Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-154)
Professor François Heisbourg and Professor
Alyson Bailes
19 JUNE 2008
Q140 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. Professor Heisbourg, how do you think the French Presidency
will take forward the work on reviewing the European Security
Strategy, and we have already had some comment on this but how
far is the work of your own Commission and the new French White
Book on defence and security relevant to the review of the Strategy?
Professor Heisbourg: The second one is
easier to answer than the first. I was not and am not involved—and
I am very grateful for that I would add—in the minutiae
of the preparation of the EU Presidency. We were entrusted in
the commission of the White Paper to project ourselves 15 to 20
years ahead, which has its own difficulties, but we were spared
from having to prepare the timetable for the six months of the
French EU Presidency, so I will ask for a pass on the first part
of your question. On the second part, yes, there are a number
of links, both in terms of the analysis and in terms of prescriptions.
In terms of the analysis much of what I said would lead you to
the conclusion that the European Security Strategy paper should,
indeed, be rewritten with a view to factoring in the two major
strategic upsets which have heralded the end of the post Cold
War era. One, of course—possibly not the most important
one but in symbolic terms it certainly was very important—is
9/11, the power of non State actors with an ability to wreak mass
destruction in countries which had thought themselves to be rather
invulnerable to major grief during what we will probably see in
the future as the golden years of the brief post Cold War era.
The second thing which has happened which is of greater moment
and, indeed, helps to explain the first one, is indeed globalisation,
and what I have called in one of your newspapers this morning
the "dewesternisation" of globalisation. That is, the
dynamo of globalisation is no longer western, it is no longer
American; it is truly global, and Asia in economic terms and in
terms of strategic importance, is now very much at the pivot of
that system, so since we have projected ourselves 15/10 years
ahead we go into rather more detail on those issues, and some
of that analysis I have no doubt could quite readily be recycled,
and I use the word in a positive sense obviously, into a European
endeavour, because that analysis is hardly country specific. There
are a few items which are French specific but most of them are
not. We also should not lose sight of some of the good ideas we
may have had in the past, and the European Union at the same time.
Alyson reminded us of the historical circumstances under which
the European Security Strategy document was drafted in 2003 on
the heels of the Iraq crisis, at the beginning of the war, actually,
since the first drafting took place at the time, but something
else happened at the same time and that concerned the headline
goals adopted as a result of St Malo, and on the European scale
at the Helsinki European Council in December 1999. Those headline
goals, which were very largely the fruit of British and French
thinking went, to speak American, AWOL. They disappeared. They
evaporated. And in particular the suggestion that the Europeans
should be able collectively—drawing, of course, on the resources
of the Member States—if it was thought necessary to have
a European operation, to project 60,000 soldiers within a period
of a number of months for a duration of a year or more in demanding
circumstances. That has completely disappeared to the benefit
of what I would call the rationalisation of the success of our
operation in the Congo in 2003, and that is the battle group concept,
the "1500 guys". Now, the French and the Brits are very
good at this sort of stuff, small groups of soldiers, moving very
quickly, acting decisively and then going home—you did it
in Sierra Leone, we did it in the Congo, we are very good at that—but
if we are facing a major contingency which threatens our livelihood
and our security such as a major war driven by, I do not know,
Iran's nuclear ambition, the convergence of the numerous conflicts
in the Middle East if we have a major contingency in or around
the Persian Gulf, surely a few battle groups will not be an adequate
response, and it is quite important for us, if we are thinking
strategically and not simply about describing visions, to come
back to the 60,000 figure, which is quite realistic. The French
national commitment is 30,000, and it is fleshed in in rather
more detail than our previous commitments have been, and historically
the Brits have certainly demonstrated they could send more than
30,000 chaps out on a muscular foreign intervention. So the notion
that the EU should, as a body, be able to martial 60,000 soldiers
and the relevant air and naval assets does not strike me as being
unrealistic or out of sync with our even admittedly rather lethargic
defence spending.
Q141 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: It sounds
as if you agree with our previous witnesses that much of the existing
Strategy document has been ignored by the nation states. If we
rewrite it, why will they not ignore the next one as well?
Professor Heisbourg: That is a very good
question and I do not know if there is a good answer to that,
but still, I would prefer for us to have a commitment which is
well crafted, well drafted, and makes sense, to which the attention
of people can be drawn, that one should be able to bring in the
shame factor, but, of course, in the case of the Solana document
the shame factor could hardly operate because it is not a strategy;
it is a vision. What is there to implement? One could accuse Romania
or France or Sweden of not fulfilling the commitment to deliver
effective multilateralism. That is rather vague and unprovable
--
Professor Bailes: Yes.
Professor Heisbourg: -- as I say it is
a vision, not a strategy. There is nothing in there which commits
people, something which you can put in their face and say: "Hey,
you said 60,000 and you are not delivering", which is why
I made the little point about the headline goal. The Brits went
into Iraq, the French did the opposite, and the two of us together
lost sight of what we had decided to do in the previous years.
The number of meetings which took place between `99 and 2002,
the force generating meetings, the European capabilities, exercises,
et cetera—we were rather serious, along with some of our
partners, to fulfil the headline goal, and then we just lost sight
of it, and, as you know, the biggest strategic sin one can commit
is to forget what one is trying to do.
