Examination of Witnesses (Questions 88-99)
Professor Mary Kaldor and Dr Bastian Giegerich
12 JUNE 2008
Q88 Chairman: Professor Kaldor and Dr
Giegerich, we are very pleased to see you. As you know, the European
Union is in the process of reviewing the European Security Strategy
and Dr Solana is going to produce a further version of it. He
is going to speak about it at the European Council next week and
then bring his document forward at a meeting in December. We thought
it would be interesting and important to have a relatively short
inquiry, taking some evidence here in London and also going and
talking to people in Brussels, and then try to produce a report
which could be of value, which we can feed into the discussions.
I do not know whether either of you would like to make a short
opening statement, otherwise we will move straight to questions.
Professor Kaldor: I am
happy to do either. I can make my opening statement in the form
of an answer to a question.
Q89 Chairman: In that case, what
I suggest is we will probably ask a question initially as to one
or the other, and the other witness, if he or she wishes to add
anything, obviously is free to do so. Can I start by asking you,
Professor Kaldor, the first question: do you feel that the strategy
provides a coherent and well-balanced assessment of the global
challenges, threats and risks facing the European Union? Are there
some things that you feel are missing from the existing strategy
which ought to be included in the revised version?
Professor Kaldor: Actually, I think the
strategy is pretty good and I think it should stand as a statement
to which all the Member States have agreed to. Of course, if we
were writing it today, we might put more emphasis on climate change,
for example, but I think the strategy is about addressing the
traditional domain of security. By that I do not mean external
threats; what I mean is situations of violence, various forms
of violence. I think that is what the ESDP is about, and I think
it is pretty good. What I would like to see is much more emphasis
on implementation and I also think it will be very important in
a way to find a way to popularise it, because I think that the
European Security Strategy is different from a national security
strategy. The European Union is a different kind of animal from
a state in the making. It is not a state in the making, nor is
it a classic inter-governmental organisation. It is a new kind
of regional institution and I think it has a responsibility to
make a real contribution to global security. That is really what
the European Security Strategy is saying. The job of the European
Union is to contribute to global security, and that is different
from a classic national security strategy. I use the term—and
I know that question is coming—"human security"
because I think it is an easy way to make it clear to people that
what Europe does, which is sometimes called the Petersberg tasks
or contribution to crisis management, is very different from what
a classic nation state does. I think that would be rather popular
because it would make it clear to people that Europe is not a
new militarised super-state in the making but rather it is an
attempt to strengthen the multilateral system in which we live.
Q90 Chairman: Dr Giegerich, do you
have anything to say in response to that question?
Dr Giegerich: Thank you, Chairman. In
essence, I agree with the assessment Professor Kaldor has just
laid out. The most important aspect of the threat assessment that
the ESS presents is that it describes a continuum of connected
threats that one cannot deal with in isolation. That not only
represents a consensual position but also one that remains valid.
It is therefore a good idea to maintain a focus on these key threats
that are pointed out rather than produce a laundry list of other
issues, not least to preserve consensus. I would also agree with
the point about implementation, which is also reflected in the
mandate which was given to Javier Solana. If you look at the text,
it very clearly speaks about a review of the implementation and
perhaps complementary elements but it does not speak of a full
revision of the document, and I think that is indeed unnecessary.
Looking at implementation is in fact much more important than
tinkering with the text as such. We also have to realise that
the ESS, the European Security Strategy actually lays out or puts
forward a fairly ambitious agenda—maybe we will look at
that later—and one might have to think about how one institutionalises
a review process for implementation. I assume that is something
we will touch on later.
Q91 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Congratulations
to you both. You appear to have answered all our questions in
your first two replies! Can I go back to basics and ask you both
what you think is the real purpose of such an assessment, and
to whom it should be directed? Is it just to the bureaucrats who,
rather like "The buck stops here", should have on their
desk the strategy? In your judgement, how flexible should it be?
What should be the means of adapting, modifying, it in response
to changes in the external environment?
Professor Kaldor: I think it is very
clear for whom, which is for the Member States and European civil
society. I think quite a lot is happening in a bureaucratic sense.
