Examination of Witnesses (Questions 126-139)
Professor François Heisbourg and Professor
Alyson Bailes
19 JUNE 2008
Q126 Chairman: Professor Bailes and Professor
Heisbourg, we are very grateful to both of you for being with
the Committee today. We are carrying out an inquiry, as you know,
on the European Security Strategy and a review which is taking
place, and we have some questions which we would like to put to
you, but I think, Professor Bailes, you would like to make an
opening statement?
Professor Bailes: A very
short one, thank you. I wanted to say that I found a tendency,
especially among academics, to read the original Security Strategy
out of context as if it had been handed down on tablets of stone.
Of course it is a creature of its time, and any review carried
out now is bound to be likewise. The first Strategy was quite
fortunate in its timing because it was the vehicle of a kind of
reconciliation, of the EU countries pulling themselves back together
after the rifts on Iraq, and that helped to ensure that it would
be quite bold and coherent; people would be on their best behaviour
and not mess up the drafting too much, so to speak, but the downside
was that the Strategy was heavily influenced by the USA's new
threats perception. It had to more or less take that as the starting
point even if it then tempered it by reintroducing a concern about
conflict as a bad thing, and, of course, offering some significantly
different policy prescriptions. Now, if you look at the macro-environment
today for reviewing the Strategy we do have more security concerns,
perhaps a recrudescence of old East/West tensions, if I can use
that as shorthand, and then new functional concerns about economic
and financial stability, food supplies, energy, as well as climate
change, continuing conflicts and so on. In logic that should push
a review towards a wider and more comprehensive treatment of security
problems. The hints I have, though, are that rather on the contrary
there may be elements of caution in the approach of the Council
machinery to this in Brussels which would lead them to play safe
by focusing more on implementation in fields that clearly belong
to external policies, CFSP and ESDP. It is partly that this review
is being undertaken by the Council before the anticipated changes
from the Lisbon Treaty, which would have blended in the Commission's
external roles and services and allowed a truly joint assessment:
and, of course, the huge uncertainty now about what will happen
to the Lisbon Treaty will be another feature pushing towards prudence.
I think the upshot is that the drafters of the review will be
very cautious about commenting on Pillar 1 matters, broader economic
issues, energy and so forth in any kind of policy-relevant detail.
We should also remember that the timing is wrong in the sense
of absorbing the results of the United States presidential elections—by
the time of the December European Council I think the full results
of that will not be fully understood—and, finally, we should
not forget that France itself, which will be holding the Presidency,
got agreement in the EU to a larger review of the Union's future
mission and scope which was supposed to be carried out by a group
of wise persons after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. It is
not clear now, of course, what will happen to that either, but
it might be that nations including France would want to reserve
some of the meat, so to speak, for a review taking place outside
all the traditional institutions of that other type. Thank you.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Professor
Bailes. Do any of my colleagues have any questions?
Q127 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: I would
very much like to come back on that. We seem to be completely
locked into the whole idea that there should be a very view. Many
of the people who have given evidence to us say that the existing
Strategy is extremely clear, it reached agreement, but the real
problem is implementation. Nobody seems to have considered that
it might be a good idea not to review the Strategy at all, but
merely to try and implement the one we already have.
Professor Bailes: Well, the Union is
a bit like that; once somebody has had a good idea and it is adopted
the trains have to run according to the timetable. Of course,
one could not have foreseen the present problems over the Lisbon
Treaty, but on the whole I would agree that it is not the best
time to review, and I think my advice would be not to hope too
much from the review and, in particular, not to sink energies
into it, particularly political energies or efforts for compromise,
which are so much more needed on the real life agenda of the European
Union at the moment.
Q128 Lord Anderson of Swansea: You
make a powerful case for saying that the timing is wrong, wrong
in terms of the United States' election, wrong in terms of Lisbon
and the wider review. The review does not have to take place by
the end of the year: what the Council decides can be undecided.
Is it your view that there should be some postponement of a review?
Professor Bailes: I think what might
be more sensible is to see this as part of a longer term process,
a string of beads, if you like. There are some components of updating
especially the analysis in the Strategy or the ESDP implications,
where sensible things could be said in December. I think the best
thing would be to see that as a step along the road and expect
that important further discussions would need to take place, especially
next year.
Q129 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Well,
the last review took place five years ago. Are you suggesting
on your string of beads that there should be if not a continuous
revolution, a continuous review, because clearly much has changed
over that five years. Who can predict what will change over the
next five?