Q142 Lord Truscott: You mentioned
the battle groups and also Rwanda and the role of battle groups
going in and being very good at short-term operations, but that
raised a question with me about the question of political will,
because if political will is lacking then really the ESS is pretty
meaningless, is it not, and we see that really with NATO's operations
in Afghanistan, where you have the Germans unwilling to commit
troops to the areas where they are most likely come into contact
with the Taliban. If there is not political will to have a meaningful
Security Strategy, then really drawing up pieces of paper is a
waste of time, is it not?
Professor Heisbourg: No. I know it is
a popular sport to beat up on the Germans in Afghanistan, including
in my own country—as you know, we are not quite so timid
about the use of force—and I would like to do a bit of a
plaidoyer for the Germans. When we collectively decided on 12
September 2001 in the Security Council in the framework of a unanimous
vote, and people can forget that, to authorise the military operations
against those who had been harbouring and helping and abetting
those who had committed the atrocities of 9/11, what happened?
Two things. One was that there was a military operation under
the operational control of CENTCOM in the United States with the
coalition of the willing and the able. The rules of engagement
of that force were quite muscular, as was absolutely appropriate;
the name of that game was clear; and there was no cavilling about
it. Those who felt able to accept those rules of engagement went
in and in the Rumsfeldian vision of the world—which I would
add is not inaccurate in that case, that is, "the mission
determines the coalition"—that went quite well. Secondly,
we had a decision in early 2002 at the Bonn meeting to have a
broad approach to the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Kabul having
fallen, Kandahar having fallen, the Taliban having been chased
out, the major effort was to take a multilateral, civilian approach
to Afghanistan with oodles of money and a lot of involvement from
all sorts of people and heavy involvement from the UN being planned.
But I think pretty much for the same reason as the one which led
the European Union in 2003 to do the European Security Strategy
as a manner of trying to salve the wounds of the Iraq crisis—when
NATO in 2003 started wanting to take over the Afghan show when
nobody really wanted to have a fight about it—we, the French,
had made ourselves so unpopular with our positioning on Iraq—rejecting
the new American and NATO approach in Afghanistan would have been
one fight too many. The Americans were in favour because they
saw in greater NATO involvement the ability to spare resources
for the "more important thing" which was, in their view,
going on in Iraq, and NATO, of course, found here another way
of proving its relevance and its raison d'être. This was
very good for M de Hoop Scheffer. So we decided, instead of having
a major multilateral effort with the UN at its pivot and with
major involvement by the regional powers like Iran, Russia, China,
India and so on, that we were going to do this all on our own,
all 47,000 NATO troops which were eventually deployed in the country,
and we took over most of the operations of Operation Enduring
Freedom. I was against this. I considered it made more sense to
have a NATO operation in Kabul with soft rules of engagement as
an anchor for the broader multilateral venture in Afghanistan
on the one hand, and to have the muscular Al-Qaeda chasing operations
along the borders of Pakistan under American operational control.
The French Special Forces were very happy to operate in that American
run, very high intensity environment. Well, that show was eventually
wound down in favour of NATO taking over, and now we have NATO
saying "Ah, but we are not really able to do it", et
cetera, et cetera. I think we really made a big, big mistake.
And our German friends? When they went into Afghanistan it was
part of a stabilisation operation; it was not part of a muscular
rules-of-engagement type operation. Their Bundestag, their Parliament,
had not sent their forces under that brief. Yes, it is very irritating
to have caveats, but then we all have our caveats. I remember
the British caveat in Kosovo when General Wesley Clark wanted
to tell General Michael Jackson he had to go to Pristina to head
off the Russians first and Michael Jackson answered if I recall
well that (a) he was taking orders from 10 Downing Street and
(b) he was not starting a Third World war with Russia. Yes, we
all have our caveats; we do not like it when the rules of the
game somehow change. If there is criticism to be levelled at the
Germans it is that they accepted to go along with the change of
plan in Afghanistan in 2003-04, and that is the area at which
I would dig at them, rather than, "Ah, well they do not want
to do the brave sorts of things the Brits and the Canadians are
doing". It was not part of the contract.
Q143 Chairman: Professor Bailes,
I would like us to get back to some of the questions on the European
Security Strategy but obviously, if you have any comments, please
make them now.
Professor Bailes: Thank you. I will try
to be very brief. I think it is a little unfair in a way to complain
about the Strategy not directly guiding national actions. It would
not have been practical to have a document as succinct as just
13 pages, and as comprehensive as it is, indeed it should have
been more so, yet at the same time being specific enough to be
cited, as it were, in national decisions. It is in that way not
at all comparable to the United States National Security Strategy
that had been produced a while before which was an administrative
programme for a single nation state fully under the control of
the people who wrote the Strategy. In fact, any instructions in
the Strategy are primarily directed to the collective institutions
of the Union and the way that collective assets are used, collective
policies managed. And even from that point of view we should bear
in mind that the Strategy, and, I am sure, any successor to it,
are political documents which under the EU system of governance
cannot have a nature that creates new law in member countries
and cannot have a nature that releases new funds, either in member
countries or at the centre. So if we are going to be fair in looking
at the impact on national policy we should look at it more in
terms of a general inspiration, and I think the Strategy did inspire
countries to try to be on their better behaviour, at least for
a couple of years afterwards, and perhaps that was one reason
why the Germans were willing to do as much in Afghanistan as they
did; that is one reason, as François has quite clearly
hinted, why France did not stir up any major debates in NATO afterwards.
