Launching the ESDP: The St'Malo Summit and Beyond

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• How to reconcile a stronger European security and
  defence policy with the primacy of NATO as the
  main security provider in Europe?
• By 1998, British PM Tony Blair was getting
  increasingly frustrated by EUs inability to
  tackle the Balkan crisis, most especially the
  Kosovo conflict
• But how can one explain the apparently sudden
  British commitment to ESDP? Were the various
  Balkan crisis enough of a spark for such change
  to occur?
• Reasons for such major shift in British security
  policy at the Anglo-French St.Malo summit of
  December 1998
• A) Tony Blair wanted to give himself a major
  European role to play or B) The British
  goverment was not sure the US would remain
  commited to European security as during Cold War
  times, thus there was a perceived need to bring
  in Atlanticism via a more direct, robust
  participation of the UK in European defence
  matters

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• C) The commitment of the British government to
  ESDP as an act of faith, that is to say, it is a
  major expression of political will inasmuch as
  its need is much less dictated from having to
  build a constituency of public (domestic) support
• D) Realpolitik The UK (and France) came to the
  conclusion that in order to safeguard its own
  national (political and security) interests there
  was a need to cooperate with institutions/ideas
  formerly approached with great caution (ESDP in
  the case of the UK, NATO for France)
• E) Bilateralism gives way to Multilateralism in
  Transatlantic Relations i.e. Anglo-American,
  Franco-American, German-American security
  dialogue substituted by a new dynamic security
  dialogue between Brussels and Washington

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• But what about the harmonisation of European
  Security Governance? How different are British
  and French security cultures?
• British Security Culture Force projection,
  professional military, cooperation, enlargement,
  focus on capabilities and tactics, pragmatism and
  a penchant for Atlanticism
• French Security Culture Territorial defence,
  conscription, integration, deepening, focus on
  institutional priorities and strategy, political
  will and a penchant for Europeanism (A la
  Francaise)
• At the same time, one can say that for the UK,
  ESDP is one of the best means of preserving the
  Atlantic Alliance, the solution being the
  creation of a European instrument outside of
  the latter for France, ESDP is first and
  foremost an European project (hence, a French
  project) that nevertheless maintains an Atlantic
  component

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• The real substance of St.Malo and/or British and
  French main points of agreement The EU should
  have a greater military capacity for conflict
  prevention, crisis management and peacekeeping
  operations i.e. 60,000 trops as a strategic goal
  Where NATO opts out, the EU should be in a
  position to autonomously conduct missions without
  US involvement the EU should equip itself with
  significant institutional infrastructures that
  can sustain a coherent European Security and
  Defence Policy the latter should be fully
  compatible with, and complementary to, an
  enhanced and strengthened NATO
• On the other hand, whereas the UK focused on
  deployability and sustainability, troop levels,
  readiness, France emphasised the need for a fully
  fledged European command chain, autonomous
  intelligence and power projection

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• St.Malo Declaration The Union must have the
  capacity for autonomous action, backed up by
  credible military forces, the means to decide to
  use them and a readiness to do so, in order to
  respond to international crisis
• The usage of the word autonomous was here first
  introduced in European security discourse, but
  what were its implications?
• Could it mean the ability to engage in military
  security missions with which the US might
  disagree politically?
• By 1999, US officials pressured their UK
  counterparts in trying to abandon both the
  concept and the word autonomy/autonomous and
  replace it with missions in which the US would
  not be involved yet the concept of autonomy
  remained
• That was in essence a consequence of Frances
  intention to have the EU emerging as a global
  security actor, therefore bringing in question
  the nature of the relationship between the EU and
  the US. That is also why France does not hesitate
  in invoking the duplication of military assets as
  something less problematic

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• And then there was Iraq
• In Spring 2003, transatlantic diplomacy became,
  for the UK, the benchmark against which European
  member states were judged The UK, through PM
  Tony Blair, advocated a one polar power system
  including a strategic partnership between Europe
  and the US, and with the involvement of other
  players such as China and Russia, in order to
  develop a common global agenda, while at the
  same time denouncing the emergence of rival
  centres of power in the guise of a vague
  definition of multipolarity (see France)
• Only three years before the War in Iraq started,
  the Nice Presidency Conclusions emphasised the
  fact that European security capacity and its
  development was a top priority for the EU
• During and after Nice, and building from the
  St.Malo summit, both PM Blair and President
  Chirac made the ESDP a policy priority for both
  countries and the EU as a whole
• However, and to a certain extent, ESDP remained,
  for the UK, as a necessary instrument in order to
  guarantee US commitment to NATO, whereas in
  France, ESDP was to be the corollary of the EUs
  emergence as an international, credible actor

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• With September 11, Blair re-aligned British
  Foreign Policy (gently) away from European
  security matters per se rather, he went
  global, that is to say, in his own words, the
  main task was now the re-ordering of the world,
  most notably by creating new structrures of
  international security, and thus, order
• In France, while most of this new focus on global
  order was shared by its political elites, Blairs
  strategy was not in Paris, focus was on the
  primacy of political and diplomatic instruments,
  limited military response (and limited to
  Afghanistan) and the utter need for UN mandate(s)
• At the same time, in the immediate aftermath of
  September 11 , the EU declared its military
  capacity operational (Laeken summit, December
  2001) by May 2002, it held its first EU-led
  crisis management exercise and one month later
  adopted its first report on conflict prevention
  and a declaration on adapting ESDP to pursue the
  fight against terrorism

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• September 11 also marked a revival of the
  fortunes of NATO itself The organisation was
  going global, and the UK would be in the vanguard
  of the process, irrespective of its other
  European partners the British MoD Strategic
  Defence Review of 2002 clearly stated that The
  governments overall goal is to eliminate
  terrorism as a force for change in international
  affairs such declaratory remarks were much more
  in tune with NATOs new mission on combating
  terrorism than with nascent ESDP goals in the
  line of Petersberg Tasks i.e. conflict
  prevention, management and peacekeeping
• At the November 2002 NATO summit in Prague, a
  proposal for the creation of a NATO Response
  Force emerged, thus coming into direct
  competition with the new EU operational concept
  of the European Rapid Reaction Force

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• France, however, held different views for Paris,
  NATO must not be transformed into a world
  policeman while the EU simply steps in to do
  post-conflict nation-building
• The political question at stake was thus the
  following, according to France What did the EU
  want from a crisis management capacity? To tackle
  crises as they arose, in a purely reactive mode,
  and only after prior consultation with the US, or
  to become and international actor and help set an
  agenda of its own choosing?

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Launching the ESDP The St.Malo Summit and Beyond

• Do ideas matter in the field of security and
  defence policy, or is it all about (national)
  interests?
• Is British Atlanticism, French Exceptionalism
  or German Pacifism incompatible with a common
  acceptance of integrated European
  (supranational?) interventionism, one that is
  based not solely on national interest(s) but also
  on idealistic motivations such as humanitarianism
  and ethics?