It is amazing when you look at the ESDP how many questions there
are, how far the ESDP has developed over the last five years,
but there is not a big amount of commitment on the part of Member
States. I think also there is not at all a public commitment.
What happens is that the ESDP is really not visible, and it is
not presented in a way that is popular, even though people do
have deep concerns about what is happening in the Congo, what
is happening in Aceh, about natural disasters. I feel all of that
is terribly important. When you say how it could be adapted, I
am not sure. Neither of us really think the actual text needs
much adaptation. What is needed is a greater commitment on the
part of Member States. What I do think is needed—again,
repeating what I have said—is a greater popularisation and
a greater emphasis on making more visible, making more coherent,
increasing public support for what the ESDP does.
Q92 Lord Anderson of Swansea: In
your judgement, can it ever be popular in the sense that relatively
small commitments to important but distant parts of the world
are never going to be popular?
Professor Kaldor: I am not completely
sure about that, for two reasons. One is that these distant parts
of the world do affect us here.
Q93 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Indeed.
You have convinced us but how do you get through to a wider audience?
Professor Kaldor: I actually think this
is a lot more serious. It is not just a tiny commitment. That
is really the basic problem of the ESDP; it is that I think in
the world today we face a really serious security gap. There are
a whole series of new types of threats which are asymmetric, which
involve terrorism, which involve fragile states, which are very
different from what we are accustomed to thinking of as security,
yet most of our security capabilities are organised around meeting
an external threat. We have in Europe 1.8 million people under
arms and only about 10 per cent are capable of being deployed
into crisis zones. I think with climate change, with the kind
of pressures we are going to see over the next few years—and
I am now jumping questions, I am afraid—that is going to
express itself not in a new kind of cold war or a new kind of
competition, arms races between nation states. It is going to
express itself in more of the kind of Darfur, even Afghanistan/Iraq,
on-the-ground type crisis, and we simply do not have the capabilities
to meet that. So I think it is much bigger than people realise.
Q94 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: We are
also talking about political will, are we not? It is interesting
that we seem to have a situation in which so many European nations
are not ready to put their troops into areas where they are likely
to be killed, which is why there is such an unfair burden on the
British, for instance, in the southern province of Afghanistan.
You referred to the lack of implementation. Other witnesses have
said much the same, that really this document has been studiously
ignored by the Member States, therefore there does not seem to
be much point in writing another one which will also be ignored.
Also, if you do start trying to rewrite the one you already have,
you detract from the problem that the existing one has not been
implemented, and surely that should be the message we are trying
to give, that the European nations should actually do something
about the one they have already signed up to.
Dr Giegerich: First of all, I would like
to take a step back and point out that in Brussels, in EU institutions
the European Security Strategy is almost omnipresent. It is everywhere.
It is actually very visible in EU institutions and therefore I
think the problem lies in Member States. What one might need to
think about is whether it is a good idea to create sub-strategies
that are on a lower order in terms of hierarchy of documents to
help with implementation. One could be on crisis management, for
example, or other aspects. On the problem with popularity and
commitment, we have to deal with a conundrum here in public opinion,
which is that if you ask European citizens whether they are concerned
about the things that the European Security Strategy tries to
address, they will say yes. If you then ask whether it affects
them in their daily lives, they will say no. That is the difficulty
that one has to address. In terms of political will, particularly
for these commitments that have been mentioned, whether it is
Afghanistan or somewhere else, the problem there is that for most
political leaders and the public at large these operations are
optional, they are discretionary, and therefore the level of effort
becomes discretionary as well. I do not see a solution to that,
other than a continued attempt at explaining why these operations,
these problems, have a direct and larger impact than is commonly
perceived. That is actually a challenge for political leadership
that we can witness across Europe.
Q95 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Professor
Kaldor made the point about asymmetric warfare, which clearly
is the threat. People may not recognise it but our problem today
is not that our country is going to be in invaded but that somebody
is going to blow us to smithereens on the streets of our cities.
When—and I think it is a question of when—this happens,
and you have very serious death tolls, is this going to change
this equation? I totally accept your view that at the moment we
do not feel threatened, we do not feel there is a problem, but
surely we are going to take a different view if there is a serious
outrage in some European city which kills a very large number
of people.
