"The European Answer to Robert Kagan"
Robert Cooper
in: Transatlantic Internationale Politik, 2/2003.
About once in a decade someone writes an article that puts its finger on some fundamental truth about the international system. Francis Fukuyama did it with his essay, ”The End of History?.” Robert Kagan has done it with his essay, ”Power and Weakness.” The core of Kagan’s argument is that the differences between Europe and America are shaped by their military capabilities. To put it crudely, the United States is unilateralist because it has the strength to act on its own; Europe’s attachment to treaties, the rule of law, and multilateralism comes from weakness and wishful thinking. Rules exist to protect the weak, and that is why Europeans like them.
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Beitrag erschienen in: Trabsatlantic Internationale Politik 2/2003 |
This is a crude and oversimplified version of Kagan’s argument. It is not true that Europeans have no military capability; after the US and Russia there are not many countries who are even on a par with the EU collectively. Nor is it true that the Europeans are unwilling to use force. After all, it was Anglo-French artillery rather than American bombing that made the difference in Bosnia; and it was the British and French who were willing to send in ground troops when the air campaign in Kosovo seemed to be going nowhere. Even Germany, in Kosovo and Afghanistan, has done things which ten years ago it would never have believed possible. Nevertheless, European capability for intervention abroad is severely limited. It was only the US that could have mounted the campaign in Afghanistan (small though the numbers were), let alone the campaign in Iraq.
It is also true that, as in the Balkans, as in Afghanistan (and probably in Iraq too), the United States may be able to do war on its own, but it needs help from others with peace.
For all these qualifications however, the basic thesis remains compelling. The most striking feature of the world system today is American military dominance. And the contrast between US and European military capabilities grows wider all the time. It is true that most European countries are ending conscription and are concentrating on more professional, more mobile forces. But the fruits of these changes will be some time in coming. Meanwhile, the United States is transforming its method of military operation even faster. Quite soon even the most capable of the Europeans may have difficulty in operating with their US allies.
It is not just that the United States spends twice as much on defense as all its European allies put together. It also spends much more efficiently. The point is that European allies do not spend together; instead they achieve the worst of all possible worlds by spending separately on equipment that duplicates capabilities but is rarely interoperable. Consequently, they achieve neither the concentration of power nor the economies and scale that the US does. And defense capability is all about scale and concentration. The accompanying table gives some impression of the capability gap —but probably understates it, because adding up separate national capabilities gives a result much less than the arithmetical total implies. Twelve different national helicopters do not make a helicopter squadron. And compared with the US, Europe, because of its fifteen separate policies and organizations, spends much more on administration and headquarters and much less on fighting capabilities.
Nor is it just a matter of the decline of defense budgets in the last decade. There is a general unwillingness in Europe to see the world in terms of power relations. In Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain the use of military power has—for good historical reasons—low legitimacy. And, for equally good historical reasons, most European countries would prefer to live in the world of law rather than one of power. During the cold war these differences were sometimes evident in European pleas for engagement as against a greater US willingness to take a more confrontational approach. As Kagan says, at the time of the cold war these were tactical differences. In the post-cold war era, and when it comes to dealing with countries such as Iraq, they become strategic differences.
As it happens, those arguing for engagement during the cold war turned out to be right. But that does not prove that this is a universal recipe.
Would Europe behave differently if it had more military power? The best guess is that it would. In the economic sphere where Europe does act more or less as a unit and carries weight roughly equal to that of the US, it behaves in a much rougher and tougher fashion. Admittedly, it operates within a legal framework—but that is the nature of trade, which depends on the enforceability of contracts—and it is a legal framework that Europe has played a part in shaping. But from the point of view of less developed countries, European rules on agriculture must look very much like a unilateral imposition.
Power and Policy
One might therefore argue that it is perhaps just as well that Europe does not have real military clout. It is enough that there is one superpower. Indeed, it may be that a unipolar world will be more stable. (The cold war was not as stable as some, nostalgically, like to think; there were a long series of crises—Berlin, Cuba, Hungry, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua to name only a few.) A single hegemony, like a latter-day Roman Empire, might provide an environment for peace, stability, and prosperity.
And yet the idea of a single country having unrestrained and unrestrainable power is not attractive. However admirable the United States may be—and for many it is the embodiment of freedom and democracy—will those qualities survive a long period of unilateral hegemony? Since no country or combination of countries looks likely to be able to take the United States on in a conventional war, there might be a growing number willing to attack the United States by unconventional means—and the images of September 11 will remain a powerful force in the minds of the disaffected. What sort of a world would we find ourselves in if the United States were both all-powerful and all-vulnerable? With massive military capacity but continuously subject to terrorist attacks? How long would the values that Europe and the US share survive? Already we hear respectable people talking about the legalization of torture. Where would this end in a long era of unchecked power?
All our domestic systems are designed to place restraint on power. It is reasonable that we pursue the same objective in the international sphere. Restraint on US power through the existence of some equivalent and hostile power is out of the question and is not what we want anyway. (Otherwise what was the point of winning the cold war?) Pleas for multilateralism by European countries may be the last resort of the weak; or they may reflect nostalgia for cold-war days, when Europe was at the center of a global struggle in a world where there was still some military balance. But they are also a bit more than this. Multilateralism and the rule of law have an intrinsic value. We value pluralism and the rule of law domestically; it is difficult for democratic societies—including in the US—to escape from the idea that they are desirable internationally as well. The evidence of opinion polls suggests that this is as true in the US as it is in Europe.
