Securing Europe

On the 24 June 2010, the Centre for European Studies and the Brussels office of the Hanns Seidel Stiftung co-organised a conference entitled ‘Securing Europe’. The aim of the conference, as the title suggests, was to asses new developments impacting European security, as well as highlighting the role of strategic partners such as the US and Russia in this changing configuration of threats and alliances.

H.E. Dr Dmitry Rogozin, Head of Mission of the Russian Federation to NATO, opened the first panel by stating that the transatlantic organisation was an attempt to preserve an order which had already changed, and that many NATO members were incompatible in terms of their contribution to the alliance.

In his opinion, the enlargement of NATO has made the body lose its raison d’être, becoming a mere tool for the US to legitimise its actions abroad. However, due to economic factors as well as other emerging powers such as China, the US would soon be forced to reduce ‘its geopolitical constructions.’ Rogozin contested the reform process of NATO’s strategic concept, arguing that it was not a real consultation process, but a public diplomacy strategy; furthermore, in his opinion, the alliance was ill-equipped to tackle new threats such as energy or cyber security, while missile defence was considered a reaction to a ‘virtual threat.’ He also stressed that Russia and NATO “should abandon military planning against each other”, and focus on common business, such as Iran and the Middle East. Asked if Russia could in ten years become a member of NATO, the speaker firmly rejected this scenario, giving as reasons NATO’s expanding membership to the East and Russia’s disapproval of NATO’s policy towards Afghanistan.

Referring to EU-Russia relations, he complained that they continued to be institutionally unstable and that they did not take into consideration common areas of interest. Furthermore, Russia and Germany are the two powers most responsible for Europe’s security and that more should be done to advance the process of historic reconciliation that has already started between the two. In conclusion, Russia could be considered an ally, but not a future member of any of the two organisations (NATO and EU), with cooperation continuing on a case-by-case basis.

Next, Mr. Thomas Silberhorn, Spokesman of the CSU Parliamentary Group for European and Foreign Affairs in the German Bundestag began his intervention by highlighting that although the Lisbon Treaty was supposed to strengthen the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, this was still not happening due to the persistence of national interests.

He stressed that this national way of thinking should be replaced by a European one; however, this should not lead to a centralised EU, but to a network model. In the field of security, this would not mean a common European army, but a networked one, and not a single centre, but rather more flexible structures allowing integration within other structures, such as NATO or UN forces.

Referring to EU-Russia relations, Silberhorn acknowledged that the two were interdependent and they could not solve problems alone. In this context, he welcomed Medvedev’s recognition of the indivisibility of European security, but stressed that spheres of influence in Russia’s neighborhood were incompatible with this indivisibility. The speaker believed that the common fora for discussing issues of mutual interest, such as visa liberalization, should be made more political, perhaps by upgrading them to the ministerial level. Referring to NATO, as long as the alliance continues to exist, European security is tied to it and there is no need to replace something if it can be reformed instead.

The second panel was opened by Dr. Eduard Kukan, Chairman of the Delegation for relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo in the European Parliament. He warned that the degree of EU attractiveness was not so high in the Balkans as it used to be in the case of Eastern European countries. One reason for this could be that politicians there already have to deal with a many bilateral issues and this is crowding their political agenda, leaving less space for accession issues.

However, in terms of the security situation on the ground, the good news was, in Kukan’s opinion, that all of the political elites in the Balkan states knew that the remaining unresolved bilateral issue could not be solved by resorting to the use of force. In the case of Kosovo, there is an imperative need to clarify its status. Furthermore, the fact that Kosovo has the youngest population in Europe, coupled with continued high unemployment, could in the future become a security threat. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, after the Dayton Agreement there have not been any serious security incidents; however, the country is now facing a political as well as a constitutional problem, namely how to organise the country so that it can function properly. Nevertheless, the speaker warned that the internal dynamism and the political creativity needed to solve this issue could not be brought from the outside.

The following speaker, Jamie Shea, Director of Policy and Planning at NATO, began his remarks by stating he was optimistic about improving EU-NATO cooperation. He contrasted this with the situation a couple of years ago when there was a certain degree of anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic about this cooperation: the Americans feared that the EU’s initiatives would run counter to NATO, while the EU was afraid that opening itself too soon to what was considered by some an ‘American Trojan horse’ would undermine the CFSP and ESDP. Nevertheless, the EU has demonstrated that the CFSP can be of great use; therefore NATO has to recognise the validity of the CFSP, as well as the new CSDP established under the Lisbon Treaty. Europeans, on the other hand, also have to admit that if the 28 NATO member states go to Afghanistan, this must become a major strategic interest for the EU as well. The issue now, in Shea’s view, was how to engineer the structural and institutional details of this enhanced cooperation. This could be accomplished by more consultation, especially in the field of joint strategic thinking and speaking with one voice (in the case of Ukraine, Belarus, etc), as well as by better coordination on the ground (embed the EU police mission into ISAF in Afghanistan, joint access to each other’s capabilities, both civilian and military). Correspondingly, the two immediate priorities should be clarifying the strategic objectives of both organisations and solving the Cyprus-Turkey political deadlock.

Referring to the EU’s progress in terms of foreign and security policy, the speaker warned that CSDP could not only be about internal consensus making, but more crucially about how to relate Europe to other (emerging) powers. In his concluding recommendation, he stated that the EU should not only set agendas, but also form coalitions to achieve them, and in order to achieve this power politics remained an essential ingredient.

The last speaker of the panel, Mr. Lars-Gunnar Wiegemark, Head of Unit for Security policy in the European Commission (DG RELEX) started by noting that the EU had always subscribed to a broad concept of security, and this European model had been most successful in its neighbourhood (with the exception of the Balkans). Referring to the high expectations raised by the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, Wiegemark warned that a single individual could not correct all the deficiencies in the CSDP, namely chains of command or cooperation on overlapping fields such as development, humanitarian assistance and security operations. Furthermore, even if the 2003 European Security Strategy still holds true in terms of threats, more substance is needed regarding the ‘how to’ part, and this is also something that the Lisbon Treaty does not solve immediately. Reacting to the Turkey-Cyprus issue raised by the other speakers as well as from the audience, the speaker pointed out that this was just the tip of the iceberg for the bigger problem of Turkey’s place within the European security architecture and was an issue yet to be clarified.