Why Europe must not divorce itself from Nato. By Henry Kissinger
www.telegraph.co.uk. Aug 16 1999.
LESS than three months after Nato's triumph in Kosovo, a
paradoxical but nagging question has become inescapable. Did
Kosovo mark the end of Nato, at least as we have known it?
For America, the Atlantic alliance - our sole institutional link to
Europe - has epitomised the twin pillars of sound American policy:
the buttressing of both security and democratic values. For our
European allies, Nato has given Britain the framework for its
"special relationship" with America; to Germany a safe haven from
European suspicions and Eastern dangers; to France, a safety net
against changes in the geopolitical balance it cannot handle by
itself; and to Italy, an anchor for the emotional Atlantic commitments
of its population.
Yet, unexpectedly, the first joint military operation of the Atlantic
alliance, carried out with extraordinary political cohesion and
involving no allied casualties, has evoked calls for greater European
independence, expressed with a vehemence and at a level never
heard before. The ink on the agreement ending warfare in Kosovo
had hardly dried when, in Cologne on June 15, the 15 leaders of the
European Union affirmed the urgency of creating a separate military
force capable of acting without the United States and without the
approval of Nato. Carried to its logical conclusion, this implies a
revolution in the structure of the West: an all-European chain of
command capable of bypassing the alliance.
The timing of this sudden quest for autonomy is puzzling, even
jarring. The European reaction would make sense if our European
allies felt, over Kosovo, that they had been dragged into what, in
retrospect, they consider an aberration, or if the Nato allies were
squabbling about the consequences.
Neither of these conditions applies. Far from feeling imposed upon,
all allied leaders insist that, henceforth, the pattern of humanitarian
intervention displayed in Kosovo is to be the rule, not the exception.
When there is such unanimity on the significance of their actions, the
sole remaining European motive for developing a capacity to act
autonomously is to escape American tutelage and to increase
European bargaining power. If these goals reflected a desire to
make a greater contribution to joint action, or to give weight to
occasional European warnings against American impetuosity, they
would contribute to the effectiveness of the alliance. To be
meaningful, this would require a vast increase in military spending,
or at the very least a major effort of defence modernisation and
restructuring. If, however, Europe fails to make a real defence effort,
resentments against American dominance will only increase. And if
the quest for independence is driven largely by anti-American
motives, it will saddle Nato with all the compulsive competitiveness
that nearly destroyed Europe before the alliance was founded in
1949.
The new European eagerness for autonomy is partly a function of
the end of the Cold War and of America's emergence as the sole
superpower. But it also reflects and compounds the key alliance
challenge: the growing confusion about what Nato is supposed to
accomplish in the first place.
The various allied leaders are correct in treating Kosovo as a
watershed. The alliance abandoned its historic definition of itself as
a strictly defensive coalition and insisted on the right to occupy a
province of a state with which it was not at war. And it reinforced this
unprecedented ultimatum by coupling it with a demand for the right
of free movement of Nato troops throughout Yugoslavia.
This abrupt abandonment of the concept of national sovereignty
marked the advent of a new style of foreign policy driven by
domestic politics and the invocation of universal moralistic slogans.
But to implement such a policy on a permanent basis will not be
nearly so simple as the self-congratulatory rhetoric implies. Those
who sneer at history obviously do not recall that the legal doctrine of
national sovereignty and the principle of non-interference emerged
at the end of the devastating Thirty Years War. The new discipline of
international law sought to inhibit a repetition of the depredations of
the religious wars of the 17th century, during which perhaps 40 per
cent of the population of Central Europe perished in the name of
competing versions of universal truth. Once the doctrine of universal
intervention spreads and competing truths contest, we risk entering
a world in which, in G.K. Chesterton's phrase, virtue runs amok.
In the Clinton/Blair version of allied policy, Nato must act because it
is the only posse in town and because its motives are pure. This is
not only incompatible with the notion of a defensive alliance but
probably with the notion of alliance altogether. Traditionally,
alliances have expressed the aggregate national interests of the
member states. They define a special, not universal, obligation. The
casus belli is generally the crossing of the national borders of the
alliance, or those of a country considered vital to the alliance.