In Europe, as Robert Kagan argues, these ideals have a particular resonance. After a century in which the European state system produced conflicts of catastrophic proportions, leaving 30 million servicemen and an even larger number of civilians dead, it is not surprising that European countries value an environment where states operate within a legal framework and conflicts are settled peacefully. The desire to spread this to the rest of the world is both natural and right. The escape from power politics has brought great benefits to Europe. Unfortunately, it has brought illusions too. Some of these were visible in the early days of the Balkans conflict, when some in Europe seemed to believe that peace and justice could be achieved simply by asking people to be reasonable.
”Civilian Power”
Today it looks as though the rule of law and peaceful resolution of disputes can be brought to the Balkans. But they have been brought there by military power.
The same illusion exists among those who speak of Germany, or Europe, as a ”civilian power.” It is true that post-war peaceful Germany has been a model for other countries; and its transformation had a profound and beneficial effect on the continent as a whole. It is also true that Europe, which has concentrated primarily on economic instruments and militarily has dipped its toe only very cautiously into peacekeeping, seems a model of non-military power. But behind every law is a policeman ready to use force. Behind every constitution is an army ready to protect it. And behind the peaceful development of Europe in the second half of the 20th Century there have been NATO and American military power.
The alliance—and in particular the US readiness to use nuclear weapons on its behalf—created a peaceful space in Western Europe within which Europeans were able to operate according to new rules. They limited defense spending, developed transparency, and gradually created a body of law and institutions to regulate relations among themselves. In the light of European history this amounts to a political miracle. NATO was a major factor in this miracle, since it helped European countries escape from the suspicion and rivalry that had marked their history. And the outer boundaries of this system have always been protected, and are still protected today, by military force. Behind the constitution that the European Convention and its chairman Valéry Giscard d’Estaing are engaged in drafting stands an army. It is an American and not a European army.
The European Reply
Europeans should answer Kagan, not by arguing that he is wrong— since he is not—but by reviewing their own position. It is unsatisfactory that 400 million Europeans rely so much on 250 million Americans to defend them. First, there is no such thing as a free defense. We do not know how or when, but at some point the Europeans will find themselves paying for these arrangements.
Second, there is no guarantee that American and European interests will always coincide. It was easy to maintain a continuous consensus with the United States (but in retrospect not that easy) when there was a common, visible threat focussed on European territory. It will be much more difficult to maintain a coincidence of interests in a world of more shadowy and more distant threats. If Europeans do not like the US National Security Strategy, they should not complain about it, but should develop their own strategy. Best of all, they should develop a joint strategy with the US. But there is no use having a strategy unless you have forces to implement it. And the US will be interested in a joint strategy only to the extent that the Europeans bring some assets to the table.
Third, Europeans may be capable of territorial defense, but that is increasingly irrelevant in today’s world. Homeland defense begins abroad—in areas like Afghanistan and Iraq. That has specific implications for capabilities. For the medium term, missile defense should not be ruled out. So long as Europe was the key theater, influence went, in some degree, with the territory. This is not so when threats are located in other parts of the world. If Europeans wish to have influence on the United States, they now have to offer something more than advice: that must include military capability.
Finally it would be unhealthy both for the world and for Washington itself that the US should be entirely on its own as a superpower. Even superpowers need someone to talk to. For the US to find itself dominant but isolated will serve nobody’s interests.
The idea is not that Europe should attempt to equal the United States in military power. That project would be wholly unrealistic. But it can do much better than it does at the moment. It can even achieve this without large increases in defense spending. Suppose all European armies used the same helicopter. It would not matter if the helicopter was German/French or British/Italian; it would not even matter if it was American. The strength of buying power of the combined European defense establishment would ensure that the helicopters would be much cheaper; pooling spares and sharing training would save further large sums of money, and the possibilities of operating together would be vastly improved. Individual defense establishments would lose some control over the choice of their equipment, but the gains they would make in terms of budgets and efficiency would more than offset this. Not only would they all have the same helicopter; they could use the savings to have more helicopters. This example could be repeated across the whole spectrum of arms and capabilities.
If a higher degree of integration of European forces brought both greater inter-operability and greater deployability, Europe would go some way to answering Robert Kagan. And the possibility of deploying European force would have an impact on relations with the US. It would also make a difference to European foreign policy. Where there is no possibility of following up words with deeds, words are empty, occasionally irresponsible. European military capabilities would bring a more serious European approach to foreign policy. Precisely as Robert Kagan argues, power brings responsibility. In a complex and dangerous world, for Europe not to use its full potential amounts to irresponsibility.
NATO too would benefit from such changes. The balance between Europe and the US would alter a little; but more importantly, NATO would become more effective and therefore more relevant.
The logic of European integration is that Europe should, sooner or later, develop a common foreign policy and a common security policy. The world does not, however, proceed by logic. It proceeds by political choice. None of this will happen unless Europe’s leaders want it and choose to make it happen. (Opinion polls suggest that European publics already do want it.) President Bush has explained succinctly why we should want it. Speaking to the American Enterprise Institute in February, he said: ”we meet here during a crucial period in the history of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others. The rest will be written by us.” If we want that ”us” to include Europe, we shall need more influence with the United States. And that means we shall need more power, including military power.
This will take time, but it can be done.
Robert Cooper is Director General in the Directorate General External Relations of the European Union and adviser to the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, Brussels. The article represents the author’s opinion only.
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