So if you look at that wider effect on national behaviour, some
kind of effect is there, it was positive, and I think it will
be the trick—but it will be much harder now—to try
to get a similar broad inspirational force flowing from any revised
concept of the Union.
Lord Boyce: Alyson answered a question
about whether greater emphasis should be placed on terrorism,
given what has happened within the years 2004 and 2005 within
the US, but I think you have answered that question already, Professor,
and I do not want to labour the question unless you have anything
else to add? You mentioned how much has changed in the five years
since 2003, particularly in Europe, but, as I say, I think you
have probably already covered that.
Q144 Chairman: Professor Bailes?
Professor Bailes: I agree with what has
been said. If anything, the 2003 document spent too many pages
on terrorism in relation to other things. I think what François
has said about, as it were, the internal security agenda of the
Europeans is very compelling and it is a fact that that agenda
was not covered in full. The Strategy spent a lot of words, for
instance, on WMD events involving terrorism: it did not really
talk about the more general concerns of Europeans, law and order
on the streets, community relations, employment, economic/ financial
instability, security of infrastructure, for example, so, if anything,
terrorism rather enjoyed its day at the expense of those other
things. That said, I think the line taken on it in that Strategy
was sensible: the line taken in the detailed sub-Strategy that
followed was sensible, and, as we know, the real problems are
not there at that level in the formulation of policy: the real
problems at European level are in the difficulty of co-ordinating
the different instruments. Co-ordination between the Second and
Third Pillar is still a huge problem, including such booby-trapped
questions as what is the role of military force in handling that
agenda, on which I think France and Britain would lean one way
and many others would lean another when it comes to internal security.
And then of course, when you move out to the nation states, despite
the horrific terrorist events that have happened since 2003, we
still face a fundamental difference of experience of these problems
and a fundamental difference, therefore, in the priority that
different Member States will accord to them and the amount of
sacrifices they are prepared to make for them.
Professor Heisbourg: Very briefly, the
Solana document talks a lot about terrorism but, indeed, it does
not draw the conclusions one would normally have expected it to
draw in terms of the efforts to be made within the European Union.
This was supposed to be a European Security Strategy; it was not
supposed to be a European external security strategy, or only
an external security strategy. Now, of course, the medium is the
message and the medium here was Javier Solana and his people whose
job within the European Union is to worry about common, foreign
and security policy, security being a sub-set of foreign policy
not something different from foreign policy, and that I think
is one of the real problems of the European Union, that it does
tend to deal with security and defence as a sub-set of foreign
policy, but they are not a sub-set. Indeed, one could rather turn
the proposition around to the point made by Lord Anderson a few
minutes ago about Afghanistan: how do you tie together what one
is doing in terms of preventing terrorism within our countries
and what we are doing to prevent terrorism outside of our countries?
That is the integration of a strategy, and it is not a foreign
policy; it is a security policy. A foreign or defence policy in
that respect is actually a sub-set of security policy. Another
point is that here in Britain you have been accustomed, because
of the troubles in Ireland, to having domestic contingencies as
one of the major tasks of your Armed Forces. You had in Ulster
for a period of about 30 years somewhere between, and I speak
under your collective control, somewhere between 10 and 15,000
soldiers, which is not an inconsiderable number, so the notion
that in your planning you will make a space in your military policy
for homeland contingency is one you are completely familiar with.
This is not the case for most of the European countries, and one
of the innovations in the French paper which has just come out
is to earmark 10,000 military personnel in order to deal with
domestic contingencies, be they, and this is another important
point, of a terrorist nature, a major terrorist act, or of an
unintentional nature, because one of the characteristics of the
age of globalisation is that unintentional events, initially of
local or minor import, can very rapidly become a global and major
concern. When we had the SARS epidemic in 2003, at the time of
the Iraq invasion, a new virus crops up unexpectedly in a remote
part of China and within the next three months you are on the
verge of a global crisis. For those of us who travelled at the
time, in Singapore, for example, the defence forces were mobilised
in order to try to ensure a reasonably free flow of people through
their airport and, if they had not been able to do that, Singapore
would have shut down. We all have been making preparations for
the interhuman transmission of bird `flu in our countries. Those
sort of contingencies have become not prime force dimensioners
but at least second level force dimensioners; certainly not third
or fourth level. They become quite important, and that is also
part of the new age.
Q145 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: You
mentioned, Professor Heisbourg, the question of Responsibility
to Protect, which is a doctrine which was only endorsed by the
United Nations after the 2003 Security Strategy was promulgated
and which, up until now, has remained really words on paper with
great difficulty in articulating it or, to use an appalling phrase,
operationalising it, and that has been most recently demonstrated
in the case of Burma and the cyclone. I think you were saying
that, although this was perhaps the last phase of an earlier era,
that is to say, the one in which the West set the agenda, it is
nevertheless something which needs to be taken seriously.
Professor Heisbourg: True.
Q146 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My
question really is this. Do you think the review of the Security
Strategy should get involved in how the European Union should
articulate its response to Responsibility to Protect and in particular,
if you agree with this, how can it turn it from being a purely
military concept into a multifaceted concept that starts at the
diplomatic end of the spectrum and only works along it to the
military as a very last resort? Could you comment on bit on that,
because it is an area we are looking at?
Professor Heisbourg: The short answer
to your first question is yes, it should definitely be in there.
