Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
Mr Dan Smith OBE
22 MAY 2008
Q1 Chairman: Good morning Mr Smith. Thank
you very much indeed for coming to meet the Committee this morning.
We are just starting an inquiry into the European Security Strategy
which is due to be reviewed and perhaps revised in the second
half of this year. We thought as a Committee it would be useful
to take evidence both from people who have concerns about the
issues which it treats as well as people who have direct knowledge
of the way in which the EU operates in this area. We really want
to begin by assessing how far the existing Strategy has worked
and as well as that look forward to see what a new European Security
Strategy might do and how it can be improved. I would like to
begin by asking you what you see as the purpose of the existing
European Security Strategy and to what extent it has proved a
useful tool for addressing the security challenges faced by the
European Union and its Member States.
Mr Smith: Thank you very
much for the invitation to present some views and some ideas today.
I think you have to begin by thinking about the political role
of the European Security Strategy and the period in which it was
first started and promulgated. It was an attempt to be a politically
unifying document between different views and conceptions about
security, about the security threats. Actually quite a big shift
in security thinking was happening—in my view it is still
happening—and the Security Strategy was in part designed
by the office of Javier Solana to cut a path through some of that
confusion. Because of the tensions between the different conceptions
of security and especially because of different views about how
much emphasis should be put on the terrorism threat and how much
should be put on other threats, I think that the document, although
it is well written, is not as clearly a clarion call for a new
conception of security as maybe some of its architects wanted
it to be. I think that it did prove useful at the outset in offering
some degree of cohesion, some degree of coherence in balancing
between these different ideas of security. I also think it has
provided some useful mapping points and reference points for the
EU institutions, maybe less so for the Member States who have
actually paid it less attention. As quick bits of evidence to
support that idea I think that in the number of ESDP missions—including
the ones that were already under way at the time the Strategy
was finalised, there have been 20—there has not actually
been a notable acceleration compared to 2003 in the numbers started
each year (with the exception of 2005 when I think seven were
started), but there has been momentum in those ESDP missions.
The European Security Strategy might not have caused that but
it explains it, it provides a background to it, it provides a
reference point for it. I think also that you can see the influence
of the Security Strategy in the work that the special envoy on
the Great Lakes Region of Africa, Roeland van de Geer has done
and the contribution he has made—which has been quite widely
praised—towards trying to get some sort of agreements between
the government and the different fighting groups in Eastern Congo.
I would say it is a political utility with a political purpose
to it, with some usefulness in relation to the EU institutions,
much less in relation to the Member States.
Q2 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Mr Smith,
can you say how you define the parameters of this? Probably when
you and I were brought up we thought of security almost purely
in military terms, now it is defined almost beyond what it can
contain. Where do you think are the limits of security and are
they adequately addressed in the document?
Mr Smith: I think of the two concepts
of security that I was referring to, one is the more traditional
one, not purely military any more but very distinctly state-based,
based on the idea of national interest and reflected in the academic
discourse and often in political discourse by what is often called
realist analysis or, when people are being pejorative, realpolitik.
On the other side, beginning I suppose in the early to mid 1990s,
there has been a different strand which has gone by the name most
commonly of human security, which argues that it is not the security
of the state which is the main objective, it is the security of
individuals and communities which is the main objective. When
this was being used to expand the notion of security to include
explosive remnants of war which in a village area will stop the
farming going on after the war is over, I think this is very useful.
When the notion is expanded to include the idea of the security
sector—the police, the prison service and so on—it
remains a very useful notion. Sometimes I hear the notion of human
security being expanded so far that you are only secure if you
feel happy. I heard one major spokesperson for human security
ideas say that human security is knowing what will happen tomorrow.
Surely one's response is, "Well, that's not life, is it?"
I think there are some conceptions of it which have pushed the
outer limits beyond what is feasible.
Q3 Lord Anderson of Swansea: It can
be defined out of existence.
Mr Smith: Exactly.
