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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/02
Conflict Management and European Security: The Problem of Collective Solidarity
Fred Tanner
Deputy Director - Head of Academic Affairs, Geneva Centre for Security Policy
GCSP - ISS at Yale University Workshop Papers: "Old and New Security Issues: Research and Policy Ramifications"
August 1998
Introduction
The dynamics of European security has become considerably more difficult to comprehend in recent years. This is due primarily to two sets of developments. First an "amorphous threat-free post-Cold War security setting" has replaced the distinct Alliance-wide threat from the Soviet Union. 1 Second, new risks and threats have increasingly affected European security from regions immediately adjoining Western Europe. Conflicts and notorious instability loom in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Balkans and the Mediterranean region, including North Africa and the Middle East. As a consequence, security cooperation in Europe currently struggles to cope with these risks of non-military nature and ambiguous threat scenarios from the "out-of-area".
This paper argues that institutional responses to these risks and threats will be hampered by the increasing diversity of national interests of member states. Many allies have special stakes in some periphery of the European continent and they find themselves competing for institutional support. Diverse and differing regional and sub-regional orientations can lead to the compartmentalisation of security concerns and, in turn, to the development of sub-regional response mechanisms on the cost of alliance-wide security and conflict management instruments. Common security policies will even be put more to test by the extension of the NATO and EU perimeters.
Collective Security FailuresTwo recent conflicts in Europe - the wars in Yugoslavia and chaos in Albania—have put the conflict management capabilities of security institutions to a test. In both cases, these institutions failed to provide the necessary support to national efforts to prevent or contain the conflict. Instead, other organisations had to intervene under very high political and military risks. In the case of Yugoslavia, UNPROFOR had to pursue a "mission impossible" and, in turn, predictably failed. In the case of Albania, allies with high stakes in the region were forced into a futile forum-hopping before their "one-off" coalition of the willing launched operation Alba. Possibly due to the inadequacy of these institutional responses to conflicts at Europe's doorsteps, the "lessons learned" on political crisis response, force interoperability and soft security building could improve the effectiveness of future European conflict prevention and management.
Wars in YugoslaviaThe Yugoslavian wars showed the limits of both NATO and the WEU with regard to crisis and conflict management in "out-of-area". NATO had first to undergo a political and doctrinal metamorphis before it could play any role in the Balkans. NATO intervened in Yugoslavia for the first time in April 1994 with air strikes against Bosnian Serbs, i.e. three years after the outbreak of the conflict. Only with the Dayton Peace agreement NATO was finally entering the realm of peace restoration activities.
The WEU, in turn, was unable to exploit the Yugoslavian crisis for defining its own identity and mission in the broad European security setting. The WEU did encounter political constraints from members who favoured a NATO involvement instead. Furthermore, it was militarily simply unable to project any preventive or deterring power into the Balkan. With the outbreak of hostilities in Yugoslavia in 1991, the WEU Council considered 4 options for WEU intervention: logistics support, escort and protection, peacekeeping force to monitor and enforce cease-fire, peacekeeping and deterrent force requiring about 20'000 combat troops and 10'000 support staff.
The Council members were unable to come up with a consensus on any of these options. Some WEU members preferred to refer the mission to the UN. With the tragic fate of UNPROFOR unravelling, the WEU contended itself to support embargo enforcement operations in the Adriatic and on the Danube. Finally, carving out its own niche in the peace-building process, the WEU sent a police operation to Mostar in mid-1994.
The responses of all European institutions including NATO to the Yugoslav quagmire have been partial, timid, and reactive rather than preventive. But, the failure of these institutions is a failure of its members to act collectively towards the same objective. Thus, Europe's failure to prevent a war in Yugoslavia or in Bosnia was not a failure of the EU, the WEU or NATO. It was a failure of the member-states, which were unable to come up with a common approach to the unravelling crisis.
The Yugoslavian tragedy shaped profoundly the thinking and decision-making process towards conflict management and missions beyond the perimeters of NATO, the WEU and the EU. First, IFOR-SFOR emerged as models for non-Article 5 missions under single multinational command structure. Second, this model galvanised the creation within the Western Alliance of the CJTF concept. Third, CJTF was accepted by the Europeans as a trade-off for not pushing the WEU into an operational military organisation. Fourth, the move towards a European Command structure had the benefits of bringing France back into the military planning of NATO. In conclusion, the Yugoslav wars prevented the competitive emergence of parallel EU/WEU and NATO tracks in the domain of conflict management and prepared the basis for flexible response under a single command on the grounds of the IFOR-SFOR experiences.