"R2P" is tremendously important. I certainly do not
want to have given the impression earlier that I was considering
that it was unimportant; it is extremely important. My point simply
was that we are going to have great trouble delivering on what
we have committed ourselves to, and we should not fool ourselves
about any possibilities of having a broad interpretation or a
broad mandate in terms of R2P. What happened in Burma last month
gave some quite clear indications as to what the response of most
of the world would be if we really tried to have a broad interpretation
of R2P. That is the first point. If we do talk about it in the
European Security Strategy I would make three recommendations.
The first would be to acknowledge that there are narrow limits
to what the European Union and other industrialised countries
can do in terms of long-lasting military provisions, for example,
Britain and France. Britain made a major effort in the war in
Iraq, Operation Telic and subsequent operations, and you are one
of the prime movers in Afghanistan. That has been achieved by
essentially removing you from every other theatre. You are no
longer a presence in the ESDP operations, a meaningful presence:
you are no longer a meaningful presence in UN operations. That
is the reality. The French? Well, we have, in a way, the opposite
problem. We are currently present in eight different operations
involving more than one thousand soldiers on foreign interventions.
That is too many; we cannot sustain that rate; some are of questionable
value. No, we are going to have to be more selective and, indeed,
the word "selectivity" is used on a number of occasions
in the White Paper and is buttressed by two things: one is the
definition of guidelines for foreign operations—not procustian
guidelines, nothing is cast in bronze, but still guidelines which
a political leader will have to respond to if he wants to send
a French military operation to Greenland or to Patagonia—and
the second one is to have Parliamentary authorisation of operations
lasting more than four months, to put them to a vote, which presumably
would introduce a bit more viscosity and to make it more difficult
to run off on every peace-keeping errand around. Secondly, if
one accepts we are going to have to be more selective, then we
are going to have to introduce a much more deliberate interface
between the EU's military—as well as civilian, but here
for the moment I am essentially on the military—assets and
the broader UN or ad hoc force providers from countries whose
competitive advantage is in the number of boots they can put on
the ground. I talked about one of the operations in the Congo
which was Artemis; the other operation in the Congo was an election
organisation operation where the Europeans formed the core set
of a much larger UN operation. So the Kosovo model, if I can put
it that way—and it was a model, I am not criticising what
we did in Kosovo, although criticism may be due, or in Bosnia—we
are going to have to move away from those models to something
rather different, and here I think the harbingers really are these
two operations in the Congo, one with the French in the lead and
the other with the Germans, by the way, having been in the lead,
and the second one was just as successful in its own terms as
the first one. Lastly, the multifaceted nature of R2P—and
here we go back to the Lisbon Treaty—gives some prospect
of the European Union being able to pull together in doctrinal,
in organisational terms, the vast array of very different assets
that it has at its disposal under various institutional incarnations,
and, indeed, the ability to project an integrated package of civilian
and non civilian capabilities adapted to whatever contingency
we are dealing with is something which the EU has really to work
on very hard. That is where the vision should become a strategy.
There are some pointers on that European score in the French Defence
White Paper, but only pointers. There is a lot more work to be
done there.
Professor Bailes: I profited from a good
discussion on this with experts in Brussels a couple of weeks
ago at the European Policy Centre, and what we did there was to
think through the three parts of the Strategy document which are
diagnosis, desiderata and directions for action. It was rightly
suggested that in the diagnosis, the way the original Strategy
was drawn up used a kind of human security analysis. Pointing
out that social and economic problems, problems of human rights
and welfare are directly linked with security, and that security
problems can only be solved if you address that linkage, is pure
human security thinking: and I think to introduce the concept
specifically at the level of analysis would do no harm; in fact,
it would bring intellectual coherence. When it comes to desiderata,
I think it would be strange if the EU could not go as far as the
UN's 2005 Summit document in its formulation of the Responsibility
to Protect—after all, all the European countries agreed
there: and as a sort of sub-desideratum, I think it would be right
also that when the EU does intervene, the manner and the micro-composition
of what it does should reflect ideas of human security. Indeed,
the micro-prescriptions of the famous Barcelona report of Professor
Kaldor are realistic and useful prescriptions and point to some
of the present weaknesses, for instance, in the EU's civil military
co-ordination. It is when it comes to directions for action that
I would be more cautious, and I agree here with the point that
Lord Hannay himself originally made, that we should seek human
security through a co-ordinated strategy with a complete range
of instruments. Very often the ESDP instrument is not the right
one; and conversely it would be quite unrealistic but also wrong
in principle to say that human security is the only goal of the
ESDP or the only use of military resources. First, they could
serve the human security of our own populations here at home,
which is, by the way, an association of words you do not often
hear except perhaps in northern Europe where human security is
called "societal security", and François has
already talked about several different ways in which military
or security resources could be deployed here. I also want to say
that there could be other self-interested but legitimate reasons
for ESDP operations, for instance, rescue of citizens, support
for border controls, guarding sea lanes and so forth. So in a
nutshell what I am saying is yes, use the concept in many ways,
but do not link it tightly or too tightly to ESDP as such, because
that is in a sense the link that is least useful and sustainable
in practical but perhaps even in theoretical terms.