Q4 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Where
do you draw the line?
Mr Smith: I think I draw the line more
or less pragmatically at the operation of the state security sector
and then, in a different way, those factors which can lead to
violent conflict. I would therefore include poverty, the environment,
good governance under the heading of security concerns. I would
want to make sure that the security strategy was consistent with
policies leading towards development, environmental responsibility
and good governance. I would not necessarily put that policy into
the hands of the state security sector.
Q5 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Following
on from Lord Anderson's point, it strikes me that this thing has
been set up by a committee and everybody has thrown their bit
of interest into it—I do not think the EU committees are
any different to any others on that—and you end up with
something trying to do almost everything. There does not seem
to be a single problem facing the world that is not included here
in the parameters of this. Is it not trying to do too much?
Mr Smith: I think there is bound to be
a constant iterative process, moving back and forth in this argument
to try to find the right balance point. I think since before the
end of the Cold War one found NATO looking at new security threats,
thinking about movement of people (that was one of the first that
came up) and looking at those threats which came from the south
which were not threats from state actors but state threats arising
out of the conditions in parts of Africa, for example. To exclude
those from the conception of security is to exclude way too much,
but obviously there is the risk on the other side that you go
too far and you include absolutely everything in. Then you are
talking about the business of government rather than a component
of government. I would love if there were a neat answer, if somebody
could come and say, "Here it is; here are the parameters".
I think instead what there will be consistently is a debate in
which people are trying to find more or less the right balance
point, but it is always going to be slightly unstable and new
issues and new problems will come up. I think it would be a mistake
either to go to the outer limits of possibility, defining everything
as human security, or to say that because it is possible to go
to the outer limits then by contrast I prefer to stick with the
core of military defence against threats from other states. There
has to be a mid-point somewhere in there but I do not think in
arguing it out there is a scientific way to do it.
Q6 Chairman: Is it primarily the
external—external either to the state or in this case to
the Union—that we are considering?
Mr Smith: I would say primarily it is
but these issues have reflections, as we have seen, echoes—very
violent ones—within the Union and within the states. I think
we also have to think about the way in which national policies
can inadvertently contribute to those external issues.
Q7 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I have
two questions about your knowledge of the origins of the Strategy.
What I had always heard—perhaps you can confirm this—was
that it was in fact virtually untouched by the Member States;
it was produced by Javier Solana and Robert Cooper and miraculously
went through a process that only lasted three or four weeks and
emerged as the Union's Strategy in a much more coherent way than
had often been the case in the past and was therefore not the
construct of a committee. The second question I would like to
ask you is to what extent you feel that the experience in the
Balkans in the 1990s and Kosovo was one of the main motivating
forces behind the definition of the strategy and one of the experiences
that, as it were, informed it, similarly of course bringing in
the question of human security which was very prominent in the
Kosovo crisis.
Mr Smith: On your first point, a draft
of the Strategy went to the June meeting of the Council of Ministers
where it was noted and, subject to correction on actually looking
at the communiqués and so on, encouraged further work.
What I have understood is that that went away into this small
team that produced it and wrote it. It is well written and it
is a coherent document. It is trying to square a number of circles
but that is the reality they were dealing with. My anecdotal understanding
is that there was really very little change in it once the second
version was produced. As to the background, I have always thought
that the Balkans and Kosovo lay in the background but I have also
thought that what drove forward the recognition of the need to
have a strategy were the disputes in the first half of 2003—and
of course also late 2002—essentially about Iraq but also
to the related question of counter-terrorism. My understanding
is that it was the British, French and German governments which
were the first to identify this as something that had to be resolved
and a joint view produced. Without having done detailed research
on it, that is my understanding.
Q8 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Was
there also in the background a wish to give a riposte to the US
Strategy at a time when Europe and the US were diverging in terms
of analysis of a number of key problems?
