Basil Germond

Re-thinking European security interests and the ESDP : explaining the EU's anti-piracy operation.

After years of debate and planning, in 2003 the European Union began to launch a variety of foreign security operations under the rubric of its European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). These efforts are intended to complement the European Union’s many other foreign policies conducted by its various institutions. At present the EU has launched no less than 23 ESDP missions of various types, some of which involve the use of military and police forces in various trouble spots around the world: Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, and others. In some cases EU forces have engaged in deadly fire-fights with local militia, indicating that these operations have not been passive or merely symbolic shows of force. However, the EU had never attempted an ESDP naval operation, although the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) specifically mentions geographic areas and threats that almost certainly would benefit from an EU naval presence. Indeed, the ESS refers to the growing strategic importance for the EU of regions such as the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and mentions piracy, terrorism, and transnational crime, all of which have maritime aspects. Yet despite various opportunities for taking joint military action to deal with these threats since the ESS was agreed in 2003, the EU chose to play a passive role and let other actors take the lead. This situation changed quite unexpectedly in November 2008 when the EU decided to launch an ESDP naval mission, Operation Atalanta, or EU NAVFOR, to combat piracy and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid in the coastal regions of the Horn of Africa. Atalanta therefore is another critical ‘first’ for the ESDP and the mission offers key lessons regarding the EU’s role in regional and international security. Atalanta has a mandate to deter, prevent, and repress acts of piracy and robbery at sea, including within Somali territorial waters. These goals indicate that the operation goes well beyond the traditional Petersberg-type ESDP tasks that originally helped to justify an independent EU military capability in the 1990s. Petersberg tasks consist of humanitarian or rescue operations, peace operations, and combat missions for crisis resolution, including peacemaking operations. Atalanta, however, exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence on the high seas and within another state’s territorial waters in order to protect the EU’s and its member states’ own interests (maritime trade), in addition to protecting the population of the state in question through the delivery of humanitarian aid. Taken as a whole, Atalanta and the other ESDP missions also increasingly defy the expectations of many sceptics of the ESDP, who have argued for years that the

The EU's security and the sea: defining a maritime security strategy

Abstract This article comprehensively discusses the maritime dimension of the European Unions (EUs) security, which encompasses military and civilian aspects, intergovernmental and community components as well as institutional and geopolitical elements. First, the article provides a narrative of the development of the maritime element in the EUs security policy since the adoption of the European Security Strategy in 2003. By depicting the interrelations between the sea and the EUs security, the article shows that the maritime dimension of EU security is generally well established, but often obscured by the complicated institutional structure of the Union. Thereafter, the article emphasises the need to define an effective EU Maritime Security Strategy, which would provide a strategic framework for the Unions security-related activities regarding the sea that encompass maritime power projection, as well as maritime security and safety. Accordingly the article provides some recommendations concerning the definition of such a strategy and for appropriate constituting elements: the maritime-related risks and threats, the maritime strategic objectives, the means to implement the strategy, and the theatres of EU maritime operations.

Multinational Military Cooperation and its Challenges: The Case of European Naval Operations in the Wider Mediterranean Area

In order to cope with current security challenges, such as regional conflicts, humanitarian disasters or terrorist threats, European states in the post-Cold War era make important use of naval forces within a complex multilateral framework. However, the issues relating to European navies have rarely been tackled in the literature on multilateral military cooperation. Therefore this article aims to fill the gap by studying the nature of the European post-Cold War multilateral naval framework, and taking it as a case study to illustrate the current issues facing multinational military cooperation. To do so, the article focuses on the wider Mediterranean region, since most of the security challenges identified by the Europeans are now localized in this area.

Bridging the gap between climate change and maritime security: Towards a comprehensive framework for planning

For the past two decades, the need to shield strategic maritime interests, to tackle criminality and terrorism at or from the sea and to conserve valuable marine resources has been recognized at the highest political level. Acknowledging and accounting for the interplay between climate change, the vulnerability of coastal populations and the occurrence of maritime criminality should be part of any ocean governance process. Still, given the complex interactions between climate change and socio-economic components of the marine realm, it has become urgent to establish a solid methodological framework, which could lead to sound and effective decisions. We propose that any such framework should not be built from scratch. The adaptation of well tested, existing uncertainty-management tools, such as Cumulative Effect Assessments, could serve as a solid basis to account for the magnitude and directionality of the dependencies between the impacts of climate change and the occurrence of maritime criminality, offering spatial explicit risk evaluations. Multi-Criteria Decision Making could then be employed to better and faster inform decision-makers. These mechanisms could provide a framework for comparison of alternative mitigation and adaptation actions and are essential in assessing responses to tackle maritime crime in the context of climate change.

Climate change and maritime security narrative: the case of the international maritime organisation

Both climate change and maritime security are currently ranking high on states’ and international organisations’ political and governance agendas. However, academics and practitioners alike have hardly tackled the actual interlinkages and dependencies between the two issues. Taking the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as a case study, this article pioneers the use of corpus linguistic method to unravel the nonexistence of a narrative linking climate change impacts and the occurrence of maritime criminality despite some connections in practice. However, direct narrative links between climate change and migration as well as migration and maritime security were found, which can point at an indirect link between climate change and maritime security. The article concludes on the implications of these findings for academics and practitioners alike. The latter are encouraged to reflect on their current narrative in a bid to contribute to a better acknowledgement of the existing links between the impacts of climate change on natural and human systems and aspects of maritime security.

