Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
International Herald Tribune
May 10, 2008 By Judy Dempsey
BERLIN--Earlier this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats published a paper calling for a security strategy for Germany. This short document touched on all the challenges facing the country, including terrorism, energy security, nuclear proliferation and climate change. It also called for the establishment of a national security council that would oversee the domestic and counterintelligence security services, the Foreign and Development Aid ministries and other agencies that represent Germany's interests.
With this document, a German political party for the first time initiated a debate over national interests and why Berlin, which oversees Europe's largest economy, needs a security strategy. But Merkel's coalition partners, the Social Democrats, and the opposition parties lambasted the document. They said that the chancellery would become like the White House and use the national security council to undermine Parliament and the Foreign Ministry.
None of the critics talked about the real weaknesses of the document. The paper did not deal with the issue of hard power. It did not spell out under what circumstances the German Army, or for that matter, the European Union, should intervene in order to stop civilians being killed - like in Darfur, Sudan.
What this shows is that neither Germany nor most of the 26 other EU member states are ready for a serious discussion about why the bloc needs a security doctrine: It would mean dealing with the issue of power.
"A security doctrine or a security strategy means power," says Frédéric Bozo, political science professor at the Sorbonne. "This is an issue that most Europeans, with perhaps the exception of Britain and France, do not want to deal with. Since that is the case, it is very difficult to talk about Europe regarding itself as a global actor."
The EU published a security strategy in 2003, and it is now being updated. But it also failed to address the crucial question about power. Although it mentioned that the EU was one of the world's biggest contributors to development aid, implying that that alone gave it the status of a global power, not once did it mention the option of military means. Instead, the EU remains content to exercise soft power through providing vast sums of money on reconstruction, development and sending soldiers to protect refugees or supervise elections in troubled spots around the world.
The EU prefers to talk about soft power partly to distinguish itself from the United States. As world superpower, America has for decades automatically linked the projection of that status with military might. It has, however, rarely coupled that might with soft power - for example, building strong and independent state institutions. The decision to invade Iraq exposed the weaknesses of hard power alone. But it also reinforced a view inside the EU that soft power was preferable to the military option.
The EU has adopted this soft power approach toward Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Sudan. It has provided aid for reconstruction and has sent soldiers to protect refugees or police officers to build up new security forces. But in every one of these cases, that soft power has failed to deliver security or peace.
Take Afghanistan. The EU has poured money into the country and has a police training program there. But the aid remains uncoordinated, and the police-training project is underfunded and understaffed.
"The EU has no long-term strategy toward Afghanistan," said Jean-Yves Haine, senior fellow for trans-Atlantic and global security at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "It does not want to even discuss counterterrorism operations even though the drug trafficking and suicide bombings are increasing," he added.
Any thought that the EU would consider sending to Afghanistan one of its battlegroups - the new, flexible and highly trained forces that are supposed to be deployable anywhere in the world within days - in order to help overstretched NATO forces has been ruled out. The EU loathes the idea of placing its troops under a NATO command.
The Europeans are also reluctant to deal with the issue of hard power because of the past, said Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, foreign policy spokesman for Germany's Christian Social Union, the sister party of Merkel's Christian Democrats. "The EU was built from the destruction of the Second World War with the aim of preventing the Europeans fighting against each other again," he said. Then, during the Cold War, by depending on the United States to provide the security umbrella, Europe lost the discipline to think strategically.
The wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which exposed the EU's lack of a common foreign policy and its inadequate military capabilities, jolted Europe out of its intellectual complacency. But it has not made the leap toward trying to reconcile the uses of soft power and hard power. It still believes that the panoply of aid, institution building and military and police training are sufficient enough to resolve conflicts and win friends.
This kind of thinking will most likely cause serious problems for the Europeans. Although the EU believes that its exercise of soft power gives it the high moral ground, compared with U.S. policy, and that it is less vulnerable to attack if it pursues that philosophy, these attitudes cannot be sustained. This is because the United States has changed its view about Europe.
Until recently, it regarded Europe's defense ambitions as creating a competitor to NATO and so held back from supporting a stronger Europe. That suited the Europeans. They could continue the familiar complaint, that while the United States did the fighting, the Europeans were sent in afterward to dry the dishes - for example, by providing aid. But with the United States so overstretched in Iraq and increasingly preoccupied with the rise of China, its attitude toward Europe has also shifted.
Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, has repeatedly said over the past few months that the United States welcomed and needed a stronger Europe that was prepared to take a more robust approach to defense and security. She is right. But so far, the German debate over national security and the EU's attempts to update its security strategy suggest that the Europeans are not intellectually - let alone militarily - prepared to go down that road.
