Examination of Witnesses (Questions 36-39)
Major-General Messervy-Whiting CBE and Mr Nick Witney
5 JUNE 2008
Q36 Chairman: Major-General Messervy-Whiting
and Mr Witney, we are very pleased to see you this morning as
part of the inquiry which we are carrying out on the future development
of the European Security Strategy of the European Union. Both
of you of course have had significant practical experience with
this area of the Union's work but you are now free, working in
other places, to be able perhaps to speak to us more frankly about
these matters than might have been the case on earlier occasions.
Can I begin and ask you what do you see as the nature and the
purpose of the European Security Strategy and to what extent has
it served as a useful tool for addressing the security challenges
which have been faced by the European Union since it was prepared
and agreed? To what extent do you feel it really informs policy-making
in the institutions and indeed in the Member States? Perhaps I
will ask Major-General Messervy-Whiting to start and then, Mr
Witney, we will switch around.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting:
Thank you, My Lord Chairman. If the Committee's attention has
not already been drawn to it might I mention the publication which
has been published by the Swiss (Zurich) Technical Institute,
ETH, as the result of a Chatham House conference in March 2006,
which is available on the internet. This was called Securing
Europe? Implementing the European Security Strategy and contained
really the results of the workshop that was co-sponsored by Chatham
House and by GCSP in Geneva, amongst others. Professor Anne Deighton
was the leading light and the editor for that and what really
came out of that workshop, of which I was a member, was that it
was very much accepted that it was a rough guide for future action,
it was not perhaps a strategy document in the true military sense.
Solana himself, when speaking yesterday, opening the plenary session
of the European Parliament, spoke at length on the European Security
Strategy and his view of his remit from the European Council.
He referred to it very much as it has proved useful, it has served
us well, it is a short readable document that reflects our values
and reflects our principles rather than a more fully fleshed-out
strategy. Certainly looking back at the period up until 2006 and
this particular Chatham House workshop, when the participants
were asked if decision-makers around the table in the Council
or indeed in the Political Security Committee in the European
Union had the strategy in their left hand whilst they voted with
their right, the answer was very much that they did not think
that happened, that it was more a document that informed the decision-making
process. That would be my view on nature and purpose; to what
extent does it inform policy-making, it informs it quite well
in European institutions. A number of them are now seized of the
issue to try and do something to bring it up to date. Whether
it is as widely used in the EU Member States I would have my doubts.
Mr Witney: My Lord Chairman, my views
are really very similar to General Whiting's. I guess the purpose
of the document was essentially to get the Member States onto
the same page in relation to their attitude towards security issues,
which was particularly necessary at the end of 2003 when the document
was born. Yes, you could argue about whether it is really a strategy
or a conceptual framework or what it actually is but it seems
to me a necessary crystallisation of the understanding that moving
into the 21st century the security threats that Europe should
be concerned about were not invasion but all these more amorphous
threats from the dark side of globalisation, if one can express
it that way, and that the way to deal with them was to get out
there and deal with them, that you could not and should not afford
just to sit at home and have these things happen to you. How far
it has been used—I know that during my time in Brussels
we seemed to have identical copies of this little blue book. Mine
is substantially dog-eared, I found it very useful on occasion,
but as Graham said my sense is that it was absorbed more within
the Brussels ring road—where after all it was proposed—than
out in the capitals of Europe.
Q37 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I have
a copy of the little blue book too but could I ask the two witnesses
this morning, who have got extensive experience of course of living
and working in our national framework and also some knowledge
of how the United States organises security strategies and so
on, do you think that this document differs markedly from documents
you came across in your professional life in London and which
you came across in your contacts with Washington? If so, how does
it differ or is it broadly similar. Secondly, does either of those
two actors, the United Kingdom or the United States, hold their
strategic document in their left hand as they take decisions with
their right, or is the situation more or less the same as the
one you have described in Brussels?
