Sten Rynning

The European Union: Towards a Strategic Culture?:

The vigorous debate addressing the potential of the European Union’s security and defence policy is indicative of high hopes and severe policy problems. This article examines the likelihood that EU member-states will develop the strategic culture - reflecting common interests and views of the world - that can be said to be a precondition for a successful security and defence policy. The article first investigates the EU’s predominant values and the reigning conception of the legitimate use of military force, and it then weighs this political potential of the security and defence policy against obstacles to unity: the ‘post-modern’ complexity of multilevel governance coupled with the necessity of ‘modern’ executive authority to undertake military coercion, as illustrated by the recent fight against global terrorism. In the light of the conclusion that the EU does not have the potential to construct a strong strategic culture, the article suggests steps the EU could take to safeguard liberal achievements in its history of integration while also enabling strategic military action by groups of countries sharing a particular view of the world, an interest in a particular conflict, or both.

Realism and the Common Security and Defence Policy

The European Union has ventured into the business of power politics with its common security and defence policy (CSDP). Realism can explain both why the EU is being pulled into this business and why it is failing to be powerful. Although realism has much to offer, it is not the dominant approach to the study of the EU and its foreign affairs because the EU is commonly perceived as capable of transcending power politics as we used to know it. The first purpose of this article is therefore to question the stereotyping of realism as a framework that only applies to great power confrontations. The second is to introduce the complexity of realist thought because realism is a house divided. The analysis first examines structural realism, then the classical realist tradition. The third and final purpose of the article is to evaluate the contributions these approaches can make to the study of the CSDP. The most powerful realist interpretation of the CSDP is found to be the classical one, according to which the CSDP is partly a response to international power trends but notably also the institutionalization of the weakness of European nation-states. The article defines this perspective in relation to contending realist and constructivist perspectives. It highlights classical realism as a dynamic framework of interpretation that does not provide an image of a CSDP end-state, but rather a framework for understanding an evolving reality and for speaking truth to power.

The false promise of continental concert: Russia, the West and the necessary balance of power

The war in Ukraine is revelatory of a malaise in Europes security order created by Russias resistance to western institutions on the one hand and the western desire to maintain these institutions while partnering with Russia on the other. Absent a sense of priorities, western policy risks contributing to the erosion of Europes security order that Russia seeks in opposition to western ambition. Europes order is premised first and foremost on a distinctively western concert of nations—whereby Euro-Atlantic states coordinate policy according to a common purpose layered into both NATO and the EU—that forms part of a wider balance of power between Russia and the West. Western policy should aim to strengthen the concert and clarify the balance. However, the prevalent desire to include Russia in the concert confuses matters in a major way, eroding both the underlying sense of priorities and the foundation for order. This article examines this threatening erosion and traces it to three underlying trends: political contestation with regard to the meaning of ‘restoration’ post-1989; military instability following from the unpredictability of ‘hybrid war’; and moral equivocation on the part of the West when it comes to defending the Euro-Atlantic security order. The article concludes that given the depth of contestation, western allies should learn to distinguish concert from balance and act on the condition that the former, a vibrant western concert, is a precondition for the latter, a manageable continental balance.

Strategic Culture and the Common Security and Defence Policy – A Classical Realist Assessment and Critique

The European Union once appeared destined to become the ‘dishwasher’ of security operations, as the United States seemed strong and capable enough to do the cooking by itself. Dishwashing was not a European ambition but Europe’s disorganization, along with what seemed to be a valid distinction between war and stabilization missions, pointed in this direction. Change may now be coming, nourished by the EU’s crafting of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP – up until 2010 known as the ESDP) and the widespread realization that war and stabilization, diplomacy and development, and in fact the whole gamut of policy tools must be applied simultaneously in the management of 21st century conflicts. The EU, favoured by its broad toolbox and likewise broad foreign policy approach, might be destined to become head chef, determining in one go who should do the cooking and who should do the dishes. Alas, this scenario is both unlikely and undesirable, as we shall see. The turn to greater complexity may feed European Union hopes but it does not resolve the underlying political problems of EU ambition in general and the CSDP in particular. The trouble is not so much the bargaining, dispute, and organizational complexity that comes with being a club of 27 countries mixed in with supranational institutions, though these obstacles to policy relevance are important. The trouble lies in the political foundations of the EU project itself. Nation-states and nationalism continue to dominate European politics even as the European Union – to an extent – seeks to move beyond them. Conditions for political leadership, which is the central concern of classical realism, are therefore difficult. Statesmen are not free agents who dispose of brute power and other instruments of policy; they grow out of and are tied into national histories and cultures. In his study of military leadership and command, John Keegan writes that ‘[w]hat is interesting about heroic leaders . . . is not to show that they possessed unusual qualities, since that may be taken for granted, but to ask how the societies to which they belonged expected such qualities to be presented’. It is this interconnection between political leadership on the one hand and national expectations and legacies on the other that tells us why the CSDP should be considered a fragile tool resting on a delicate balance of political power within Europe. We engage the basic argument of classical realism in the first section of the article. The second section deals with the EU from a power political perspective. When looked at from the outside – as many contemporary (realist) observers of power

Why Not NATO? Military Planning in the European Union

This article explains why the EU in recent years has gained an upper hand in Allied defence planning. The development is surprising in light of reforms undertaken by NATO in the mid-1990s and also the 1998-99 US ambition to reinforce NATOs defence planning process with the Defence Capabilities Initiative. The article argues that a number of European governments, notably including the British and French, has been motivated to seek change because NATOs defence planning process has proved difficult to adapt to new low-intensity threats and also because governments seek to control the political development of the EU itself. The article illustrates how these concerns are directly visible in the current EU design for military planning and offers an assessment of future NATO-EU relations.