Operation AlbaIn April 1997, law and order in Albania basically collapsed. Protracted violence, humanitarian emergency, and massive exodus of refugees towards Italy and Greece were the results. In this context, the OSCE Representative Vranitzky appealed to Western institutions to send a stabilisation force of 4000 troops and policemen. Upon pressure from the US that was concerned about further entanglement of NATO in the Balkans, the NATO Council decided not to contemplate a military operation. But also the WEU Council was unable to take up the OSCE proposal.
Italy and Greece, the states primarily concerned by the Albanian crisis tried now to prepare the political ground for an intervention through the EU. An informal CFSP ministerial meeting decided to send a high-level mission on the ground. The mission recommended the involvement of the EU as a lead agency for the purpose of providing humanitarian emergency aid and the re-establishment of a police force. It also proposed the involvement of the OSCE and the Council of Europe for advancing the democratisation process, human rights and elections. Finally, for providing security to these missions, the dispatch of a Multi-National Protection Force (MNPF) was recommended.
Italy, on the ground of these recommendations attempted to use the WEU as the institution for planning and running the military operation. The operation would have been a Petersberg-type mission with WEU members, acting under the authority of the WEU for humanitarian and rescue tasks, and tasks of combat forces in crisis management and peacemaking. 2 But, the Alliance solidarity within the WEU was not strong enough for triggering an institutional support. The UK but also Germany opposed the request of Southern European members that a Special Session of the WEU Council be convened for the purpose of confiding the WEU the authority of the military operation.
The lack of collective solidarity forced Italy to pursue the crisis management unilaterally and to seek a UN Security Council authority for a "coalition of the willing" operation. Italy managed to get this authority within one day and then staged the operation outside any institutional framework. Together with its ad hoc partners Italy had engage in mission planning and force deployment from scratch. Even the political co-ordination of the troop contributing states had to be done through an ad hoc Political Steering Committee "resembling WEU or CFSP". Finally, some 7'000 soldiers from eight countries —Austria, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain and Turkey —participated in Operation Alba, that was the first crisis management mission conducted in Europe by a multinational military force composed by Europeans only. After a successful end of the operation, the WEU Secretary General acknowledged that the organisation had missed an opportunity to successfully contribute to an out-of-area mission. 3
The case of Operation Alba shows the limited use of European security institutions if there is a lack of congruency of interest. The Southern European states were not able to use any of the numerous military forces that are available to the WEU. The WEU institutional support and some of the Forces Answerable to the WEU (FAWEU) could have been used for this operation. But, the use of the European corps with a strong German contingent would have been vetoed by Bonn, and even the Euromarfor, that has been set up precisely for Alba-type of operations has been blocked by Portugal.
Security-Building at Europe's PeripheryHow do current institutions and policy makers see out-of-area risks and threats and how do they respond to them? A recent report of the North Atlantic Assembly, for instance, has identified the following risk factors coming from beyond the Southern periphery of the alliance. The first and foremost risk is the "immigration explosion", that results either from an increase in the rate of illegal immigration or as a "consequence of a huge influx of refugees trying to escape from a crisis". 4 Second and third on the list are risks of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The report does not list any direct military threat potentialities from the South to the NATO territory.
In a slightly different approach, Alyson Bailes of the WEU differentiated between regional, generic, and non-military challenges to Europe: 5
1. Conflicts in the region immediately adjoining the "greater Europe" such as North Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia.
2. Generic security threats such as: the actual use or sharpened threat of use weapons of mass destruction, anywhere in the world; a resurgence of terrorist activities against Europeans (or broader "Western) populations, using either traditional or WMD techniques; terrorism in new dimensions, notably "cyber-terrorism"; and accidents from inadequate storage or disposal of military wastes.
3. Threats in non-military dimension such as: disturbances in the supply of energy or other basic commodities for the European economy, disturbances in the financial system (including insurance), natural disasters, economic damage through climate/environmental change, short or long-term flows of illegal and/or unassimilable immigration into the European area.
Finally, Admiral Lopez, Commander-in-Chief, AFSOUTH, provides a similar threat analysis. According to him the "new enemy" of the Alliance is called "instability". 6 He identified four regions that affect European security: North Africa, the Near East, Transcaucasus and the Balkans.
In view of the various risk and threat assessments, it is important to explore how security institutions in Europe respond to security challenges coming from beyond alliance perimeters. Indeed, can and should Europe play a role beyond its borders? The cases of former Yugoslavia and Albania have painfully shown that no European institutions have been able to respond to an unravelling crisis right at their doorsteps.