Professor Bailes: I think this is a rather
intriguing idea because, of course, any organisation with complex
aims should have some kind of regular review process annually,
as, for example, the board of an organisation would make such
a review annually, and if you think about it there is not really
institutional provision for that in the EU at the moment because
Council and Commission have their separate planning units who
think the big thoughts; it is not normally part of the Council
schedule to sit back and have this kind of wider review. I suppose
the Gymnich-type meetings of foreign ministers are the ones that
come closest but one cannot expect the functional issues to be
looked at really deeply, and I think it might be an interesting
thing to ponder on whether this capacity for a well intellectually-supported
rolling review would be something to build into the workings of
the Union in future.
Q130 Chairman: Professor Heisbourg,
do you have any comments on Professor Bailes' opening remarks?
Professor Heisbourg: Absolutely. First,
I would like to say "Hallo" to Alyson; I missed you
in Reykjavik last week so we have an opportunity to make that
up now! On the European Security Strategy, a few remarks. First,
it is not a Security Strategy. I do not know whether you have
heard the authors of the document, those who wrote it, but my
understanding is that they did not intend to call it a European
Security Strategy: that that subtitle came up as an afterthought.
Because, indeed, it is not a strategy; it is a vision. It analyses
the world and then goes on to state its vision of the manner in
which the EU could present itself within that world, notably with
the well-known concept of effective multilateralism, but it is
not a strategy in the sense that it says: here are the means towards
the end and this is how we are going to deploy those means towards
those ends. I think it was an abus de langage to have called it
a "Security Strategy". Maybe it is a good time to start
doing one. Secondly, on its own terms, and this is, indeed, a
consequence of it not being a Security Strategy, the document
was very weak on two key points. One was that it hardly ever talks
about the United States of America. That was the fruit of the
circumstances back in 2003. What Alyson Bailes just said about
the mood of the times, this was the opportunity to make up. So
nobody was going to ask hard questions as to what the positioning
of the EU and its members on the one hand, and of the United States
on the other, vis-a"-vis each other, should be in the future.
The second shortcoming is that although the threat of global terrorism
was well known at the time—yes, it was drafted before Madrid
and before London but 9/11 certainly had been there before and
we had all had to face terrorist attempts previously to the document
being drafted—it hardly says anything about homeland security
and defence of the Union, which one would normally assume to be
a major element or one strategy. Look at the American Security
Strategy, look at the French Security Strategy, which has just
come out, or, indeed, look at your own National Security Strategy
document, which just came out also. Lastly, and this point is
very much a third way in favour of, indeed, revisiting the whole
thing, the European Security Strategy document was possibly the
last major document of the post Cold War era. The post Cold War
era is over. Asia has risen and is continuing to rise; globalisation,
a globalisation which is not driven by the United States in particular
or by the West in general, now structures and is the overriding,
overwhelming feature of the international security landscape.
You do not get any sense of that if you look at Solana's otherwise
excellent document. It was quite good as a vision at the time
it was written but that was five years ago, and in five years
a lot has happened. As for review processes, I completely agree.
In the French case the notion is we are going to review our Security
Strategy every four years, and I think that is reasonably sensible.
Q131 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Professor
Heisbourg, do you accept Professor Bailes' prospect that a review
may lead to a rather weaker document than we now have, and may
go backwards rather than forwards?
Professor Heisbourg: I do not know; you
will not know until you try. Maybe there is so much disagreement
between EU members as to what the world is like and what we should
do about it, but somehow I would be surprised. Is there very much
in the United Kingdom National Security Strategy document or in
the French National strategy document which other Member States
would strenuously disagree with, in terms of those elements of
possible commonality at the European level? I am not sure. Whether
it is possible to go very far in a real Security Strategy we do
not know, but I think it is worth testing. In any case the 2003
vision we have is really overtaken by events. It fulfilled its
role at the time when it was done: it no longer fulfils any identifiable
purpose today. Just compare it to your National Security document
or the French National Security document, and I think you will
see the differences.
Q132 Chairman: Yours is certainly
longer!
Professor Heisbourg: But ours also has
the bells and the whistles because it goes into the programmes
and into the organisation, it fulfils a broader purpose, than
the National Security Statement. The world really is as different
from what it was five years ago as it is between today and the
years which immediately followed the end of the Soviet Union.