Once borders lose their sacrosanct quality, how is one to define the
casus belli for the humanitarian wars of intervention of the new
dispensation? Since they reflect a universal, not a special,
obligation, they should - logically - be implemented by a global
consensus. But if Nato is subordinated to the United Nations, its
high aspirations will almost certainly be stymied by the Russian/
Chinese veto. On the other hand, if Nato insists on defining a
universal legitimacy on its own, it will face the opposition of most of
the rest of the world, as has been the fate of all previous claims to
universal jurisdiction.
In the end, the dirty little secret of the allied leaders may be that their
sweeping assertions reflect no operating policy. Shaped by 1970s
protest movements suspicious of alliances and assertions of the
national interest, and by the experience of the 1990s, which
witnessed the disappearance of the Soviet threat, they treat foreign
policy as an aspect of domestic politics and ideological goals rather
than as a pursuit of long-range strategic objectives. They undertook
the Kosovo operation, at least in part, in reaction to public
repugnance of television footage of refugees; but a similar fear of
the pictures of allied casualties caused them to adopt a military
strategy that, perversely, magnified the suffering of the populations
on whose behalf the war was ostensibly being fought.
In the aftermath of the war, the alliance has experienced that even
just wars cannot avoid ambiguity and can have political
consequences. A war to vindicate the inadmissibility of ethnic
cleansing has concluded with replacing one ethnic cleansing with
another. It has also projected the alliance into a political dilemma:
whether to carry out the UN resolution, in effect making Kosovo a
Nato protectorate, or allow it to become independent. The former
course guarantees clashes with the local population on the model of
Somalia; the latter course will produce a long-term Balkan crisis
when the quest for a greater Albania threatens the stability of
Macedonia and perhaps of other states.
No more important task confronts the Atlantic alliance than to bring
the rhetoric of its leaders into line with realistic choices. Various
declarations and "spins" since Kosovo have stated, or implied, that
humanitarian military intervention is not contemplated against major
powers (China, Russia, India), against allies, against allies of major
powers or countries far distant from Europe. Then what is left? It
would be an odd revolution that proclaimed new universal maxims
but could find no concrete application except against a single
Balkan thug.
To be sure, concern for human rights has become a major
component of the foreign policies of the democracies, and it is
supported by powerful domestic constituencies. Non-democratic
governments court trouble when they ignore this reality. But the
leaders of the alliance need to keep in mind that they have
obligations not only to the emotions of the moment but to the
judgments of the future.
Joseph Nye Jr., in a thoughtful article in Foreign Affairs, has put
forward four principles for humanitarian intervention with which I
generally agree: having a just cause in the eyes of others;
proportionality of means to ends; high probability of success; and,
wherever possible, reinforcement of the humanitarian cause by the
existence of other strong national interests.
Thus more narrowly defined, the rhetorical distinction between
humanitarian and national interests erodes. But the task of Nato's
leaders is to be even more concrete and to supply answers to
questions such as these: where and for what humanitarian causes
will Nato project its military power?; what risks is it prepared to run?;
what price is it prepared to pay?
Even more important is to reverse the hollowing out of the traditional
purposes of the alliance. Some of this has occurred because, with
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War threats have largely
disappeared. But allied leaders, systematically deprecating historic
notions of national interest, bear a heavy responsibility as well. The
April communiqué of the Nato summit is symptomatic. It enumerates
a host of New Era challenges, from drugs to terrorism to weapons of
mass destruction. But they are treated functionally, almost as in an
academic exercise without any sense of priorities or of strategy for
dealing with them.
No wonder that Nato headquarters is increasingly preoccupied with
peripheral, essentially psychological, activities like the Partnership
for Peace programme. Whatever their value in giving East
European and Central Asian countries a window into Nato, they
water down the historic functions of the alliance. Meetings of Nato
heads of government are turning more and more into preludes to
G-8 summits or to public spectacles of all the various associates,
numbering some 50 nations.
If the Atlantic alliance is to continue as more than a relic of a fading
period, it must answer these questions. How do we define strategic
threats to world order? What political changes will we resist for
security reasons? Above all, and especially in light of the sweeping
political goals recently enunciated, the political structure of Nato
must be broadened and strengthened.
But this cannot happen unless there is a reaffirmation of the
centrality of the alliance, not for liturgical purposes at periodic,
formal meetings but as a living institution systematically adapting
itself to new realities. Half a century ago, the leaders of the time
produced a vision relevant to their future and their needs. The
current generation of leaders owes it to its people and to its
standing in history to do no less. |