Q147 Lord Crickhowell: I am going
to ask my first question to Professor Bailes, if I may. Does the
issue of energy security need to be better addressed in the European
Security Strategy, and if so how? I want to hang on to that question
what seems to be emerging as a pretty central question. You, Professor,
right at the start, said that the European Council was likely
to be cautious about extending into these broader areas, and Professor
Heisbourg asked the question what defence and security is all
about? It seems to me we are in danger of spreading into economic
and infrastructure management areas which are not necessarily
anything to do strictly with the European Security Strategy or
vision. Indeed last week Professor Mary Kaldor, agreeing with
that, said that the real energy issue was not the threat that
we might be cut off from energy in Europe but that the energy
producing states were themselves very vulnerable from what she
described as resource scares; at the moment when their resources
fall away they will be unstable states, and that was the real
risk. Can you elaborate on this connection? What should be really
part of the security issue, and what is actually something quite
different?
Professor Bailes: I agree with every
point that you have made there. Energy security was very underplayed
in the original Strategy; it is staring us in the face today;
it is, indeed, a complex issue and it hurts many people in the
world other than ourselves. I myself am certainly preoccupied
by this kind of North Sea disease of not only over-reliance on
energy income but misuse of energy income that may be facing many
of the prominent producers at the moment, not excluding Russia.
I am also extremely concerned about the impact on the developing
world, which is combined, of course, with rising food prices and
other kinds of disruption. I would also say that the EU should
not be too obsessed with only fine-tuning its own policy, although
that is important, but it should ask itself how to influence the
United States, China, India, Brazil, whatever. At the analytical
stage it is a cliché to stress how important these other
major consumers are, but when you get to policy you do not usually
find the corresponding section or chapter which is carefully devoted
to what leverage does the EU have on them? What political institutional
business or other solutions should the EU use in order to steer
everyone's reactions in the right direction? Having said all that,
the point I made right at the beginning and which you referred
back to is perhaps a much more petty and bureaucratic point than
some of the noble Lords are allowing for. What I am saying is,
if you look at the institution in Brussels that has been asked
to draft this, at this point in time and the nature of the officials
and the attitudes of the officials drafting it, they are not in
the Commission, they are not the energy managers, they are not
the people who will be pondering on the latest G8 decisions on
this whole nexus: they are people who deal with CFSP, ESDP and
whether those instruments are relevant to this particular set
of challenges. Again, I would say, let's not overestimate the
importance of military assets or traditional assets in the security
sense to this particular agenda; if we over-securitise it and
over-militarise it in that way, we may fall into exactly the same
pitfalls we did when we overmilitarised and oversecuritised terrorism
and WMD back in 2003. So, in short, I would love to see the European
Council make progress on these issues already in December, but
coming back to my petty bureaucratic perspective, I do not think
it is under the agenda item saying "Review of the European
Security Strategy" that they are going to reach those political
compromises and take those new initiatives they need to take.
Q148 Lord Crickhowell: I do not think
it is a petty bureaucratic point at all. From the start I thought
it was a very central essential point, if we are going to address
security strategy, who should be doing it and how, and who should
be addressing as their central objectives these important issues
concerning energy and other matters?
Professor Heisbourg: Exactly. On the
two points, because there are now two of them, first, on energy
as such, I am old enough to remember when petrol rationing tickets
were issued in France briefly after the Suez debacle in the early
months of 1957. Threats to the provision of energy are definitely
not new, they are a permanent recurring feature ever since the
world economy has functioned at a global level, that is ever since
the 16th century. When the 30 Years War was dependent on the transfer
of silver and gold from the Andes to the Spanish armies here in
Europe—it was not energy, or rather it was energy of a particular
sort—that is what kept the war going, so we have five centuries
of experience in this field! So we should not pretend it is a
new issue and that we are all of a sudden rediscovering energy
and energy security. Secondly, we should not use the word "security"
in a lazy manner. Energy security, and I speak under the control
of Admiral Boyce here, when we had the Pasteran shooting Silkworm
missiles and laying mines in the Persian Gulf against the oil
tankers which were at sea the West sent in a naval force. I hasten
to add it was the first military operation in which some of those
ships were operating under some sort of European command.
Professor Bailes: Yes. Western European
Union.
Professor Heisbourg: Could it happen
again? Yes, of course. That is energy security in the sense that
I use the word "security" tacked on to the word "defence".
That is not the same as dealing with the general issue of whether
the amount of oil being pumped is going to diminish because of
this or that. On the question of who should be drafting, that
is a very interesting question. The threat analysis, the "analysis
of the world" part, is very much in Solana's shop. The Bob
Coopers of this world do it supremely well. For this you do not
need to go to the Commission and you would not want to go to the
Commission. But if you are starting to flesh it out in terms of
devising a strategy then you are probably going to want to pull
in a wise man's group in, I dare say a White Paper type approach.
We do it at the national level and there is no particular reason
why it should not be doable at the European level but, once again,
Solana is about foreign and security policy, not about national
defence or homeland security. It is not his job.
Professor Bailes: Yes.
Professor Heisbourg: As for the Commission,
the Commission has assets and muscle, it has the ability to run
things, it knows how to run stuff, but it does not know culturally,
historically, organisationally, how to produce a strategy; and
documents which are called Strategy such as the Commission's Russia
Strategy or China Strategy, because such documents exist, they
are not strategies either. They are a catalogue of measures reflecting
what different parts of the EU bureaucracy could do with China
or Russia, and they are fine as they go but they are not about
strategy, or else the word really does lose all meaning. So I
would strongly advise, and John has heard this before in a different
context, a Harmel-type approach, that is, you pull together a
group of 20 people, you give them eight or nine months to work
on it, and they come up with it.
