The following analysis of security aspects of U.S.-West European relations is excerpted from a forthcoming FPIF essay, "The Transatlantic Partnership in the Shadow of Globalization," by Jonathan P. G. Bach <jb810@colombia.edu>. The author is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Saltzman Center for the Center of Constitutional Democracy.)
FISSURES IN THE BEDROCK
By Jonathan P.G. Bach
Not all is quiet on the military front either. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is regarded as the bedrock of U.S.-European relations. A primary reason for its perseverance after the demise of its raison d'ˆtre, the Warsaw Pact, is that NATO's rationale extended beyond deterring the Soviet Union. NATO institutionalized U.S. military relations with Europe in a way that interwar internationalists could only dream of. The original impulse rested most immediately, of course, on the Soviet Union as a threat. But there was also a perception that a lack of American military commitment to Europe per se was threatening, allowing instability and its consequences, whether fascist or communist. Decades later, NATO capitalized on this perception by recasting itself as a political/military organization whose existence was justified by this original concern. NATO was billed as tantamount to U.S. commitment, and hence stability, in Europe.
The decision to retool NATO for a post-cold war role essentially meant abandoning alternative European security constellations such as: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a wide-ranging, informal consultative body that includes both the U.S. and Russia; an approach drawing on nonoffensive defense; or a collective security model. As NATO increasingly became the only game in town, those critical of the alliance hoped it was truly capable of metamorphosing from a collective defense system into some form of collective security for Europe. The principal concern among critical voices was that Washington would seek to develop NATO as a U.S.-led police force to enhance its interests around the world. This prompted the out-of-area debate about whether NATO forces could be used outside its members' territory for reasons other than self-defense, a question answered by NATO's de facto military action first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo.
Although European member states support "upgrading" NATO, they are not as sanguine about continued U.S. dominance within the organization. France, historically suspicious of Washington's perception of European defense, postponed reintegrating its forces with the NATO military command, insisting that a French admiral should command the Southern Fleet. Washington's hypocritical position--refusing to subordinate U.S. troops to any other command, while expecting and insisting that other troops defer to U.S. commanders--is becoming more of an issue. In this context, recent U.S. proposals to give NATO a more explicit role in the maintenance of global stability--including combating nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons--were met with a decidedly cool reaction in Europe. Combined with NATO enlargement and military action in Yugoslavia, Washington's attitude has fueled critics' and skeptics' worst fears of NATO evolving from a defensive alliance into a semiautonomous regional actor drawing new partitions in a Europe still unhealed from cold war rifts.
Both European hawks and doves take issue with the U.S. role in NATO. Critics fear that Washington will use NATO as a military extension of its own global activities, subordinating Europe's interests and dragging the alliance into unwanted wars. Even supporters of more aggressive military engagements within Europe criticize Europe's military dependence on the U.S., citing the lack of a European capacity for air transport of troops, strategic reconnaissance, and military technologies such as laser-guided bombs. Thus even among more traditionally inclined officials there is growing sentiment for a more autonomous voice in European military affairs, even if this means working outside of NATO.
Here is where divisions within NATO between the U.S. and the EU could become crucial. The oft-maligned Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, while still a pale version of its economic and social counterparts, remains a pivotal feature of continued European integration. European foreign ministers have now replaced the moribund West European Union, until now the military coordination arm of the EU, with a common defense policy that would allow independent military action. The new entity consists of an EU military committee headed by a new High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Javier Solana, NATO Secretary General since 1995, will assume the new position in December 1999. The EU will now develop its own satellites, intelligence sources and military staff and would have the option to lead operations with or without NATO assets. At the same time, the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which sets forth the most complete guidelines to date on a Common Foreign and Security Policy, allows an "opt-out" option for EU member states who, for reasons of neutrality or history, feel they cannot participate in a military mission. This procedure is known in Euro-lingo as "constructive abstention," reflecting a desire to dilute the need for unanimity required by the Maastricht Treaty, the 1990 landmark agreement on European political integration.
European gestures toward new defense institutions first achieved a new level of significance during NATO's fiftieth anniversary celebration in April 1999, which wore a beleaguered look of gnawing self-doubt illuminated by the failure of air strikes to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo. The war over Kosovo injected an air of near panic about the future of the alliance: "If we do not achieve our goals in Kosovo," warned U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, Jr., ominously in the midst of NATO's fiftieth anniversary, "NATO is finished as an alliance." The Europeans are generally more sanguine about NATO's future, regarding U.S. supremacy--rather than the alliance itself--as being at stake, but the Kosovo crisis clearly highlights the contradictory impulses of NATO's attempt to redefine itself.
The war over Kosovo began as a call to maintain NATO's solidarity in the face of seemingly shameful inaction. It became the most serious test yet of NATO's unity in the face of unclear political aims and ineffective military force, which precipitated the very humanitarian catastrophe it was supposed to prevent. As loops of argumentation for and against military action in Kosovo devolved into infinite regress, two consequences resonate: NATO can no longer shroud itself in the mantle of pan-European security where Russia is concerned, and Russian concerns are European concerns.
For all the soothing rhetoric in selling NATO enlargement to the Russians, Russia has now gained the ammunition it needs to credibly present NATO as an aggressor and NATO enlargement as a threat. For U.S.-European relations, this reality harbors long-term consequences. At first glance, Washington could exploit the image of a bellicose, if impoverished, Russia to strengthen the alliance. But given the European desire to jettison the U.S. foreign policy umbrella, if not the Pentagon's security umbrella, Washington will not find a replay of the hegemonic aspects of the cold war possible. For Western Europe, and especially Germany, good relations with Russia are of paramount importance, and official support for a renewed enemy image is likely to be luke-warm at best.
Beyond the problems unleashed by excluding Russia from meaningful participation in the original decision to use NATO forces in Kosovo, the Balkan war opened rifts both between NATO allies and within them. Greece and Italy grudgingly accept the air war, more out of fear of reproach than any enthusiasm. Hungary became a front-line state two weeks after joining NATO, tempering its show of support after its hard-won NATO acceptance with its concern over the war. Perhaps the most serious threat to NATO's coherence came from the effect of the war on Germany, where the historic Social Democratic/Green Party coalition government struggles with the once seamless, now contradictory, sentiments of "never again war" and "never again Auschwitz."
Having failed miserably in preventing the violent implosion of former Yugoslavia, Europe now uneasily participates in the U.S.-led effort. After so much inaction, the European allies are in a weak position to criticize the NATO intervention, especially when President Clinton has made it the centerpiece of his foreign policy. Major changes in NATO are likely to arise in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo. European politicians are preparing the public for higher military expenditures, viewing a modernized military as enabling more options. "We Europeans," states the otherwise pro-American British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "should not expect the United States to play a role in every disorder in our back yard."
For the U.S. this does not mean the end of NATO but rather the politically palatable possibility that NATO could henceforth undertake missions using U.S. military equipment but not U.S. troops. NATO is still too important to the new Europe's sense of self and too central to America's role as the purveyor of global security to be discarded rather than modified. Thus, to satisfy both European desires for more autonomy and U.S. desires for less troop risk, the future NATO may look increasingly to ad hoc operations (premised on the idea of "Combined Joint Task Forces") collaborating with Europe's nascent independent military capacity. Washington could then assemble "coalitions of the willing"--those European allies inclined to participate--rather than seeking unanimity within NATO. Should this become the trend, the criticism that selective military action serves geopolitical rather than humanitarian reasons stands to gain more credibility.
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