Chiara de Franco

Is There a European Way of War? Role Conceptions, Organizational Frames and the Utility of Force

Europe is the region of the world where the network of security institutions is the densest. Yet, these institutions did not erase differences about conceptions of force employment among European countries and between European countries and the United States. Why have concepts of military power and force employment remained distinct and varied in Europe, and yet, what facilitates their convergence at the European Union level into the ambiguous notion of crisis management? We argue that an important answer to these questions is endogenous to the military: both role conceptions and organizational frames of military institutions are key underlying aspects of the differences at the national level and of the common ground at the European Union level. We examine and compare empirically the role conceptions and organizational frames of the armed forces in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom since the early 1990s.

‘Living by Example?’ The European Union and the Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Most empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EUs implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of ‘living by example’. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to ‘live by example’: the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle.

Conclusion: New Perspectives for Theorising and Addressing Transnational Risks

Preventing serious harm at little cost through foresighted action is a tantalising prospect. It is also a highly elusive goal, as the contributions to this book show. Obstacles stretch all the way across the four challenges we identified in the introductory chapter and which form the analytical backbone of this book: forecasting, warning, learning and mobilising preventive action. The odds seem to be stacked against overcoming the warning-response gap, particularly when risks are transnational and require coordinated responses. Forensic inquiries into industrial accidents or plane crashes typically reveal multiple failures forming an idiosyncratic causal chain leading to disaster. The opposite appears to be true for warnings at a time when they would be most useful. Genuinely surprising warnings are transmitted through a long, fragile chain, where each link has to withstand extreme pressure and individuals need to make difficult balancing judgements under conditions of uncertainty. The chapters by Tom Huertas and Gillian Tett illustrate why this was the case with the near meltdown of the world financial system in 2008. However, there are important variations across different constellations of risks and actors in how the warning-response process unfolds, as illustrated by cases of more propitious conditions for preventive policies like air pollution (Chapter 5) and flooding (Chapter 9).

Introduction: The Challenges of Prevention

In the opening sequence of Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a palaeoclimatologist played by actor Dennis Quaid reports on his findings on climate change at a United Nations conference in New Delhi. The diplomats and politicians present, including the Vice President of the United States, remain unconvinced by his vague if forceful warning. We draw attention to this film not for its cinematic qualities or its popularisation of climate science. Rather, it illustrates western, and in particular US, concern over potentially catastrophic perils in the future, which is also reflected in subsequent academic writing about new global threats and vulnerabilities: the meltdown of the financial system, terrorism with nuclear and biological weapons, the unintentional dangers of new technologies and sudden changes in the earth’s environmental system (Posner, 2004; Homer-Dixon, 2006; Delpech, 2007; Fukuyama, 2007; Perrow, 2007; Bostrom and Cirkuvic, 2008). The film also encapsulates popular mythology about warning and prevention, which portrays decision-makers as cynical and narrow-minded, while expert ‘warners’ are extraordinarily foresighted and altruistic individuals who put their reputation on the line to speak (scientific) truth to power and prevent the worst. Implicit in this Cassandra-mythology is the expectation that warning is bound to fail.

Power over the Instruments

The well-established concepts of propaganda, news management, and public relations tell us the extent to which the media are manipulated by political and economic institutions and elites, but do not account for the fact that, despite any well-planned strategy to deal with the media, politicians and military personnel find themselves in continuous need to adjust that strategy and even change the military plan. Media operations are necessary to win contemporary conflicts and are not simply optional: without successful integration of the media with political and military strategies, the latter may fall short. As already discussed in the previous chapters, the media alter the interaction between the agents of politics and war at different levels. They provide a new stage, a new environment where new forms of interaction are possible and new practices become appropriate, if not necessary. Ultimately, it is the mere existence and presence of the media in the international sphere which creates the need for a battle over meaning. The media impose themselves as new channels of communication but also as instruments of a necessary ‘Semiotic War’. This concept refers to the existence of a completely new field of fighting on screen, running parallel to the one on the ground, where the media determine the choice of the instruments.