Q149 Lord Jones: May I thank you,
Professor Bailes, for your paper. I very much appreciated your
reference to foreign ministers seeking to retrieve a unity. To
what extent does the European Security Strategy address the issue
of climate change and other drivers of insecurity, such as poverty,
inequality, and poor governance?
Professor Bailes: The original strategy,
so to speak, did its best on those issues. It tried to bring them
into the picture of causation. There is a very important sentence
in it where it has been talking about terrorism and the linkage
with conflict, crime and so on, and it says that the roots of
these problems also exist in our own society, and I think that
was an important realisation for which there was no parallel,
for example, in the United States documents at the time. These
are common problems of humanity; they are ones we share; they
are also ones to which we have contributed. That said, the original
document was extremely weak in spelling out exactly what this
set of broader, climatic, ecological, population, if you like,
migratory problems were at the time: all those problems have become
more complicated since; and it is clear to me that if one were
to have a really good revision of the Strategy and a more comprehensive
approach it would have to give far more space to those kinds of
issues. What EU policy on this has particularly lacked up to now
is a sober consideration of chains of consequence, if I can use
that expression, particularly how a climate change feeds across
into a food change, into a population change, into a migration
change. A common factor on all those issues would be, for instance,
the value of land, of cultivable and habitable land, and we see
in the newspapers that Saudi Arabia is buying up large tracts
of land on other continents. These are extraordinary changes in
patterns of resource use and co-operation, which will be quite
a stretch for a new strategy document to capture and deal with
adequately. But, broadly speaking, I would like to see the EU
think harder about those topics, whether it is in the context
of the strategy exercise, whether in the context of a continuing
dialogue on connections between security and development or, indeed,
security, development and disarmament, for which the time is now
very ripe. Just to throw in one other little angle that has not
come up yet but may do so, namely the role of regional integration
and organisation in other parts of the world: if you are looking
for approaches to climate change or to any other of these more
human factors in security which carry the spirit of multilateralism
in other words, they are not zero sum, they are more than the
sum of their parts, but on the other hand are really adjusted
to local circumstances and in a legitimate way reflect local interests.
I do not see anything much other than regional organisations which
are going to achieve that. I think this theme of the EU thinking
about its relationship to and support of such organisations was
a theme that should have been brought out in the original Strategy
and, hopefully, would be more brought out now.
Professor Heisbourg: Very quickly, it
is tempting to try to rebuild a world in which we have simple
causations, one big event in a simple setting, leading to a fairly
simple policy response, pretty much what we had during the Cold
War. Climate change is not the functional equivalent of the Soviet
Union, if I can put it that way.
Professor Bailes: Absolutely.
Professor Heisbourg: The real difficulty
for us in the age of globalisation is to try to understand the
connectivities between interacting causations. Let me take something
as straight forwardly monocausal as the 2004 Tsunami. There is
nothing more monocausal than that—earthquake under the surface
of the earth provokes the phenomenon that we know and we have
ever since the earth has existed. Nothing new, nothing complex.
Yet what was important was not simply that it happened; what made
it what it was was the patterns of urbanisation, what made it
what it was was the pattern of deforestation, possibly the changes
in sea level—I do not know—or you take Katrina. Simple
causation, a hurricane. Well, what caused the causation and what
made it bad? The nature of the urbanisation, the nature of the
organisations which were dealing with these sorts of contingencies,
and so on. The real difficulty for us at the security policy level
is to try to understand how the various challenges which we are
facing are going to be interacting, and because the interactions
are complex, because they are not straightforward, that is why
we run this risk of constant strategic upsets. I mentioned SARS
earlier on. Where did SARS come from? It took us a short number
of months, not years, to find out it came originally from a certain
type of existence in a certain part of China between men and animals,
et cetera, and at the other end, of course, what made it important
was the phenomenon of globalisation with air transport, communications,
with Toronto all of a sudden on the front line of a contingency
which had originated in the backwoods of Guangdong province in
China, and the conclusion you draw from that is not that you should
not be interested in climate change per se or, indeed, in deforestation
or in pollution or in patterns of urbanisation or in changing
demographic evolution and so on, of course you have to be, but
from a security and defence standpoint what you are going to try
to do is see what the connectivities are between these various
issues and how they could lead under certain circumstances to
the emergence of an actual threat, be it intentional or unintentional.
Once again, I emphasise that. You take Katrina. The Americans
had to send in their 82nd Airborne, like in Normandy in June 1944,
and if somebody tells you that is not security—well, it
certainly is. So let the IPCC work on climate change, but we have
to be aware that what people in our neck of the woods really should
be doing is to try to understand how these various phenomena can
interact generating a change in security circumstances. It is
not simply looking at a mono cause with a mono effect.
Q150 Lord Crickhowell: I understand
that those who are looking at security issues are looking at what
the possible threats may be and emerge, but I come back to the
organisation and European management issue. In fact, Europe is
extremely active on climate change; it is one of its most active
and some might argue most successful areas of intervention, though
not all agree, but at least it is making a very strong attempt,
and an international attempt which is spreading out from its efforts
in Europe to the global world outside. I, again, find it quite
difficult to know how, with all that activity going on, it effectively
connects with the security thinking that you are saying should
be addressed. Is there a connection and, if not, how is it to
be made?
Professor Heisbourg: Just in one sentence,
today the connection is not made in any deliberate manner in a
European context. Should researchers be tasked with reflecting
on the connections globally and regionally? The answer is yes.
Can the European Union afford to do so? The answer is yes, too.