Peripheral or Powerful? The European Union's Strategy to Combat the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

Abstract The European Union has since 2003 developed both a security and a Weapons of Mass Destruction strategy, and it has become the primary interlocutor of Iran in the dispute related to Irans nuclear development. These are signs of significant policy progress. However, the fact that four years of nuclear diplomacy have brought few results invites a critical appraisal of EU strategy. This essay undertakes this appraisal, arguing that the EU is notably ambivalent regarding its underlying conception of international order. The EU wishes to be pluralist (in the tradition of sovereign equality), but is also anti-pluralist (in the liberal–democratic tradition). The essay lays out how the EU has coped with pressures for reform—arising notably from the United States—within the current international nuclear non-proliferation regime, and how this has made the EU problem apparent. The essay finally suggests that to salvage its policy of effective multilateralism the EU must acknowledge its anti-pluralist bias and promote a common transatlantic approach to nuclear non-proliferation.

French defence reforms after Kosovo: On track or derailed?

How well prepared has France been politically for the operational implications of its efforts to build a military instrument designed for extra‐territorial interventions such as that conducted by NATO in Yugoslavia in 1999? Did the prolonged bombing campaign and the question of deploying ground troops provoke severe criticism and controversies? This article assesses the French Kosovo debate both in the political centre and the broader elite public. The analysis finds that the new French military instrument receives solid backing from key policymakers who now race to claim parenthood of the military reform programme. The utility of a new military instrument was at one stage developing into a major concern to the elite public. However, an engineered anti‐American agenda hijacked the debate, failed to address military issues, and ultimately could not mobilize the elite public. The conclusion outlines that an energized political centre has an opportunity to press ahead with military reforms but also points out that the relationship between France, Europe, and NATO requires careful political management.

The NATO Response Force: A qualified failure no more?

ABSTRACT With much fanfare, NATO declared its rapid reaction force—the NATO Response Force (NRF)—an Initial Operational Capability in 2004. This article addresses four questions: Where did the NRF come from? What does it look like in 2017? What have been the major obstacles for the NRF fulfilling its promises? And where is the NRF likely to go? The article holds two main arguments. First, due to inadequate fill-rates and disagreements as to the force’s operational role, the NRF was for many years a “qualified failure.” The force failed to become the operational tool envisioned by the allies in 2002. While not without effect, it fell hostage to the harsh reality of the expeditionary wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the NRF is off to a fresh beginning and will likely be considered at least a partial success by the allies in the years to come.

Coalitions, institutions and big tents: the new strategic reality of armed intervention

Armed interventions of the past decades demonstrate that strategic leadership can give way to lofty campaign plans, conflicting strategic narratives and concern with tactical, as opposed to strategic, issues. The intervention debate rightfully emphasizes the need for both leadership and institution-building to rectify this situation, but then breaks down into discord: some critics argue that stronger leadership by big nations is necessary, others that this type of leadership wrecks the collective institutions that are needed in a new age of multilateralism and interdependence. This article argues instead that strategic leadership grows out of the effort to connect the three distinct political arenas that have come to dominate armed interventions: coalitions, institutions and big tent diplomacy. Strategic leadership is not about choosing between coalitions or institutions; it is about building bridges among these political arenas. The article embeds this argument within the strategic literature and demonstrates how it emerges from an engagement with modern armed interventions. It engages in two in-depth assessments of NATOs experiences in Afghanistan and Libya and then undertakes a more general discussion of the steps that can be taken to encourage strategic leadership.

NATO from Kabul to Earth Orbit: Can the Alliance Cope?

It is widely acknowledged that NATO has multiple rationales. What is more contestable is the view that the burgeoning complexity of the security environment feeds these rationales and that NATO may not be able to cope. If each rationale is like a personality, then NATO’s multiple personalities have a corrosive effect on the Alliance since they prevent it from setting consistent goals and pursuing them. The prescribed cure is a clarified personality that emphasises one rationale at the expense of others. This paper questions the metaphor behind this debate. NATO’s multiple rationales are built into the Alliance, we argue, and a better metaphor may be NATO as a congress whose members are independent yet tied to an overarching political project. Such a congress will never be unitary, but it can at times make decisions. Sometimes decision-making will require grand and thus elusive bargains; sometimes it can be moved from formal committees to backroom caucuses that eschew big questions of rationale and instead focus on problem-solving. In any case, congresses can cope with persistent, competing preference orderings and divergent resource bases among constituent states. Where the split personality analogy leads to the collapse of NATO as a coherent actor, the congress metaphor affords better notional explanations for what we actually observe, a messy, raucous alliance that muddles through from Kabul to Earth orbit.