Clear skies or troubled waters: The future of European ocean governance

Ocean governance is a complex process that involves many stakeholders within, across and beyond states. It currently stands high on the political and public policy agendas of European states and the EU due to the importance of the sea from both an economic and security perspective. This article aims to present the current state of European ocean governance, discussing the current trends and proposing some recommendations as to how best to tackle the challenges. It suggests that the future of European ocean governance rests on the actors’ ability to endorse a holistic approach that combines all aspects of sustainable development and security.

The Naval and Maritime Dimension of the EU

Until the midst of the 1990’s, the EU did not pay much attention to the naval and maritime issues. But this has gradually changed, and now, this particular domain gets an important place within the EU policies, notably concerning its external relations and the security of its borders. This originates in the new post-Cold War security concept and policies, which develop a strong naval and maritime component, as well as in the growing importance for the EU of the sea in general. First of all, concerning the second pillar, the development of the ESDP requires the reinforcement of the European naval device, so as to fulfil the Headline Goals 2010 criteria, notably in terms of power projection; consequently, this calls for the reinforcement of naval cooperation or even integration. Second, concerning the first and the third pillars, the European common policies in the field of maritime safety and security were strongly reinforced, notably through the creation of many specialized agencies, and the European Commission is currently studying the feasibility of creating a European Coastguard service. Given the patent academic shortage of studies concerning these issues, our paper analyses the post-Cold War era naval and maritime dimension of the EU. We discuss the significance of EU naval and maritime policies, while questioning how this “new” dimension could contribute to the power of Europe in the world. Following the disappearance of the designed and foreseeable Enemy in 1989/1991, the Europeans were obliged to revise and redefine their security policies, taking into account not only the budgetary restrictions, but also the new identified risks. In this context, the conception of national and European defence evolved officially, or sometimes tacitly, from the territorial defence of the continent and the defence of the Euro-Atlantic sea lines of communication against a massive invasion of Western Europe by the Warsaw Pact forces to a larger but less precise conception of security. The latter now includes a whole range of “risks of instability”, ranging from the terrorist threat (already noticed by NATO documents in 1991, before the first attack against the WTC in 1993) to intra-states conflicts at the borders of the European Union (EU), weapons of mass destruction proliferation, and many nonmilitary threats such as transnational criminality, illegal migration or even environmental degradation. Thus, in the post-Cold War era, we face a double reconceptualization of security, coupled with a dynamic of deterritorialization. To begin with, the process of reconceptualization of security develops on two axes. Firstly, when we look at “who is threatened”, we must not only consider the states, but also, more deeply into the states, the societies and the individuals, and, outside the states, the regional institutions (such as the EU) or the international system as a whole. Secondly, when we look at “what is threatening us”, we must go beyond the traditional conceptions of defence to include various “new threats”, which are not exclusively military. Nevertheless, there could be a kind of reciprocity between 1 Contact information: . To quote, please use the following model: GERMOND Basil, “The Naval and Maritime Dimension of the European Union”, paper presented at the Conference The EC/EU: a world security actor? An assessment after 50 years of the external actions of the EC/EU, European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), Paris, 14-15 September 2006. 2 The first official document underlining this slide from a large-scale threat to the existence of risks of instability was the 1991 NATO Strategic Concept. The Alliance’s Strategic Concept, agreed by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council (Rome, 8 November, 1991), see I, §9.

Maritime Security and Safety — Securing, Policing, and Protecting the Seas

This chapter focuses on the second and third components of the maritime dimension of security introduced in chapter 1, namely, securing and protecting the seas, which requires controlling human activities at sea. Numerous nonstate and transnational criminal actors are active at sea. Combating terrorism at sea, piracy, illegal immigration, and human smuggling, as well as drug and arms trafficking has become high on states’ security agenda following the securitisation process that has occurred in the postCold War era. In addition, marine environment protection and marine resources management have also topped many governments’ policy (if not security) agendas. Although the seas are not easy to police, states have developed a wide range of tools to exercise the monopoly on the (legitimate) use of violence at sea, far beyond their territorial waters. However, as ‘fishes cross the borders’, criminal actors use the maritime space to their advantage, by exploiting legal disparities and inefficient coordination among services within and between the different countries. Thus, for states, the challenge lies in coordinating maritime security actors at the national and international level.

Naval Forces as Vectors of Seapower

The term naval forces implies seagoing ships (and their air, space, and land support) operated (or sponsored) by states. Thus, beyond navies, naval forces encompass coastguards, branches of the police and customs operating at sea, as well as civilianmanned support fleets such as the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. In the past, privateers would have fallen into that category as well since they were backed by states. Seapower has traditionally been related to naval forces’ ships. French Admiral Michel Tripier, in the foreword to his book on naval missions, boldly claimed that the sea shall not be considered as the kingdom of Poseidon, ‘a twobit monarch: potbellied, limply enthroned between mermen, mermaids and sirens amid kelp, shellfish and dolphins’ (1993: 9) but the kingdom of Archimedes. Indeed, human beings have been able to use the sea as a means of transportation and to exercise command of the sea since they have been able to operate ships, and this was made possible thanks to the wellknown buoyancy principle attributed to the great Greek physicist: Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. (Archimedes of Syracuse; see reprint 1897)

The EU’s Maritime Frontier: The Concept

Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of security has gradually replaced the concept of defence in shaping European policies.1 The concept of security is much broader and thus less accurate, since it encompasses various kinds of loosely defined risks and threats, that is, intrastate conflicts, international terrorism, WMD proliferation, as well as various in framilitary issues, such as transnational criminality, illegal immigration, energy security, environmental degradations, and climate change.