We had 10 or 15 years of the post Cold War era in which the west
had its unipolar moment. That unipolar moment is over; the Solana
document is still very much in the west unipolar moment mood.
Q133 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Another
difference making it a child of its time, and I think Professor
Bailes has argued also on this, is that it was done almost as
a riposte to America. Since that time Europe has changed its leadership;
we have Chancellor Merkel; President Sarkozy aiming fully to rejoin
NATO has a more balanced view, if I may say so, of the United
States; the United States, under whatever President, is likely
to take a more multilateral approach; Europe has far more tools
at its disposal, so do you think we can draft a document with
a more mature Europe, one not looking over its shoulder at the
relationship with the United States? What should be the view of
the US taken in the new document?
Professor Heisbourg: If I apply the French
approach, and it is one which may be extrapolated I think in the
broader European context, the basic French approach today is to
say "more NATO, more Europe". That form of words is
not used in the French White Paper but I think those four words
summarise quite well the thrust of what we are trying to do. Now,
that may be a mistaken proposition: that is, "more NATO"
may not lead to "more Europe", or the two may be incompatible,
but the French are determined to try and see whether that proposition
stands. The Americans certainly seem to be responding quite positively
to this new French approach --
Q134 Lord Anderson of Swansea: It
is a bilateral relationship!
Professor Heisbourg: Not simply in terms
of the bilateral relationship, which, of course, has improved,
between France and the United States, but in the broader United
States/European framework the Americans are essentially saying:
"The more ESDP the better, the more NATO the better".
Now, it may be easier for the Americans to say that than for you
here in London, because for the Americans, as far as ESDP is concerned,
it is essentially a political and a rhetorical issue; it is not
one in which they pour money, resources, et cetera—they
do that in NATO but they do not do that in the ESDP, for fairly
obvious reasons—so they are responding very positively to
this new French approach which is to leverage the move towards
NATO as a means of also developing EU defence and security policy
and capabilities and getting the two to work in synergy, and you
do not hear the Americans any more using the sort of language
they used 10 years ago when the British and the French launched
a St Mâlo process and we had Mrs Albright coming out with
all guns blazing—you remember the three Ds: Decoupling,
Duplicating and Discriminating. Now the Americans rather seem
to be saying "the more the better", and that indeed
seems to be quite sensible because, after all, the EU's members
and the EU as such constantly duplicate what the Americans are
doing. I never heard the Americans complain about the British
or the French buying main battle tanks on the pre-text of the
Americans already having some. Well, it is the same with planning
and command capabilities. The Americans used to complain about
the Europeans wanting to acquire those because they already had
them and NATO already had them. Now the language is "the
more the better"; it is no longer the sour grapes approach
of some years ago. I very much hope that this will also be the
view taken in this country because what you decide to do in the
field of defence and security policy is key to whatever can happen
in the European Union, and, to speak very bluntly, there are two
serious countries in this field in the European Union and that
is Britain and France.
Q135 Chairman: You once described
them as the two extrovert countries in Europe, I think.
Professor Heisbourg: Indeed.
Q136 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I want
to revisit a couple of points that have come up so far, and first
about the timing not being particularly good. Surely the answer
is that the timing is never particularly good to do something
like this, and if you want to step back to get further ahead you
have to accept that there will be some negative factors around.
I do not know if either of you can comment but it seems to me
that the timing and the idea of revisiting this Strategy probably
about every five years is the right one. The second point is that
the timing in regard to the United States would seem to me, but
I would like you to comment on this, rather good. It is no bad
thing, surely, that the incoming President of the United States
should have some idea of the direction in security issues that
the Europeans would wish to go and what effort they are prepared
to put into it. Of course, a Strategy cannot be a fait accompli
or anything like that, but it seems to me it ought not necessarily
to be unwelcome to the incoming President of the United States
to know that.
Q137 Chairman: Professor Bailes,
could I ask you first to comment on that, and make any other remarks
you have on what we have just been saying?
Professor Bailes: Thank you. I think
these last points are sound ones, and there is another sense in
which I would not want the development of the EU's actual activities
in the world to go on for too long without a higher level strategic
review. There have been enormous changes in the ESDP since 2003;
there have been a much wider range of missions, and many of us
have felt that, because the original Strategy did not give terribly
clear prescriptions, a lot of what has happened has been improvised.
It is not particularly clear what the principles and priorities
are that lead us to go into one particular mission and not another.