These sorts of studies are not expensive but if you do not do
them you are not going to get the product. Putting on a national
hat for a moment, the French Defence White Paper, what is it that
we put at the pivot of the national security? It is what we call
in French "connaissance et anticipation", what I have
translated as "knowledge-based security"—big words
but they mean what they mean. That is, a premium on actually acquiring,
processing and delivering knowledge of exactly the sort that you
are talking about. That is at the premium; that is what makes
our new Security Strategy basically different from the post Cold
War strategy that we evolved in 1994, which served us quite well,
which was dealing with the absence of the Soviet Union, a single
American super power, and the West's ability to call the shots,
in every sense of that phrase, building on our ability to project
professional military forces as the military component of that
strategy. It is a very different world now.
Q151 Lord Selkirk of Douglas: May
I ask Professor Bailes a question about the Strategy? Namely,
should the Strategy contain stronger references to working with
and building up the capacity, legitimacy and credibility of the
international system, including the United Nations, as well as
regional organisations such as the African Union?
Professor Bailes: This is a line of thought
which I have already supported and which I think needs to be further
developed as part of EU policy, and also perhaps a little bit
more superficially of the EU's profile. When we are within the
EU we are perhaps more conscious of its fragmentation and the
elements of national difference or incoherence that remain. From
the outside it looks like the most interesting experiment yet
in a collective approach to world problems, and there are many
people working in institutions around the world, successful and
unsuccessful institutions, who are looking to be inspired and
helped by the EU. Interestingly enough, even in countries that
do not seem to share our values very much, like China and sometimes
Russia, often imitation is the sincerest form of flattery when
they construct organisations like the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.
By all means let's retain this as a theme but I think if a revision
of the Strategy is going to bring anything very new it has to
be more than pious talk; it has to be capable of being operationalised.
It is all very well for the EU to say it supports the UN but then
not be able to swing the 2005 Summit in a direction that would
have reflected our common disarmament aspirations, for example.
If we are not going to be able to do that because of the limits
of European influence in the UN, let's not pretend we are going
to. So I am in favour of an approach on this issue that is at
the same time idealistic and realistic, and I think also this
may be an area where research and intellectual input into EU policy
may have something to offer because there are a lot of academics
around Europe and the world who are trying to conduct studies
looking precisely at multilateralism as a force in the world today,
just looking at the comparative experiences of regional organisations
and their strengths and weaknesses. I think at the moment there
is not a particular point in the Brussels machinery where one
can input those ideas and have those debates because what tends
to happen is that, let's say, ASEAN is dealt with by a desk which
is a long way away from the China desk; UN matters are very fragmented
and dealt with by probably a 100 different desks in the EU. So
I am afraid it is rather a vague answer but perhaps, to sum it
up, if we are going to get from this prima facie idealised role
of the EU in supporting multilateralism to specific moves that
we should take, specific do's and don'ts, we still have some missing
mass in the middle and need a really good analysis to guide us.
Chairman: Professor Heisbourg, can we
go on to the next question, but Professor Bailes' answer will
be very useful to us when we go to Brussels next week.
Q152 Lord Crickhowell: Turning to
implementation, the Strategy calls on the EU to be more active,
capable and coherent, but perhaps for the time being we will have
to wait and see whether the Lisbon Treaty will improve the coherence
of EU external action because that is all rather on hold, for
the reasons we know. But are there any other thoughts? We have
already heard Lord Hamilton's question about the fact that individual
states are not perhaps taking much notice of the Strategy, or
the vision, and not acting on it. Have you anything to add to
what has already been said about implementation and making it
more effective?
Professor Heisbourg: I would tend to
focus, for reasons I will explain, on a couple of simple, understandable
objectives, and here I take the short view, not the long one,
the short-term perspective serving the long view, and notably
using in the French case the opportunity of the EU Presidency
and direction. The first thing is to reinstate the 60,000 headline
goal. That is the tool which (a) sets you a goal towards which
one is supposed to work and (b) it provides you with the catalogue
which permits you to use the shame factor. So you have committed
yourself to this, what have you done? It actually worked quite
well at the very initial stages but, once again, this was a collateral
victim of the Iraq crisis, and the Iraq crisis really created
a very large cemetery of lost opportunities and initiatives. So,
reinstate that one; it should not be a big political deal to do
so since it would only require recalling that which we had already
committed ourselves to, except that one would want to tag on to
that a couple of force generation conferences and meetings and
start changing people who would need to be shamed. The second
thing, and this is very much Anglo/French, is the force planning
capability of the EU. Now that the Americans no longer have any
theological objection to it I think it would make a lot of sense
to start to get moving on that one. Is it complex materially?
Organisationally? No, it is not complicated materially. Is it
difficult politically? Presumably yes, because we have been at
loggerheads on this one for a number of years but, once again,
circumstances have changed. The world has changed, the Americans
have changed, the French have changed, and, indeed, others can
change too. Thirdly, the only official hat I wear is White Paper/Commission;
anything else comes from an analyst shooting off his mouth; so
as far as renovation of the European Security Strategy is concerned
I personally consider that there is no particular reason to want
to rush it. That is, if you want to spend eight or 10 months to
do it, you spend eight or 10 months to do it, and, as for the
craftings of it, I simply re-state what I said earlier on, the
Strategy part, the doing part, if I can put it that way, should
not flow from Solana's shop; it should be a broader-based endeavour,
and the Wise Man's approach would be the one I recommend. The
last recommendation, but further down the road, is that it may
be useful to start looking at what an EU defence capability's
White Paper could look like. This is not something urgent but
if one restores a serious headline goal, if one has an effective
European Security Strategy, then moving on towards the defence
capabilities in the White Paper mode may be something one can
do.