There are two analytical perspectives to provide answers to this question. From a neo-liberal point of view, Europe has interest to assure a peaceful transition of these countries towards good governance and liberal market. Europe could only be safe if its adjacent areas are included in a zone of democratic peace. 7 Under these premises Europe would have to be prepared to pursue a policy of liberal internationalism in those areas that are threatened by authoritarian rule, or worse by threats or acts of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Western security-building in its periphery would include the promotion of liberal norms, that could happen either through cooperative sub-regional arrangements or the more muscled implementation of liberal peace agreements. Roland Paris argues that the prominent involvement of European institutions in peace building in the Balkan, for instance, represents a form of liberal interventionism, as the reconstruction of a war-torn society would be done according to a mirror image of a Western pluralistic democracy. 8
But, liberal interventionism could also happen in the form of an outright military operation against an autocratic ruler whose actions blatantly violate the norms and values of a Kantian civil community. The NATO preparations for deterring Serbia's Milosevic in Kosovo must be understood on such grounds. But NATO has never been able to effectively communicate the criteria according to which the contingency planning has been made against the Serbian armed forces.
From a neo-realist point of view, Europe has today vital stakes with regard to great powers in the area such as Russia and Turkey, both of whom are playing a key role in the sub-regional alignments at the periphery of the European security perimeters. The neo-realist perspective would prescribe European states to assure a secure access to oil and gas reserves. In this context, a special emphasis should be put on the Central Asian region, or -according to Brzezinkski - the "Eurasian Balkans" that are exposed to the ambitions of Russia, Turkey, Iran and China. 9 Central Asia and the Caspian Sea are unstable regions with a power vacuum, disputed borders, ethnic strife, but with large deposits of oil and gas. According to The Economist, the rectangle of land that "stretches north-east from Arabia to where Kazakhstan meets China" holds up to three quarters of the world's total reserves of oil and a third of its reserves of natural gas. 10
Extension of Defence PerimetersThe eastward extensions by NATO and the EU is an attempt to knitting together the various societies subscribing to liberal democracies. It represents an extension of a value consensus that deserves to be collectively defended. But, can European states extend and deepen their security arrangements without simultaneously threatening others? 11
The neo-realists expect from the NATO expansion a balancing effect from Russia and other states sooner or later. 12 This does not necessarily exclude more cooperation between NATO states and Russia on matters such as arms control and joint conflict management.
American voices were calling for simultaneous enlargement of the EU and NATO or for an EU enlargement first. The basic official claim is that an EU membership would assure the connection between Europe's security and its economy. The more discreet and more serious argument is the American fear that a NATO expansion could spoil US-Russian accommodation over cooperative build-down of weapons of mass destruction on Russian soil. 13 The way the enlargement debate has taken its course, it is safe to predict that the NATO extension will become a serious test to US-European burden sharing. This has been highlighted by the threat from French President Jacques Chirac who went on the record saying that France would not pay for the American goal of NATO enlargement, because the French-supported candidates Romania and Slovenia were not retained. 14
A number of analysts argue that the deepening of the EU through a monetary union may hinder the consolidation of the liberal order that is emerging in Eastern and Central Europe. As Timothy Gordon Ash puts it: "Liberal order, not unity, is the right strategic goal for European policy in our time." 15 Europe may be a split up into an inner and outer wall; a new artificial division of Europe may emerge. In this sense, the move towards a European monetary union represents a high-risk for the efforts of a continental consolidation. 16 Furthermore, the Amsterdam summit of 1997 brought common border management policies to the core competences of the EU.
Shaping the "Out-of-Area"Given the risks and threats that are directly affecting Europe's security agendas, the Western institutions attempt to project influence into areas outside their collective defence boundaries.
In addition to the membership extensions of NATO, the EU and the WEU, these institutions have launched a number of cooperative programmes with the purpose of creating a zone that becomes safe for democracy. These are partnerships with hard and soft security programmes in the framework of PfP, EACC and the special arrangements with Russia and the Ukraine. Non-military programmes and dialogue programmes have been launched by all security institutions with regard to the Mediterranean. NATO and the WEU have their dialogue programmes, the EU the Euro-Med process, PHARE and TACIS and the OSCE the Mediterranean Dimension.
The most ambitious programme in security cooperation is Partnership for Peace (PfP) that is regional in scope but bilateral in practise. The non-committal nature of PfP with the possibility of creating a special "a la carte" programme has allowed over 40 countries from Western and Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Balkans to work with NATO. The PfP arrangements are placed in the soft security network of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. The Council's mandate is to promote the enhancement of the PfP programmes and to coordinate the cooperation of the partners in the following areas: political consultations about security-related issues, functional discussions on defence and defence-related activities, and peace support and disaster relief.