That is just one small example, and I think you could find examples
in other fields of external policy where it is time to stop just
doing things and sit down and think for a moment. I do not at
all disagree with that. I also agree with the second point and
with what François was saying just before, that there is
now a chance to give positive signals both towards the United
States in terms of the direct EU/United States partnership and
also on the EU/NATO relationship, which was too difficult to be
talked about very much in the first Strategy. It is not exactly
a bed of roses now but I think the development in French policy
has very much tipped that issue towards the positive side, and,
indeed, I would take François' argument on this one stage
further. If we say "more NATO and more Europe", I would
also support "more NATO and more Europe" as distinct
from more rushing out into the world to do things, which has been
very much the theme of the last five years and supported by this
rather West-centric top-down approach of the EU strategy itself.
We have fallen badly on our faces in some of those ventures but,
perhaps more important, I think we have neglected many European
issues. We cannot pretend that the dossier of enlargement, for
instance, is in terribly good state at the moment; and EU/Russia
relations are, frankly, a mess, although there may be some faint
hope now of getting them better on track. I do not mean this at
all in contradiction to what François was stressing about
the rise of Asia, the multipolar world, but it is rather the very
common sense remark that Europe is not going to find its right
place in the world unless it clears up conditions in its own home
space, and its home space, first of all, involves the Euro/Atlantic
relationship and, secondly, the Eurasian relationship, if I can
put it that way, which covers relations both with Russia and the
Middle East. Finally, although I hope a review of the Strategy
and any new statement will give proper weight to that last set
of points I have been talking about, I think it is not the moment
to launch the big new idea, particularly on the Euro/Atlantic
partnership. We cannot guess what packaging a new United States
President will use for positive ideas, even if we hope that the
ideas will be positive and we have some idea what they are. The
fact is that the improvements in EU/US relations over the last
four years which have been considerable have come very much out
of prudence, exhaustion, out of neither side really wanting a
fight and both realising that they are, after all, among each
other's best partners. It has not taken place in the framework
of a new big idea to relaunch this relationship for the post post
Cold War period, and I still think that December 2008, before
we have fully heard the voice of the new United States President,
or perhaps, even, the new Russian President, is not the right
moment for the EU to wager everything on some hastily prepared
new concept.
Professor Heisbourg: I cannot refrain
from reacting to the comment about hearing the voice of the Russian
President—we may have to wait rather long to hear it! Seriously:
the issue of timing does not bother me in terms of the relationship
with the US. Both American candidates have gone out of their way
to demonstrate their multilateral bona fides. There have been
some very remarkable pieces by McCain and Lieberman, more in the
Asian press actually than in the European press, on this score,
and yes, I think it would be quite nice to have a thoughtful EU
document coming out with, indeed, a reasonable and civilised discussion
of the relationship between the EU and the US/NATO which I think
we can undertake now. We are no longer in 2003.
Professor Bailes: Agreed.
Professor Heisbourg: Of course, timing
in other respects is atrocious because of the Irish referendum
which obviously forces people to worry about other stuff and so
on, but I agree with David Hannay that timing is never good, and
I really do not see why we should not embark on this venture.
It may be more difficult; it may take more time than one would
want. That is, if one sees that six months is not enough then
obviously yes, one should go on longer. I do not think this is
one which should be railroaded through. Thirdly, and here I speak
as a member of the White Paper Commission in France, we have a
name for the period in which we live, and it is the age of globalisation.
We no longer need to tear out our hair wondering what we are going
to call it, the post post post whatever—no, it is the age
of globalisation. I did not say multipolarity, by the way; I did
not use that word because I think there are elements of multipolarity
but also a lot of other stuff like empowerment of individuals
and non state actors which changes the nature of the game and
the nature of the threat analysis very fundamentally. Lastly,
I completely agree with Alyson on refocusing on Europe, not because
we should get into little Europeanism or into a form of European
isolationism, but simply because we have to remember what defence
and security are about.
Professor Bailes: Yes.