Mr Smith: There were certainly a lot
of people—observers active in politics—who wanted
the Strategy to be a riposte to the US and you can indeed look
into it and find things which are such, but you can also look
into it and find other things which seem like they are concessions,
they are alongside the US positions and are compatible with them.
Steering that course is what the strategy was trying to do. At
a time when it felt as if the Atlantic was getting wider and those
divisions were then being replicated in Europe rather destructively,
it was an attempt to pat those divisions back a little bit into
place, not to completely obscure the differences but to get them
back to manageable proportions again. I think there was a general
view that what had happened in the first half of 2003 was not
viable long term.
Q9 Lord Truscott: Mr Smith, do you
agree with the analysis of the global challenges and specific
threats as set out in the first part of the European Security
Strategy? How would you rank energy dependency as a security threat?
Mr Smith: I think there is a lot of great
interest and value in the analytical parts of the security strategy.
It puts the emphasis on threats not being from states but arising
out of phenomena or syndromes or processes—or whatever you
want to call them—in international politics, some which
are specific to regions and some which are to do with the nature
of the world system. I think that its emphasis on a multi-faceted
threat, a rather complicated threat is right, and the idea that
one has a multi-faceted response using a lot of different instruments
of government is also appropriate. It is right that in a globalising
world distance is not as important as it used to be in assessing
security threats. The idea that EU enlargement, in a general sense
an expansion of an EU zone of peace, is an important part of an
overall security strategy—I think that is also very valuable
and worthwhile. I find various absences; perhaps some of these
are based on retrospectively looking back with five years of additional
knowledge, but climate change is a glaring absence. The lack of
attention to the problem of injustice and unfairness in the world
is also important because the perception and understanding of
that is a major aggravating feature of a great many of the conflicts
which give rise to some of the direct threats which we are concerned
about. The focus on terrorism as a thing in itself is incomplete.
I think one has to look at what terrorism grows out of as well
as the specific terrorist threat. There is also a big thing which
I would like to introduce into the discussion. It does not surprise
me at all that it was missing in the European Security Strategy.
I think though that it hints in this direction: that there is
a major change going on in the nature of violent conflicts that
are challenging the world system and major players within it.
The notion of inter-state war of course is still real but it is
much less important in the post-Second World War and especially
the post-Cold War period. We are now seeing, as the Human Security
Project has reported, a decline in the number of intra-state wars,
but we are beginning to see, identify and understand what are
being referred to as non-state wars. Beyond that I think it is
necessary also to pay increasing attention to that zone where
what we have thought of as armed conflicts having political purposes
intersect with pure criminality. What I wonder is whether some
of the driving forces behind armed conflict in terms of a marginalisation
of people which makes it possible to mobilise them in conflict
are now going to be mobilised in things that we would understand
more in terms of gangs and crime rather than political movements
and war. I think there is a shift happening in the nature of armed
conflict worldwide. It is part of a development in the world system;
it is part of the development in world economics but also in world
politics which is putting increasing sanctions against those who
use violence for political purposes. Those sanctions are still
not powerful enough; there is still too much political violence.
I think I am almost arguing that violence or violent conflict
is a sort of homogenous fluid which, if it cannot get an outlet
through political causes, we are going to see it happening in
ways that we understand as being more social. To go back to your
question, I think that the analytical section is interesting,
important, many parts of it are valid, but there is a case for
re-writing now.
Q10 Lord Truscott: You did not answer
the point about energy dependency. One of my views is that the
major security threat facing all of us in the 21st century will
be the competition for natural resources: water, food and energy.
How would you rank energy?
Mr Smith: I think that energy issues
may carry a dimension of risk that is different from what we have
been talking about in the last decade, perhaps, when we have been
discussing security issues. An awful lot of discussion of global
security issues is really based on the risks for the poor in the
world and the risks to all of us that arise from neglecting the
condition and the situation of the poor. In terms of climate change
you can argue quite clearly that the greatest negative effect
of climate change will be felt by the poorest of the poor living
in low income, badly governed states. Energy dependency or energy
issues will hit those people and those societies as well but they
may also, if we are not careful, hit European, developed OECD
countries as well. I would not say this is something that I was
thinking will happen in five to 10 years' time, but untreated
and unregarded, perhaps in the middle of this century we would
be seeing tensions and issues arising between the rich countries
in a way that we have perhaps not seen in the last many years.