May 10, 2008 By Judy Dempsey
BERLIN--Earlier this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats published a paper calling for a security strategy for Germany. This short document touched on all the challenges facing the country, including terrorism, energy security, nuclear proliferation and climate change. It also called for the establishment of a national security council that would oversee the domestic and counterintelligence security services, the Foreign and Development Aid ministries and other agencies that represent Germany's interests.
With this document, a German political party for the first time initiated a debate over national interests and why Berlin, which oversees Europe's largest economy, needs a security strategy. But Merkel's coalition partners, the Social Democrats, and the opposition parties lambasted the document. They said that the chancellery would become like the White House and use the national security council to undermine Parliament and the Foreign Ministry.
None of the critics talked about the real weaknesses of the document. The paper did not deal with the issue of hard power. It did not spell out under what circumstances the German Army, or for that matter, the European Union, should intervene in order to stop civilians being killed - like in Darfur, Sudan.
What this shows is that neither Germany nor most of the 26 other EU member states are ready for a serious discussion about why the bloc needs a security doctrine: It would mean dealing with the issue of power.
"A security doctrine or a security strategy means power," says Frédéric Bozo, political science professor at the Sorbonne. "This is an issue that most Europeans, with perhaps the exception of Britain and France, do not want to deal with. Since that is the case, it is very difficult to talk about Europe regarding itself as a global actor."
The EU published a security strategy in 2003, and it is now being updated. But it also failed to address the crucial question about power. Although it mentioned that the EU was one of the world's biggest contributors to development aid, implying that that alone gave it the status of a global power, not once did it mention the option of military means. Instead, the EU remains content to exercise soft power through providing vast sums of money on reconstruction, development and sending soldiers to protect refugees or supervise elections in troubled spots around the world.
The EU prefers to talk about soft power partly to distinguish itself from the United States. As world superpower, America has for decades automatically linked the projection of that status with military might. It has, however, rarely coupled that might with soft power - for example, building strong and independent state institutions. The decision to invade Iraq exposed the weaknesses of hard power alone. But it also reinforced a view inside the EU that soft power was preferable to the military option.
The EU has adopted this soft power approach toward Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Sudan. It has provided aid for reconstruction and has sent soldiers to protect refugees or police officers to build up new security forces. But in every one of these cases, that soft power has failed to deliver security or peace.
Take Afghanistan. The EU has poured money into the country and has a police training program there. But the aid remains uncoordinated, and the police-training project is underfunded and understaffed.
"The EU has no long-term strategy toward Afghanistan," said Jean-Yves Haine, senior fellow for trans-Atlantic and global security at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "It does not want to even discuss counterterrorism operations even though the drug trafficking and suicide bombings are increasing," he added.
Any thought that the EU would consider sending to Afghanistan one of its battlegroups - the new, flexible and highly trained forces that are supposed to be deployable anywhere in the world within days - in order to help overstretched NATO forces has been ruled out. The EU loathes the idea of placing its troops under a NATO command.
The Europeans are also reluctant to deal with the issue of hard power because of the past, said Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, foreign policy spokesman for Germany's Christian Social Union, the sister party of Merkel's Christian Democrats. "The EU was built from the destruction of the Second World War with the aim of preventing the Europeans fighting against each other again," he said. Then, during the Cold War, by depending on the United States to provide the security umbrella, Europe lost the discipline to think strategically.
The wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which exposed the EU's lack of a common foreign policy and its inadequate military capabilities, jolted Europe out of its intellectual complacency. But it has not made the leap toward trying to reconcile the uses of soft power and hard power. It still believes that the panoply of aid, institution building and military and police training are sufficient enough to resolve conflicts and win friends.
This kind of thinking will most likely cause serious problems for the Europeans. Although the EU believes that its exercise of soft power gives it the high moral ground, compared with U.S. policy, and that it is less vulnerable to attack if it pursues that philosophy, these attitudes cannot be sustained. This is because the United States has changed its view about Europe.
Until recently, it regarded Europe's defense ambitions as creating a competitor to NATO and so held back from supporting a stronger Europe. That suited the Europeans. They could continue the familiar complaint, that while the United States did the fighting, the Europeans were sent in afterward to dry the dishes - for example, by providing aid. But with the United States so overstretched in Iraq and increasingly preoccupied with the rise of China, its attitude toward Europe has also shifted.
Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, has repeatedly said over the past few months that the United States welcomed and needed a stronger Europe that was prepared to take a more robust approach to defense and security. She is right. But so far, the German debate over national security and the EU's attempts to update its security strategy suggest that the Europeans are not intellectually - let alone militarily - prepared to go down that road.