Mr Witney: I suppose my immediate sense
of how it differs is that it is blessedly short, very lucid and
readable, which cannot be said for most security strategies. Because
the EU is not a nation state we find less in here about its policies
and it is closer to being a statement of principles whereas the
US national security strategy will tend to be more specific. Interestingly,
I thought the recently produced British national security strategy,
although considerably longer in its ambit, was surprisingly congruent
with this five year old document, certainly in its analysis of
the threats.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I wonder
if the US national security strategy is perhaps more widely used
within Washington because it reads across to a certain extent
to budgetary issues, which I do not think this does—perhaps
it should. I note that it followed hard on the heels of the US
strategy and that our own Foreign Office's first strategy followed
hard on the heels of the EU.
Q38 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Is there
any point in it at all unless it actually changes things on the
ground? The reaction of most European nations to Afghanistan,
which I think threatens the whole of Western Europe if it reverts
to being a terrorist state, is appalling, but really the performance
of German and French troops has been pretty weak and defence budgets
have been cut across Western Europe. What is the point of all
of this if things are changing for the worse on the ground?
Mr Witney: I agree that to the extent
that there is anything wrong with this, it is not the words so
much as whether people are doing it or not and across Europe I
am not sure that I would exempt any national capital. Across Europe
people are not actually following the prescriptions of more active,
more capable and more coherent.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I would
perhaps just emphasise that like many things in the European Union
this is about starting a long term process of construction rather
than achieving immediate results in the short term.
Q39 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could
we turn now to that phrase that you used, Mr Witney, about providing
a coherent and well-balanced assessment of the threats and risks
facing the EU. Does the strategy achieve that? Are there any threats
or challenges or risks that are not covered by the present strategy
and which could now fall within the ambit of the review that is
ongoing at the moment and which has triggered our own consideration
of this matter. Already, of course, Solana and the Commission
put a paper to the March European Council on climate change which
suggested that that was an area that came within the ambit of
a broad security policy, but there are other things like electronic
attacks, non-military espionage, maritime piracy, natural disasters
and then a whole range of what I call poverty eradication, pandemic
disease, food security and so on. Could you perhaps comment, both
of you, on the extent to which these now need to be brought within
a broader view?
Mr Witney: There is no doubt that in
recent years there has become an increasingly widespread understanding
that defence issues need to be seen as part of a much broader
spectrum of security concerns, which cover many of the sorts of
issues that you have just listed, and that military power per
se is not often, perhaps never, the answer to a particular situation
and most crises and areas of instability need to be addressed
with a variety of tools. It is interesting that this document
does in fact mention quite a few of the subjects you have mentioned—there
is even, I noticed, a reference to piracy which has become topical
in the last week or so—though it does not have very much
to say about them. Whilst it is important and right that people
are increasingly concerned about the multi-headed nature of most
of the situations of instability and crisis management that the
EU might need to involve itself in, there can be a danger of this
tending to shift the debate too far away from matters of hard
power and military matters. It is too easy to move from saying
that the military is seldom a solution to anything by itself to
an attitude of mind which is that you do not actually need the
military at all. I myself, for example, am slightly sceptical
about today's rather vogue concentration on energy security which
I think falls pretty loosely under the ambit of what I understand
by defence and security affairs, it seems to me in fact more a
matter of the organisation of the internal gas market in Europe
than something that needs to be considered in conventional security
terms. I see that danger if one is too sophisticated and moves
too far into spreading the term security, but on the other hand
it is absolutely right that things like climate change do play
a key role in contributing as drivers of conflict and instability.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I tend
to agree with Nick. There are tags to most of the things in there
and, of the ones the Committee listed in its question, I do not
think there is anything about non-military espionage, that is
about the only one I could not find a coat-hook to. It is interesting
that yesterday, whilst saying that most of the threats were still
the right ones as they were in 2003, Solana picked out in particular
climate change and its effect on international security, ditto
illegal immigration and information security. Actually, the strategy
does mention global warming under global challenges and talks
about turbulence and migratory movements, and it does mention
illegal immigration under the key threats in relation to organised
crime, but clearly these are issues that Solana will probably
feel he needs to tackle in any update of the strategy. The other
thing I noted recently is that the French are just about to update
their defence white book after about 15 years and President Sarkozy
is going to announce the main findings on 17 June, just before
the European Council on 18 and 19 June and just before France
takes over the Presidency of the European Union. What Le Figaro
trailed as likely headlines from that were obviously terrorism,
but the dangers generally coming out of Asia and specific mention
about cyber-terrorism and climatic change.
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