Q11 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: I was
very interested with your diagnosis of these internal conflicts
and criminality. I have a lot of sympathy and find it very interesting,
but what do we actually do about it? Let us take an extreme example
of this, Afghan warlords who, let us face it, are about as criminal
as they come, but the drugs trade gives them a fantastic cash
flow which really enables them to buy almost any military hardware
they want. Is there anything other than a military solution from
the point of the view of the West when dealing with these people?
I cannot see that sanctions would have any effect on them at all.
Mr Smith: I think the military or the
policing solution is obviously an important part of it. I think
that providing alternative livelihoods for those who are doing
the farming is also part of it.
Q12 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: That
is not easy though.
Mr Smith: No, it is not easy, but good
governance in Afghanistan—as in other countries where the
issue arises—is also a part of it. The problem in some ways
lies in ourselves in western societies, whether or not we can
manage to find a solution. As long as there is a market for the
poppies they will be grown. Also, at the other end and looking
at how we manage those issues internally in our own societies—I
do not want to get into a discussion of what I, as an ordinarily
ill-informed citizen, think would be a reasonable drug policy
in the UK—you are right, you have to have that hard-headed
policing and military core to this but if you were not taking
any other actions then it would be treating symptoms without getting
even close to treating the causes. The two must different kinds
of approach must go hand in hand.
Q13 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Do
I understand you to say that the report fails or inadequately
deals with the inter-relationship between various heads—terrorism,
organised crime—and could the same, for example, be applied
to migration flows and demography? Do you think the report addresses
the problem of world population—the division between the
developing and developed world in terms of population—adequately?
Mr Smith: My preference is to treat the
question of migration with great care because it is such an emotive
term. When my organisation looked at the question of climate change
and its potential effect in causing migration one of the things
we thought was necessary to make clear is that an awful lot of
the migration we are talking about is not from the south to the
north, it is not from the poor world to the rich, it is within
the poor world. It is from areas which, in scenarios of climate
change, absolutely cannot cope with the impact of climate change
to areas which can barely cope, then putting increased pressure
on those areas. I do think that there is a series of inter-relating
or inter-locking issues which form the background to the specific
security threats that are faced and are addressed, and that the
European Security Strategy document was not clear enough about
those inter-relationships. At the same time I hasten to add that
I do not think that a strategy document like this should become
a major academic disquisition on absolutely everything. It has
to keep political clarity and therefore I would not expect it
to go into the analytical depth that one would like in some contexts.
Q14 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Clearly
one factor in migration is the very pressure of population.
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q15 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Has
that been addressed adequately?
Mr Smith: No.
Q16 Lord Crickhowell: Just following
up on the point raised by Lord Hamilton, clearly Afghanistan is
uniquely difficult as a situation but recent history in, say,
Colombia does suggest that policing good governance is a way of
dealing with some of these issues in some parts of the world.
I am actually in the middle of planning a visit to Colombia which
I do not think I would have been doing five years ago. While Afghanistan
may be uniquely difficult, there are parts of the world where,
if these things are tackled seriously and in the right way, great
progress can be made.