NATO also maintains a dialogue with a number of Southern Mediterranean states. NATO's 1997 Summit in Madrid decided to widen the scope and enhance the ongoing Mediterranean Dialogue and to establish a new committee, the Mediterranean Cooperation Group, to further that end. The outreach remains rather weak, however, as it is on a bilateral basis only and with no operational dimension.
The WEU promotes a less ambitious outreach programme than NATO and concentrates on consultations and cooperation along the lines of the Petersberg Declaration, i.e. humanitarian and rescue tasks and peace support. Associate partners come from Central Europe and the Baltic. Some of them are involved in the WEU police training operation in Albania (MAPE) through the Associate Partnership. The WEU also maintains a rather weak dialogue with select number of states from the Mediterranean region.
The EU sustains its outreach through the accession partnership, association agreements and multilateral partnerships. The Barcelona Process, for instance, has as its objective to address the root causes of conflict and migration from the South towards Europe. It has three chapters of cooperation: security, economic and cultural. The security cooperation is paralysed as some Arab states have established an explicit link between the Middle East Peace Process and the Euro-Med Partnerships. In this context, it is unlikely to create any cooperative crisis management functions for the Mediterranean in the foreseeable future.
The Southeast European region and the Mediterranean have not been included in the expansion plans of the EU and NATO. 17 It is possible, however, to expand the security space in Europe to the Balkan and to Central Asia with WEU Associate Partner status, Nato's Partnership for Peace, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the OSCE Stability Pact. Operational association has already been done with the inclusion of military contingents from countries such as Morocco or Egypt into the integrated command of IFOR or SFOR.
Conflict Management MechanismsThe extension of the alliance frameworks and the structuring of outreach programmes towards the periphery of Europe may help to foster a culture of cooperation and it may support states in their difficult transitions towards good governance and liberalism. But how can the European institutions react to a threat or a risk that rapidly needs to be taken care of in a non-Article V situation? Can European institutions project power into adjacent areas, such as the Balkan, the Mediterranean or Central Asia for the purpose of peacemaking, peace enforcement or peacebuilding? And, to what extent are the force requirements of such missions compatible with NATO's classic mandate of collective defence?
The Europeans do not have the military capability nor the organisational unity to project power beyond their borders. According to a WEU study, European-only assets without American troops and logistical support would be able to project no more than 10'000 troops beyond the alliance boundaries. 18 This shortcoming of power projection is a reason why some European states have insisted to develop within NATO a European Security and Defence Identity that would facilitate the use of collective NATO defence assets for a WEU-led operation.
The WEU is the military arm of the EU and it can be used for operations in which the US does not wish to be involved. But with the acceptance of a European Security and Defence Identity by NATO, the WEU can use NATO collective assets and capabilities for such operations. The implementation of such operations may be facilitated by the concept of Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs). A European command with CJTF could provide the Europeans with greater freedom to undertake non-Article V operations. This would still be better than a "coalition of the willing".
The trends of creating more flexibility of response towards sub-regional challenges have also been reflected by the creation of new forces that are geared primarily for crisis management in out-of-area operations. Eurofor (European Rapid Operational Force) and Euromarfor have been set up by Southern European member states for that purpose. Eurofor and Eurmarfor are military forces that can be used primarily by Southern European states, but these forces can also be made available to NATO and WEU for non-Article V missions. The main mission objectives of these forces are the support of humanitarian missions, emergency evacuations of national citizens, peace support missions and peace enforcement missions.
In the aftermath of operation Alba, the Southern states accelerated the creation of other crisis management instruments. In late 1997 Italy and Spain decided to establish the Spanish-Italian Amphibious Force (SIAF) that could serve the national security interest of these two nations but that could also be employed in the framework of WEU as well as of NATO.
In the meantime, the propensity for unilateralism and one-off coalitions is not likely to diminish as long as the European are unable to define an effective Common Foreign and Security Policy. Challenges such as peace support, humanitarian aid, mass refugee management, disaster relief, peace-making, and peace-building will continue to test the effectiveness of European crisis management instruments and the power of persuasion of individual member states.
ConclusionThe broadening horizon and opaque nature of European security poses a serious challenge to security institutions in Europe. More diversity, parochialism and different outlooks of the alliance members towards geographically divers sub-regions will undoubtedly complicate consensual decision-making in security policy and in crisis management. The crisis of collective discipline is accentuated by the extension of both NATO and the EU.
