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SPEAKING
FREELY
The weakening Atlantic
alliance
By Robert Mullin
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
PORTLAND, Oregon - US President George W
Bush has paid his respects to the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. During his recent visit to
NATO's Brussels headquarters, he declared the
organization to be "the most successful alliance
in the history of the world", an obligatory
statement of praise that didn't originate with
Bush, or with his speechwriters for that matter.
It is, rather, a well-worn platitude that
politicians, pundits and academics regularly pull
out when expressing admiration for an alliance
that's said to have won the Cold War without
firing a shot. More significant were Bush's words
for the future, the ones exhorting NATO to keep up
with the times:
"In order for NATO to be
vital it's got to be relevant," Bush said, "and if
it stays stuck in the past it's slowly but surely
going to fade into oblivion."
The future
for the Bush administration is now, and right now
the United States needs its NATO allies to share
the burden of an increasingly costly and unpopular
occupation of Iraq, if only to provide domestic
cover or a de facto justification for having
invaded in the first place. If NATO can't
contribute, then the alliance is irrelevant to the
US, or at least to the neo-conservatives steering
US foreign policy.
But if Bush's week-long
European "charm offensive" signals the beginning
of an effort to heal wounds in the trans-Atlantic
relationship, then his foreign-policy team would
do well to examine the present condition of NATO
as a starting point for a realistic prognosis.
Because even more significant than the growing
irrelevance of NATO as an institution is what that
irrelevance illustrates about the nature of the
discord between the United States and Europe.
Americans, by now accustomed to hearing
how everything changed after September 11, 2001,
are apt to overlook the possibility that
international events unfold within the context of
historical developments, rather than in a series
of media-framed non sequiturs. Tensions in the
trans-Atlantic alliance began to arise well before
2001, and they're as much rooted in a changing
Europe as they are in a changed United States. If
NATO is in fact stuck in the past, it's because
the organization exists to serve the interests of
its member nations, and those nations, once united
by common interests and a more or less shared
outlook, are now being pulled apart by diverging
interests and seemingly irreconcilable visions of
the future.
Given his role, NATO secretary
general Jaap De Hoop Scheffer has to show an
optimistic face for his organization. In remarks
at a press conference during the recent Bush
visit, De Hoop Scheffer, speaking of the need for
a "stronger political role of NATO", encouraged
the alliance not to "shy away from discussing
political subjects of relevance". The truth is
that NATO has long been as much a political body
as a military alliance. NATO's governing body, the
North Atlantic Council, arguably represents the
most advanced effort to institutionalize the
trans-national relationship linking the United
States, Canada and Europe. But political
relevance, once assured, is increasingly elusive.
As De Hoop Scheffer noted in an April 2004
Financial Times commentary heralding last year's
enlargement of NATO to include seven new Central
and Eastern European members, "NATO today is quite
different from the alliance our new members set
out to join in the early 1990s." His assertion was
in no way an exaggeration: NATO today boasts a
number of programs and initiatives not likely
considered conceivable - or even desirable - for
the organization in the years that marked the
beginning of the end of the Cold War for which the
alliance was conceived. Since then, NATO
activities have come to include everything from
peacekeeping operations to military reform, from
civil emergency response to technological
cooperation. And as NATO has increased its
activities, so too has it extended its
geographical reach to include so-called "out of
area" operations in such places as the former
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
But expanded
activities and extended reach haven't made for a
stronger or more politically unified alliance.
Even as NATO widens and enlarges, it confronts
shallower support and declining interest from its
existing members, and NATO's penchant for adding
to its menu of activities seems both a cause and
effect of this condition. NATO enlargement came
almost exactly one month prior to the landmark
enlargement of another European institution - the
European Union, the expansion of which was
inarguably more important, meeting with more
fanfare from governments, media, and the general
public. So despite efforts to burnish its profile,
NATO finds itself haunted by a persistent
question: Exactly what purpose does the alliance
serve? Framed another way, the question could ask
whose interest the alliance serves, particularly
within the context of an increasingly integrated
modern Europe that itself is moving eastward under
the auspices of the European Union.