Dr Giegerich: Yes, and it is a sad thing
in a way that one has to learn from experiences like that but
clearly there will be an impact, but I think on a larger scale
perhaps it is just difficult to see how even these key threats
that are mentioned in the European Security Strategy amount to
anything that we would refer to as a strategic or existential
threat. Not to be too cynical, a successful terrorist attack every
couple of years in a European country is not threatening the existence
of our societies. I am not saying that is an acceptable price
to be paid. I am not saying that at all and I do not want to be
misunderstood on that point, but it does not amount to an existential
threat, I would argue, now. Of course, you could point to the
link between two things that are mentioned in the European Security
Strategy, namely terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It
is referred to as more or less the ultimate nightmare in the strategy,
and I think that is probably a situation where you would have
both capability and intent for massive destruction and the killing
of as many people as possible, which is the only scenario in those
that underpin this problem, I think.
Professor Kaldor: I would just say I
am not sure that I do think it is not necessarily an existential
threat, but my emphasis would be the same probably, that it is
all about the means you use in dealing with this. That is why
it is so serious actually, because I do think that we face a lot
of problems—we are going to discuss them -fragile states,
regional conflicts, all getting entangled and interrelated with
each other, and I do think they have serious consequences for
us and we have to take them seriously. I would like again to emphasise
that I think using the term "human security", which
means protecting individuals on the ground and using the instruments
of law rather than the classic instruments of war is terribly
important in this respect, both to help people understand what
it is all about and to make it clear what the European Union policy
is. Essentially, I think what needs to happen is, as it were,
to turn the inside of our societies outwards, which has always
been the European Union method. The European Union has been a
brilliant peace project after the Second World War, the methods
of integration, the ways of stopping societies going to war with
each other. What makes European Union external policy different
from a classic foreign policy is precisely that it is extending
those methods outwards, trying to extend the zone of peace, if
you like. That is exactly what is meant by a human security strategy,
and I feel if we could get the story right, we would have a better
chance of mobilising people to support it and to make a greater
commitment to implementation.
Q96 Chairman: Could I ask one supplementary
to Dr Giegerich, who said that in Brussels, wherever you went
in the European institutions, the strategy was very present. You
also in terms of your earlier research visited Berlin, Vienna,
and you also had discussions with people in London. In which,
if any, of those three countries did you feel there was much consciousness
of the security strategy among the people you talked to who were
dealing with its content?
Dr Giegerich: Clearly, in Germany, for
example, it is a visible document if you look at national government
security policy documents. If you look at the German White Book
from 2006, for example, you will see a threat assessment that
essentially follows the logic of the European Security Strategy
and there is also explicit reference to these documents. In that
discourse it is very present. If you look at the draft national
security strategy that the Christian Democratic party in Parliament
published in Germany about a month ago you will see exactly the
same. In my conversations with the people who drafted it they
were very open in their acknowledgement, as in "This is exactly
what we're trying to do. We accept the European Security Strategy
as the reference point. It is a frame of reference and therefore
it structures what we do now on the national level." In that
setting it is clearly very visible. I would say in Austria one
can also see that if one looks at their defence reform documents,
for example, which came out between 2004 and 2005. I think however
there is then still a disconnect between that level, the policymaker
level, and what one might refer to as the security policy establishment
and public opinion, the public at large, where clearly there is
a much lower perception also in those countries of its content
and its importance.
Q97 Chairman: What about as an external
observer of London?
Dr Giegerich: I was trying to avoid that!
My general comment on that would be that it is not just the European
Security Strategy but a lot of things that are related to the
ESDP. In London in my conversations the problem that I always
see—and it has been for years now, over time—is that
the government here has failed to engage in a discourse that explains
why these things are necessary, why they are beneficial, why there
is utility in doing them on the European level. The discourse
here to me seems to be rather defensive, as in "Why does
it not undermine NATO?", all the things that it is not, rather
than explaining why these things might be useful and helpful to
British security policy. I think that also goes for the European
Security Strategy.