Q153 Chairman: Professor Bailes?
Professor Bailes: I would just like to
add something at this practical level that François has
stuck to, and I do agree with everything he says: that purely
within the Second Pillar, and without getting into problems of
competence, there is a lot more that can be done for civil-military
cohesion in policy-making, in preventive work and on the ground.
I think the group of people in authority in Brussels at the moment
are grasping this and it needs to be pushed forward in parallel
with the kind of military coherence which François is talking
about if those assets are going to be used really well. If I could
be just a little bit more general or ambitious—and jumping
here over the issue of perhaps using the Lisbon Treaty reforms,
which is, of course, perhaps the most crucial thing for coherence
and external action—I think it could be interesting to bring
into the intergovernmental discussion of strategy the question
of how we work with private business actors, who are a very important
force on all these new issues for ill and also potentially for
good—and we are supposed to be the home of the free business
model! Similarly with the role of NGOs, charities, citizens' organisations
and the empowerment of individuals to deal with their own security,
which is very much an issue here at home even without looking
abroad: and, finally, the issue of the impact of new technologies
on security, which has been pushed a long way in recent Commission
studies, and European money has been directed to develop certain
areas of technology seen as important for solving problems. The
other side of that, however, which is possible mis-use of new
technology has been missed out somewhat by everybody, and perhaps
should come more into the main strategic discussion.
Q154 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: This
seems to be the week in which we all beat our breasts and tear
our hair about the disconnect between European institutions and
the electorate following the Irish referendum, and tidal waves
of rhetoric are pouring into the press at the moment on this subject,
but just taking this to the specifics we are talking about now
all the opinion polling seems to show that there is quite wide
support for the generalities of the European Security Strategy,
of a European Union that is reasonably active in this whole field,
but at the same time there does not seem to be any understanding
whatsoever of what that means in practice and it does not seem
to be connected up. Could either of you suggest, first of all,
if there is a new version of the Security Strategy in the next
few months, how it could be socialised, to use that ghastly phrase,
how it could be set out better and talked out with a wider range
of people, including our own electorates? Because it is surely
a weakness at the moment that this is a construct purely produced
and owned by the elite?
Professor Bailes: I agree very much with
the spirit of this question and also with the remark that the
willingness to think positively about European strategy is out
there, according to the opinion polls. Not only that, but detailed
polls like Transatlantic Trends show that some of the specific
values and ideas that the European elite have put into this Strategy
are also shared by the European people. The trouble is that this
almost looks like an accident at the moment, and I think the structural
reason why we have that perception is that there is no transmission
line within nations. If you think about it there is not a way
of engaging the man in the street in the formation of foreign
security or strategic policy in individual countries, as we know,
nor indeed is there a systemic way of building in business actors
to that process. Probably those who do get built in because of
their own initiative are NGOs and charities and single-issue organisations
who, by the way, are also quite active in Brussels. I think it
is extremely difficult to construct some kind of great consultative
machinery. The only people who can easily be handled in that way
and will be so handled again are the academics, and perhaps against
my own interest I would say we have plenty of academic involvement;
let's not waste more resources on that. What I think could be
the key to this is a point I made on the last question and that
is, if we take a jump forward to saying that good non-state actors,
European and foreign, are going to be part of the implementation
and thus the ownership of a good new European Strategy, it becomes
much easier to think of ways—which may be fuzzy, flexible,
new ways—of getting all those constituencies and not just
academics involved in the preliminary debate on the Strategy,
and find ways to allow them to give evidence, as it were, in the
different ways in which those different kinds of non state actors
might find most natural.
Professor Heisbourg: I do not think there
is a serious chance of engaging with public opinion at large on
these issues unless you give pride of place to the homeland security
dimension. If it is not relevant in a fairly obvious way to the
man in the street you are not going to engage the man in the street.
You may engage this or that set of NGOs, this or that set of academics,
but you are not going to engage the man in the street. If you
take security issues, in my own country at least, I would argue
that people were very well socialised, because there was a lot
of media attention and the two fed into each other, when there
was a decision to go ahead with the European arrest warrant, for
example. This is something people understood and which was relevant
to them at the time the decision was made, but generating great
public interest in a general Strategy document? Honestly, I do
not see it. Let's not try too hard to do something which is probably
not achievable. Secondly, you very rightly emphasise that these
were general expressions of support in the opinion polls and as
soon as issues become specific things tend to change very easily.
Opinion polls do not yield different results in Ireland, for example,
in general terms on these issues, but I am not sure that deployment
of the substantial number of Irish soldiers in the framework of
a European force under an Irish general in Chad has been conducive
to a Yes vote in Ireland. If I look at the electoral material
used by the No camp, this was a not an invisible part. The only
part I saw was that which was visible on television; that included
slogans about not being engaged in military commitments, so the
specifics of the Irish tend to yield a different result from the
generalities of the opinion polls vis-a"-vis the same people.
Chairman: Can I thank both of you very
much indeed for what has been a very rich session for us. We have
gained an enormous amount and drawn upon the collective wisdom
of a few people who, in different places, have played very active
parts in the development of these ideas over a long time, as we
have heard this morning. Thank you both very much.
|