Our
history textbooks told us that NATO was
established to confront Soviet domination of
Eastern Europe, often omitting the other factors
compelling the creation of the alliance. These
were neatly summed up by Lord Ismay, the first
secretary general of NATO, who quipped that the
alliance was designed "to keep the Americans in,
the Russians out, and the Germans down". NATO was
primarily a defensive alliance, but almost equally
important was the parallel mission of keeping the
Americans engaged in Europe as a stabilizing and
protecting force, which in turn would keep German
military ambitions - and the security fears that
could fuel those ambitions - in check. Certainly
there was an enemy in the near abroad, but there
was also a potential menace lurking within: that
of discord and instability. One could then
figuratively draw a straight line from each of
those factors back to the national interests of
each of the allies. And one needn't be a cold-eyed
realist to understand that national interests -
taken collectively - were of vital importance to
the establishment of NATO.
If the United
States has traditionally played the role of benign
hegemon within NATO, it is still, nonetheless, the
hegemon. The price of US involvement in the
alliance was US dominance of the military command
structure, an operational hierarchy that
ultimately linked back to the nation's nuclear
capability. But regardless of the lopsided power
equation, NATO for decades clearly served the
common interests of its members. In the absence of
a bipolar international system, those interests
have changed, and geopolitical and economic
developments - especially those related to Russia,
Iran, and China, not to mention Iraq - are forcing
a wider divergence. While the United States is
undoubtedly the lone military superpower, its role
as hegemon is of questionable value in an alliance
where its allies have an alternative. And that
alternative is the European Union.
In the
lexicon of the EU, the category of external
affairs encompasses all Union relations with the
outside world. But not all variations on that
category are treated the same internally. With
respect to economic affairs, such as trade policy,
the EU functions as a supranational body, meaning
that member consensus is not necessary to
establish EU policy, only a qualified majority,
and that policy becomes law for all members,
overriding any contradicting national policies. In
traditional foreign policy, however, and
particularly in security policy, the EU still
operates as an intergovernmental body. Here the
European Council defines the general guidelines
for foreign and security policy, but policy must
be agreed upon by unanimity. For this reason, one
could fairly conclude that, even within Europe,
the EU is on more equal footing with NATO when it
comes to foreign policy, or is even at a
disadvantage, since it has neither military
capability nor history to match the success of
NATO. Nations holding membership in both
organizations may still find their hard
foreign-policy interests better served by their
relationship with NATO, at least for now.
Surprisingly, and despite the proximity of
their respective headquarters, there is no formal
relationship between NATO and the EU. As might be
expected, one reason for this has to do with the
French, who have always sought to prevent NATO -
and by extension, the US - from influencing EU
policymaking. The other reason has to do with
Britain, the EU's staunchest Atlanticist, which
has been reluctant to yield EU-NATO relations to
the supranational European Commission. In the
past, the Western European Union (WEU) military
alliance provided a go-between for NATO and the
EU, but that arrangement was called into question
in 1999, when the EU launched the Common European
Security and Defense Policy, then announced the
creation of the 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction
Force, Europe's first effort to create a military
structure independent of NATO. More recently, and
with strong Franco-British endorsement, EU foreign
ministers approved yet another development in the
creation of the European Defense Agency, which is
intended to improve the international
competitiveness of the European armaments industry
vis-a-vis the US.
With the prospect of
military independence for Europe, what would be
the future division of labor between NATO and the
EU? And that leads to the question: Would Europe
still need the alliance? Academics and policy
pundits have long speculated about the eventual
phasing out of NATO, but the growth of external
partnerships would seem to indicate that NATO is
not planning for its own obsolescence. Rather,
it's putting its institutions to work in other
areas - ones that overlap the EU's traditional
domain of soft power. How, then, can one predict
the shape of the future relationship between the
EU and NATO? Will the two institutions complement
each other, or compete? And is competition even a
possibility?