Q98 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I just
wanted to follow up on what you said and ask you whether you felt
that the European Union had a role to play in this review of the
European Security Strategy and in its ongoing policy formulation
in trying to identify ways of moving forward with the concept
of responsibility to protect, which is at the moment just words
on paper, and which the whole international community, not just
the EU, have signally failed to find practical means of giving
effect to, in Darfur, for example, and certainly, in my opinion,
some of the ministers in the EU set off down the wrong road, Mr
Kouchner in particular, in the context of Cyclone Nargis, trying
to suggest straight away that this was a case of responsibility
to protect, which I do not actually think it really was. That
is not to say the issue of responsibility to protect does not
arise in Burma, but not in the Irrawaddy Delta two days after
a massive cyclone. Could you say whether you think the European
Union could play a role or that its reviewed security strategy
could identify ways in which the international community could
be made more capable of giving effect to what it signed up to
in 2005?
Professor Kaldor: For me, that is what
it is all about. I use the term "human security" rather
than responsibility to protect because I think it is a bit broader.
I think what responsibility to protect did not do in the original
UN resolution was to think about how you would implement it. Human
security is all about the protection of individuals and the communities
that they live in rather than the protection of states. It seems
to me that is the big problem that we face, whether we are talking
about states' responsibility in their own societies or the need
for the international community, and I think actually the European
Union has a historic role to play because the European Union is
a large regional bloc. It could make a real contribution to the
United Nations' ability to carry out human security or responsibility
to protect. So I think it is incredibly important, and is one
of the reasons why I am so keen on using this term. I think it
is somewhat broader than responsibility to protect because it
covers natural disasters, multiple sources of insecurity, but
it has that same emphasis on the issue of human rights violations.
It is about protection and respect for human rights and the spread
of international law. I think there has been a tendency all the
way along to hope the US will take the lead. Maybe the US after
Obama will take the lead but I think the European Union does have
a responsibility to set the agenda and to strengthen the capability
of the United Nations to carry out this kind of operation.
Q99 Lord Chidgey: We have covered
so much ground already, I just want to make sure I can focus on
the issues that I wanted to raise without asking you to repeat
what you have already said. I think I have understood this correctly.
Both our witnesses have acknowledged that the European Security
Strategy has prioritised countering terrorism and proliferation,
and rightly so, and the concerns that they have expressed of the
lack of implementation so far in the strategy. I would like to
ask them to spend a little time concentrating on the issue of
whether the strategy should pay greater attention to the causes
and sources of security threats in addition to the focus we have
at the present time on the symptoms. When I say that, I am thinking
in terms of not just asymmetric threats but the threats that exist
because of global shortages of water supply and food, as well
as radicalisation of people through religion or whatever, the
extent to which some nation states are trying to expand their
territory and the effect that has on us. How can we see the strategy
being used to pay greater attention to the subliminal, almost,
future causes of security threats, not just to the European Union
but also globally.
Professor Kaldor: I suppose—and
this again might anticipate future answers, but it seems to me
two things. One is that not all of the causes of insecurity, whether
you are talking about poverty, food insecurity, or climate change,
can be covered under ESDP. A lot of it will be the responsibility
of the European Commission, in that the European Commission provides
aid, or indeed the European Council pressing for better agreements
on climate change. The kinds of things that are specified in the
European Security Strategy, which are weak states, regional conflicts,
terrorism, I still think should be the focus of the security strategy.
I think the point is that, if you take the underlying causes,
say migration, say food insecurity, say land erosion, these are
not necessarily going to lead to violent conflict. Whether or
not they lead to violent conflict depends on the extent to which
there are institutions capable of managing these threats in a
co-operative way. We saw with the tsunami that it, interestingly
enough, had opposite effects. It actually provided the conditions
under which a peace agreement was reached in Aceh, and it also
temporarily contributed to an easing of the situation in Sri Lanka.
So it is not necessary that these causes, so-called, of insecurity
lead to violence. It is all a matter of whether states can manage
violence, whether there is a rule of law, whether there is trust
in institutions, and it seems to me that is what the ESDP has
to focus on and will become all the more important. That is not
to say I do not think those issues are important but I just do
not think the ESDP can cover everything. Other bits of the European
Union have the responsibility to cover those other things.
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