Power over the Agenda

The narratives produced by the media, especially those constructed around one or more images, do create a reality effect which impacts not only on the public at large, but also on policymakers. Those narratives constitute a mediated reality which interferes with the policymaking process because they affect the mental image of a given issue through which policymakers interact and on the basis of which they take decisions. As a consequence, this study distinguishes between three different effects caused by media power over the political agenda: (1) a direct cognitive and emotional effect of television news on the agenda of policymakers, which refers mostly to the private dimension of their media consumption; (2) a direct cognitive effect on policymakers perception of the issues at stake which pertains both private and public dimensions of policymakers lives; and (3) an indirect effect which refers to politicians’ concerns about the agenda setting effect on public opinion and which can be seen as relating to policymakers’ institutional roles.

Power over the Process

Media power also manifests itself in a variation of the timing of the decision-making process. This happens because of two forms of mediation: on the one hand, the media mediate between decision-makers and the public opinion and, on the other hand, they alter the speed of information and therefore mediate between decision-makers and the information flow produced by intelligence services and open sources. The decision-making process is affected by the fact that the media can broadcast news which questions the effectiveness of certain policies toward international conflicts and is attributed with the potential of undermining the support of public opinion, which may accelerate political discussions and even lead to policy change. This effect, usually known as Real Time Policy, is linked to both Agenda Building and Semiotic War because, on the one hand, it implies a given issue to be high on the media agenda and framed as a problem which requires immediate response, while, on the other hand, it leads to the adoption of strategies aimed at controlling the pace and nature of information flow. Media power over the process, therefore, assumes two faces that we can differentiate by distinguishing between a ‘push’ effect and a ‘pull’ effect. The latter scenario refers to the attempt by politicians and the military to attract or space out the media by adjusting the timing of the decision-making to the media schedule and news cycle.

Media Power: A Radical View

Even though they are recognized as being among the most important agents of contemporary societies (see Debord, 1967; Baudrillard, 1981; Harvey, 1990), the media have rarely been investigated as an agent contributing to the transformation of war.* That a transformation has occurred seems to be confirmed by the constellation of labels that have been used to define contemporary conflict: it has been called a war that is ‘of the third kind’ (Holsti, 1996), ‘postmodern’ (Gray, 1997), ‘without identity’ (Laidi, 1998), ‘new’ (Kaldor, 1999; Shaw, 2005), ‘virtual’ (Ignatieff, 2001), ‘virtuous’ (Der Derian, 2001), ‘humane’ (Coker, 2001), and even a form of ‘spectator-sport’ (Mclnnes, 2002). Besides the nuances differentiating each scholar’s view, contemporary conflict and warfare have been invariably connected to several recurrent elements: globalization; the decline of the state; the emergence of transnational relations, both cultural and economic; late capitalism; post-industrialism; the end of ideologies and metaphysics; post-heroism; and the rise of the ‘society of spectacle’ and the information age.1

Power over the Channel

Because the media mediate between the agents of politics and war and also between them and the policy objects, media power generates a totally new form of conflict mediation that is based on the fact that a new channel of communication exists. Not only do the media create a link between policymakers and public opinion, but they also intervene in the diplomatic processes, thus creating an arena in which diplomats and policymakers can communicate with each other directly as well as with the public opinion. Such a new form of mediation, which is generally known as Media Diplomacy, is not simply a version of public diplomacy which focuses on the media, but is, in fact, a completely new kind of diplomatic interaction for which the media are a necessary condition. Messages from different parties get mixed on the screen and develop a diplomatic process which interferes with the one off screen which usually happens away from the public gaze.

Mediatised Warnings: Late, Wrong, Yet Indispensable? Lessons from Climate Change and Civil War

Why should we expect the news media to play an important role in warning about transnational risks? After all, governments have their intelligence services, regulators their scientific experts, and companies their in-house or external risk-consultants, each charged with identifying relevant risks and bringing them to the attention of decision-makers. Why should the news media have any role at all? We tend not to notice the dog that did not bark, and in fact prevention of drug trafficking, terrorist attacks, or conflict escalation is good news to most, but usually not newsworthy. Nonetheless, this chapter contends that the news media still play a crucial role, for good and for bad, in amplifying or muffling warnings.