all then proceeded to handle it badly; Europeans worse than Americans because it was our problem and because it took us time to understand that it would need force to reestablish peace – we had lived to long in an environment of law and of political compromise. We discovered in Bosnia that we lacked the political culture and the decision making framework to use force. We discovered in Kosovo that we lacked the military capabilities to do certain operations on our own. (In Bosnia as a matter of fact the main damage was done not by American bombing but by Anglo French artillery; but in Kosovo we found that although we had more aircraft than the US few of them were capable of precision bombing and none of them could do so at night).

Out of this experience come some lessons and some reasons for wanting to have some European defence options outside the NATO framework. First that framework has ceased to be as important to the US as it is to us. Second there may be occasions when Europe takes a different view of a situation and wishes to get involved when the US does not. That was the position initially in Bosnia . The United States , like all countries is subject to change. Who knows what its policies will be in twenty or thirty year's time? It is reasonable to for European countries to give themselves options that do rely altogether on the US , for all that it remains the most important ally.

It is also possible that Europe might be able to do something about its lack of military capability in the European framework. The problem with European countries is not that they spend too little on defence – though doubtless one or two could spend a bit more without it doing any harm – but that they spend it in a fantastically inefficient way. If we had a single European rifle or a single European tank it would be cheaper and our forces would be more effective. If we could only construct our aircraft carriers so that French planes could land and take off from British vessels it would improve our flexibility.

Of course all this could be done in NATO but the fact is it has not been done over forty years. The EU which spends money on research and which has responsibility for organizing a single market in defence goods - as far as that can reasonably be done - may be better placed to make progress in this area (it contains some non NATO members too of course, one of whom has a serious defence budget and defence industry). At the short term end we are working on making improvements through, for example the battlegroup concept – the creation of nine groups of about 1500 men deployable at short notice, some of which will be multinational. For the longer term we are setting up a Defence Capability Agency whose job it will be to stimulate collaboration in projects – which may be about training or maintenance as much as about equipment – with a view to meeting common needs more efficiently.

Especially for smaller states the best way to savings and efficiency is through specialisation or operating in larger multinational units. There is the Eurocorps, the German Dutch Corps, the Dutch/Belgian naval cooperation, the UK/Netherlands amphibious force and many others. No one is likely to do a major operation on their own and some of the units already exist in multinational form.

European security and defence policy is not just a matter of cost benefit analysis. Its growth in the last few years following the appointment of Javier Solana has been impressive. That growth is not just the result of a calculation that it is more efficient or practical to do things in a European configuration – though that may also be the case: it also reflects the wish among many Europeans to carve for themselves some autonomy and to take some responsibility.

In the last few years EU has made itself the most important player in the Balkans; it makes a more useful contribution in the MEPP than ever before; it pursues active policies in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe . In all of these areas it works closely with the United States : to do anything else would result in instant failure. Just occasionally in pursuing foreign policy goals it will be necessary to back them up with military deployments. It is reasonable that when JS goes to negotiate with someone he should have that possibility himself and should not have to rely on another organisation for it. How far we go in the military field will depend ultimately on how close our foreign policies grow.

Our experience in Bosnia is that what is needed in most situations today is not so much military capability as some combination of military political civil and economic capability. (This is another thing that distinguishes the present world from that of the Cold War). The EU has at least the potential to bring together all those elements.

I doubt if military action is going to form a large part of a European foreign policy. We are, for the moment, not that sort of people. Besides the basic fact is that we still live under a Pax Americana; and strategic military operations are always likely to be US led. My guess is that Europe is going to focus on aid in different forms, on deployments of Police as much as soldiers and when military are deployed on peace keeping (And don't forget that such operations can be as dangerous and as important as warfighting). Very likely a good number of EU operations will be in support of the UN. It is in this spirit that the small planning cell that the EU is setting up will focus primarily on civilian/military planning – the things that happen when fighting is over, which we always seem to do so badly at the moment. We hope for example that there may be some value added in having the same organisation responsible for police training, aid for improving the rule of law and military security in Bosnia .

Far from this being bad for EU relations with the United States there are three ways in which a well functioning European Security and Defence Policy may be good for them. First if as a result European forces become more capable that should be welcome to the US and would be good for NATO as well as for the EU. Second a greater European willingness to deploy troops should be welcome to the US as a contribution to burden sharing.

Thirdly and most important, a willingness to use force is the mark of a serious foreign policy. Europe can be a real partner for the US only at the point that it ceases always to have at the back of its mind the feeling that if things get serious the US will probably have to take over. Only when it is really ready to take responsibility for its own actions will Europe have a real foreign policy. I suspect it will be a while before we reach that point but if we do we would be a more useful and more influential partner for the USA . More uncomfortable too perhaps but that also has its merits.

If it makes sense to try to eliminate some of our national duplication it makes no sense to start by duplicating NATO's planning capabilities. Hence the so called Berlin Plus arrangements that give the EU access to NATO assets and capabilities – there is no certainty that such assets will be available at a given moment but a high degree of likelihood. They also provide the EU with command options – DSACEUR & SHAPE. But if Berlin Plus are going to work – and it is in everybody's interest that they should – then the EU really has to feel that SHAPE is working for them as their military HQ. Maybe out of this might come a pattern in which big operations are run through SHAPE, smaller rapidly deployed operations make use of national headquarters and the EU itself develops expertise in putting together the civilian /military packages that are vital for the success of much of what we do. But this is only one possible future: how far we go, where we end up will depend on a whole series of decisions along the way, each of which will be taken by national governments in national capitals.

Let me finish by saying something about what the EU has done so far in this field. First we started from nothing and established a small military and civilian staff to deal with crisis management. There is a high level committee of Member States to provide strategic guidance and political control. We have also created a Situation Centre which brings together intelligence from different agencies in Member States. We are wrestling with the problem of creating efficient secure communications etc.

Since I started in Brussels about two years ago we have launched four operations:

 

•  EUPM

•  CONCORDIA

•  ARTEMIS

•  PROXIMA

And we are working on:

•  EUFOR

•  Kinshasa

•  Rule of Law in Georgia

For a period of four years – two of preparation, two of operation that is not a bad record. You might say: suppose this goes on, suppose some of this comes true and therea re integrated European capabilities, increasingly integrated foreign policies, an increasingl habit of operating together: does not that amount to a European army. The answer is the same I gave at the start. NO. Final decisions will rest with the states who own the armies amd they will continue to be national states. No state no army.