Mr Smith: I think maybe one would have
said maybe 15 or 20 years ago that Colombia was uniquely difficult
and it is still extremely difficult. You are talking about a background
of essentially permanent violent conflict ever since independence
and indeed before it. This war itself goes back at least 40 years
and its roots can be found in the previous war in La Violencia
in Colombia. The intersection with cocaine has given FARC and
the other groups enormous resources and enormous power and at
times they have completely out-numbered and out-powered the Colombian
army. In recent years the Colombian government—with a number
of different initiatives heading first in one direction, sometimes
correcting course, some initiatives which did not work out, did
not go right—does seem to be making progress. I think the
problem about this is that the pace of progress in these circumstances
is always at a snail's pace. Sometimes maybe there is an impatience
amongst policy makers to achieve a solution within what is actually
an unrealistically short timeframe. When a conflict goes back
decades and centuries one should not expect two or three years
or the lifetime of a government to solve it.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom: I would like
to remind Lord Crickhowell that Colombia still has one of the
highest homicide rates in the world.
Lord Crickhowell: Yes but the fact is
in the major cities you can now visit probably in greater safety
than you can visit in parts of London. Enormous progress has been
made and it is now a growing tourist country as a result.
Q17 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: We have
really begun to cover this ground in the previous questions and
answers, but looking at the Strategy do you think it sufficiently
and clearly enough emphasises the main drivers of insecurity,
challenges to the rules-based international system, climate change
(you have already said it does not and is in a way reflected in
the fact that the Commission and the Council Secretariat actually
produced note for the March Council on that aspect), competition
for energy resources (Lord Truscott asked you about that), water
resources, poverty, inequality and poor governance. I suppose
we should add now food security or anyway we should think a bit
about it. To what extent do you think that the Strategy as drafted
in 2003 identifies these drivers sufficiently? Are there any that
are missing from it? Does the Strategy take sufficient account
of the inter-relationship between what you might call classical
security issues and classical development issues which are now
recognised as being part of a wider security nexus in, for example,
the High-Level Panel's report to the Secretary General in 2004?
Arising out of that do you think that the Security Strategy should
have specifically said that achieving the Millennium Development
Goals was a desirable objective for the European Union?
Mr Smith: To take the first part of the
question addressing the drivers and insecurities, I think the
European Security Strategy makes a reasonable start on that. As
I think I have already said, I see some major absences there.
The one footnote I would add to that—to nuance it in a way—is
that one needs to be careful that the analysis does not re-visit
the same issue simply under different names, for example poverty
and food insecurity or indeed climate change and food insecurity.
I am not arguing that food insecurity is unimportant; I think
it is critical. Food insecurity is a major transmission mechanism
from some of these underlying social or climatic or economic drivers,
through food insecurity and livelihood insecurity which can lead
then to people moving—migration—and thus in that particular
chain of cause and effect increase the risk for armed conflict.
Exactly how to reflect this network of issues in a document I
think requires some careful thought. Where International Alert
went to, as we were analysing this, was to attempt to stay away
from simple chains of cause and effect and rather to talk about
the interaction of different elements. Thus, in a situation where
you have bad governance, a history of conflict, low levels of
human security and low income, then the effect of climate change,
interacting with those weaknesses in society and inequality are
going to produce a higher risk of armed conflict than climate
change may in a completely different circumstance. Take two low
lying countries, one rich and one poor: why do we worry so much
about Bangladesh in the context of climate change but really think
that the Dutch will handle things? It is the interaction between
the social realities and the natural phenomena that produces risk.
Carefully addressed, introducing that element, would be a real
strengthening of the European Security Strategy because those
specific threats which are then being talked about and which need
to be addressed, whether it is with military preparations or with
policing or specific programmes, are being put into a background
and a context that makes sense. On the relationship between security
somewhat classically understood and development somewhat classically
understood I think the expression of that relationship in the
European Security Strategy is quite inadequate. I refer to the
previous part of the answer just now to say what I think there
ought to be. I do think that it is in the interests of the European
Union that the Millennium Development Goals be achieved but I
would caution against writing achievement of the Millennium Development
Goals as specific targets into a new European Security Strategy.
The reason for this is that I feel that the Millennium Development
Goals actually function best when they are seen as aspirations
and I have a lot of reservations when they are made into bureaucratic
objectives, wholly quantifiable and a tick-box approach is taken
to them, because that homogenising view of world development misses
the distinctions and the differences between the different countries.