As if competition from within
Europe weren't enough, NATO also faces well-known
challenges from its largest and most influential
member - the United States. With the end of the
Cold War and the apparent success of the peace
project of an integrated Europe, the US finds that
its immediate interests now lie elsewhere, in such
places as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, East Asia, and
the former Soviet republics - in short, in places
that will likely give rise to conflict with the
long-term interests of Europe. Nevertheless, there
are those who still hold the belief that US
involvement in Europe remains an important element
of maintaining stability there, particularly as
Europe moves eastward. This belief is being
tested, though, particularly by US efforts to
isolate Russia and Iran, two countries with which
the energy-dependent EU is determined to forge
closer ties.
Further straining the
trans-Atlantic relationship are contrasting
beliefs in the ultimate benefits of soft vs hard
power. The EU is increasingly demonstrating
success in its ability to promote and maintain
stability - as well as its own interests - through
cooperative means. As Harvard Professor Joseph Nye
wrote in the Financial Times in March 2003:
The union is not a new nation-state
with a mighty army. The Europeans are not all in
the same sovereign boat but the national boats
are lashed together into an island of stability
that is sui generis and powerfully
attractive to its neighbors ... Europe's
culture, values and the success of the EU have
produced a good deal of soft power, the ability
to attract rather than merely coerce
others. Nye is an American, but his
thinking obviously reflects a different
understanding of trans-Atlantic affairs than the
neo-conservatives who dominate the Bush
administration, or even the realists who've
dominated US foreign policy since the 1940s.
According to Columbia University Professor
David Baldwin, realists believe that "concerns
about relative gains [among nations] will inhibit
cooperation when the utility of military force is
high but not when the utility of force is low". In
other words, in a situation where the cost of war
is deemed too high, a nation will seek cooperative
means to pursue its national interests, even if
that cooperation benefits others. But when the
cost of war is low, a nation will then resort to
unilateral military action. During the Cold War,
it could be argued, the utility of military force
was, paradoxically, low, as both sides knew that
the logical end of such force was mutual
destruction. And while the neo-conservatives are
not realists of the Kissinger school, they borrow
from realism when it suits their purposes. At this
unipolar moment in history, with the US standing
as a lone superpower unchecked by any military
rival, the neo-conservatives understand that the
utility of military force is rather high. Still,
US allies in Europe - militarily weaker and
perhaps more politically and historically mature -
may think otherwise. That's because cooperation is
the raison d'etre for the European Union, a
founding ideology that the EU is quietly exporting
abroad as a condition of its relations with other
regions. For now, cooperation is doing quite well
in serving the interests of the EU.
But
the raison d'etre of NATO isn't so clear.
Contrary to the assertion that NATO is stuck in
the past, what's more likely is that the alliance
doesn't figure into any shared vision for the
future. As Europe seeks deeper integration in
political and military affairs, it will inevitably
turn away from a structure in which its voice is
not the most influential one. Similarly, as the US
continues to identify its immediate interests as
lying in the Middle East and Central and East
Asia, it is less willing to commit resources to an
institution that refuses to serve those interests.
Perhaps the institutional survival instinct of
NATO will compel it to help the US and Europe to
continue to identify common interests in and out
of area. Whatever the case, NATO's survival will
ultimately depend on more than its own
institutional interests, but in the collective
interests of its members.
So the future of
NATO may lie in its ability to transform itself
from an organization designed to serve the
interests of one superpower and a number of lesser
powers into one that manages a more equal
partnership between the hard power of the United
States and the soft power of the European Union.
This, of course, would require that the EU
actually achieve a common foreign and security
policy in such a way that Europe is finally on
equal political footing with the US. It would also
require a change in course for US foreign policy,
especially with respect to a commitment to a true
multilateralism. The problem with this scenario is
that NATO - and the trans-Atlantic alliance - may
not have the time to wait for its realization.
Robert Mullin is a freelance
writer and former editor who recently received a
master's degree in economic science from the
Dublin European Institute at University College
Dublin, where he studied the political economy of
the EU in some depth. He currently resides in
Portland, Oregon.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing. |
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