As the examples of Yugoslavia and Albania have shown, alliance crisis management is based on common interest rather than on collective security. For this purpose the Western institutions will be able to maintain their "raison d'etre only if they can provide crisis management instruments for contingencies that do not require the collective consent, nor would it exclusively draw form collective alliance assets.
This study has shown with a number of cases that European and trans-Atlantic security institutions cannot fail, but rather their members can fail to "give life to the principles, norms, rules and procedures enshrined in these organisation". 19
The spectre of the massive flows of refugees, the presence of morally unacceptable practises such as ethnic cleansing, but also power vacuums, and the anticipated rivalry over the rich resources in Central Asia will compel the European security community to shape the conditions beyond the current boundaries of the security arrangements.
Soft security programmes such as PfP, the peace-building efforts in Bosnia or the Barcelona Partnerships indicate that the European outreach efforts will be based on liberal internationalism, rather than on neo-Wilsonianism. In these efforts the OSCE plays an increasingly important role as it has shown in the peace-building phase of Bosnia or the norm building in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
When it comes to crisis management or peace enforcement, the EU can neither speak with one voice nor can it engage in any out-of-area peace enforcement activities. Only NATO has currently the capabilities of sustaining a large-scale military campaign outside the NATO perimeters.
But, structurally and organisationally, Europe is very close to being able to engage in WEU-led operations with NATO assets and logistics. What is lacking is a coherent relationship between NATO and the EU. Only then can CFSP credibly engage in crisis and conflict management. But even at that stage, CFSP will remain a problem of persuasion as long as foreign policy and security decision making will be based on unanimity.
To avoid future unilateralism and "sauve qui peut" reactions, the European states have to be prepared to work through the relevant security institutions. Europe's failure to prevent the wars in Yugoslavia or in Bosnia was not a failure of the EU, the WEU or NATO. It was a failure of the member-states, which were unable to come up with a common and coherent approach to the unravelling "out-of-area" crisis.
Endnotes:
Note 1: Michael Brenner, "Conclusion", in NATO and Collective Security, ed. Michael Brenner, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), p. 291. Back.
Note 2: Part II of the Petersberg Declaration of 19 June 1992. Back.
Note 3: Referred to in the address by Admiral Venturoni, Chief of the Italian General Staff to the WEU Fiftieth Anniversary Conference on "WEU on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century", Brussels 17 March 1998. Back.
Note 4: North Atlantic Assembly, Nato's role in the Mediterranean, Draft General Report, 25 August 1997, p. p.1. Back.
Note 5: Alyson J.K. Bailes, Challenges for European Security, Paper presented at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, 15 June 1998, p. 4-5. Back.
Note 6: Remarks to the Colloquy on the "European Security and Defense identity", Madrid, 6 May 1998. Back.
Note 7: The Barcelona Document, for instance, that posits in its first chapter the objective of creating a zone of peace in the Euro-Mediterranean area. Back.
Note 8: Roland Paris, Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism, International Security, vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 1997. Back.
Note 10: The Economist, January 3rd 1998, p.18. Back.
Note 11: Robert Jervis, Cooperation under the Security Dilemma, 181 Back.
Note 12: For an analytical perspective that explains balancing on the grounds of military capabilities and ideology, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 13: Howard Baker Jr., Sam Nunn, Brent Scowcroft and Alton Frye, "Enlarge the European Union Before NATO, IHT, 6 February 1998. Back.
Note 14: Stanley R. Sloan, The US Role in the World: Indispensable Leader or Hegemon?, CRS Report for Congress, December 10, 1997, p. 4. Back.
Note 15: Timothy Garton Ash, "Europe's Endangered Liberal Order", Foreign Affairs, March/April 1998, Vol. 77, Number 2, p. 52. Back.
Note 16: For a rather alarmist view of about the consequences of the introduction of the Euro, see Martin Feldstein, EMU and International Conflict, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, pp. 60-73. Back.
Note 17: Malta was not included in the expansion track, after the newly elected Maltese Government froze its application to the EU in late 1996. The inclusion of Cyprus hinges on a settlement of the Turkish -EU relations. Back.
Note 18: Assembly of the WEU, "Europe's Role in the Prevention and Management of Crises in the Balkans,", 5 November 1997, Document 1589, p. 2. Back.
Note 19: Ernst B. Haas, Regime decay: conflict management and international organisations, 1945-1981, International Organization, 37, Nr. 2 Spring 1983, p. 190. Back.