Professor Heisbourg: The military during
the `90s were broadly conceived in the post Cold War era as the
armed component of foreign policy. We entered into wars of choice
with a view to making the world a better place, and for that we
were ready to mobilise military assets—very nice but not
national defence, and in many cases not national security. It
is good diplomacy, good influence and doing good stuff, and I
was very much in favour of the war in Kosovo so I do not have
any hang-ups about most of the things we did, I do have hang-ups
about some of the things we did not do like Rwanda. Because of
the way the world has changed, that is we no longer write the
rule book, and because of the way globalisation affects our ability
to act, we really have to start thinking much more about defence
and security in a holistic manner and in a manner which does embrace
the concerns of our citizens, that is homeland defence, homeland
security, European and national defence. That is where the Solana
document was incredibly weak, and that is why I say it was the
last document of the post Cold War era. It was the tail of the
comet of the `90s when Bernard Kouchner and others thought that
the West could tell the rest of the world how we were going to
run it and according to which rules.
Q138 Lord Anderson of Swansea: We
have globalisation but there is no one global power. If one breaks
down the domestic and foreign Afghanistan seems far away, but
Afghanistan leads to drugs on the streets of Europe, Afghanistan
leads to terrorists on the streets of Europe and it may be very
tempting to be Eurocentric and to define our interests narrowly,
just looking at ENP, but who else can deal with the Congo? It
is France plus other partners. Who else can deal with other areas?
It is only Europe, and therefore, like it or not, we are going
to be drawn into distant conflicts, some of which, like Afghanistan,
will be highly relevant to our streets and some of which, like
Congo, are irrelevant but we are there for almost moral purposes.
Professor Heisbourg: Indeed. First, on
Afghanistan, I entirely agree, and what bothers me is that European
assets have not been marshalled in a coherent manner. That is
we did the usual thing, using the military as an armed component
for external purposes, but we never came up with an integrated
strategy which would have included the sort of point which you
mention. On marshalling the assets, for example, the Commission
in Brussels, here the Irish "No" is a bit of a tragedy
because the Lisbon Treaty would have made it considerably easier
to bring together the assets of the Commission and of the Council
and of the Member States, bringing together the civilian and the
military means of operation. As for the Congo, Artemis was a remarkable
operation, fantastic, yes; it was an operation which was very
much the harbinger of what awaits us. What do I mean? We sent
a 2000 man force, mostly French, in 2003 to prevent genocide in
the province of Ituri, which we did successfully. 2000 people,
three months, robust rules of engagement. Then a handover to the
much larger forces with the blue helmet, the Bangladeshis, the
Indians and the Pakistanis. This is military intervention in the
age of globalisation. Our comparative advantage is not the ability
we used to have even thirty years ago to have 600,000 Americans
in Vietnam, or forty years ago 400,000 French soldiers in Nigeria,
and we no longer have that ability. Our comparative advantage
is not to have large numbers of low paid pairs of boots to send
here and there around the world—indeed, the numbers of pairs
of boots we can afford to send, even if we doubled or trebled
our defence expenditure in Europe, would be much lower than we
were able to do in the past because our comparative advantage
is in high quality, high cost stuff, not in the ability to recolonise.
Take the protectorate we created in Kosovo. It is only 10,000
square kilometres and that was doable, but you cannot do that
in Darfur which is 800,000 square kilometres, or, indeed, as George
Robinson used to remind people when he was Secretary-General of
NATO to do a Kosovo in Afghanistan. The same modus operandi would
have required somewhere around 700,000 soldiers if you apply the
same forces to space and population ratios. We no longer can play
those games; that is over. Conversely, we have to think rather
harder than we did during the `90s about what could happen to
us. During the `90s we had a sense of invulnerability. We were
not only writing the rule book but nobody could really hit us.
Then 9/11 happened and dispelled the second part of our illusion,
but the first part of what was not an illusion at the time but
was the ability to write the rule book is only beginning to sink
in. R2P, Responsibility to Protect, was possibly the crowning
point of what the West was able to push through the multilateral
system, and our battle now is to make sure that R2P can exist;
we are not going to be in a position to go beyond it.
Q139 Chairman: Professor Bailes,
have you any further comment on Lord Anderson's last question?
Professor Bailes: The only thing I would
like to say is that I think François is absolutely right
and paradoxically, if we looked at interventions abroad more in
terms of self-interest, if we scrape away a little bit more of
the traditional peace-keeping veneer and say what changes we want
from Europe's point of view, we would immediately see that those
changes can only in a small part, if at all, be provoked by the
use of European military force. In other words, we should be moving
towards more intervention in the world but less military intervention,
considering how all the other very considerable resources of the
EU—the economic/financial influence, the development aid,
the technology—are going to be deployed to change situations
abroad in the way that is good both for people there and for ourselves.
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