I far prefer the trend in the development debate which is looking—under
the heading of the fragile states discourse—looking at the
specific issues which are arising which are different in Nepal
from in Tanzania, which are different in Liberia from in Indonesia.
I prefer an approach therefore which takes us towards the specifics
rather than one which is happy resting at the generalities.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I would follow
that very much; it is a theme which in a debate in the House of
Lords recently on the Millennium Development Goals it came out
very clearly. Presumably in a document which is necessarily a
general document you have to found your contribution to dealing
with specifics into some general principles and that is where
this comes in. I think your reply is very helpful.
Q18 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Had
the Strategy been evolved 10 years ago probably there would hardly
have been a mention of climate change. If one projects 10 years
hence the likelihood is that climate change will be even higher
up the agenda. As you have already mentioned, it is fundamental
to a whole series of threats to human development, be it population
movements, be it natural disasters, conflict over water, general
environmental matters. Lord Hannay has already mentioned the report
of the Council and Commission which I think was presented in March
of this year. In your judgment is there currently a sufficient
emphasis on climate change as a driver and factor in change? Does
that report in its own analysis adequately tackle the subject
in its recommendations?
Mr Smith: As I said when talking initially
about the European Security Strategy, it is good to begin with
understanding the political moment. At the beginning of 2007 I
think it was almost an eccentric position to be talking about
the connection between climate change and security. When the UK
Government used its chairmanship of the UN Security Council to
convene a debate on that in the spring of last year there was
really quite a lot of critical comment by other states, including
ones to which HMG would normally feel pretty close. The case that
there is a connection between the consequences of climate change
and security issues I would say at that point, in April/May last
year, was not broadly understood. This is around the time we were
beginning to take up the issue as well. I got onto a number of
radio and television programmes on the basis that here was somebody
saying something completely different that we have not really
heard before. During 2007 the debate shifted enormously, first
of all because the fourth assessment report from the IPCC—the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—came out and secondly
because a lot of people were interested in it. The Nobel Peace
Prize Committee gave the award to Al Gore and to the IPCC itself
which at least pushed people into talking about the connection.
Now we come round to the early part of 2008 and this is beginning
to be a mainstream view. It is nonetheless still at a fairly early
stage of really working out what that connection is. The effects
of climate change are being felt now. On a lot of the problem
areas the analysis in the report is right. I found a couple where
I found it rather hard to trace causality but those were minor
objections and I would not go into them. The general sense that
climate change is going to break the back of a pretty weak camel
I think is right. I think then, however, that the conclusions
and the recommendations which came out of the report are relatively
unambitious. There is a slight sense that the authors of this
report were sort of going through the motions, not really sure
what actually can be done about this but needing to put down a
few paragraphs at the end under the heading of recommendations.
I would very much hope that those recommendations would get revisited.
As the former Chief Scientist of the Government, Sir David King,
has said, it is going to be three and a half decades under even
the best scenario before mitigation really changes things around.
In the meantime, especially for poor countries, there has to be
a huge amount of emphasis on adaptation. People will adapt to
climate change; they will adapt in some cases by changing crop
cycles, by changing the way their houses are built. Let us hope
that that is done with support from governments and the international
community. In the worst case they will be adapting by running,
by moving away, by fighting with each other over scarce resources.
There will be an adaptation to climate change but some of that
process of adaptation can be counter-productive and what we want
is to encourage a form of adaptation and models and systems for
it which are conducive towards peaceful social relations rather
than towards violence.
Lord Anderson of Swansea: Is it fair
to say that global warming is broadly preferable to global freezing.
Q19 Chairman: So there is benign
adaptation and malign adaptation and what we need to look for
are the ways of encouraging the former.
Mr Smith: That is right. I think that
in a lot of circumstances the malign adaptation will occur because
the benign has not been planned, prepared and implemented properly.
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