7 December 2019

EU-NATO Cooperation In An Era Of Great-Power Competition

Luis Simón

Over the past two decades, discussions on EU-NATO relations have been closely associated with crisis-management operations and transnational threats. But that is yesterday’s world. The return of great-power competition is eliciting a shift in European security and transatlantic relations toward deterrence and defense. As such the conceptual framework that has so far underpinned debates on EU-NATO relations has been, by and large, rendered obsolete.

The return of great-power competition and growing uncertainty about the United States' commitment to Europe have led to renewed calls to turn the EU into an autonomous pole in global politics. Some even toy with the notion of European equidistance in a global context that is increasingly defined by Sino-American competition. At the same time, the EU’s need to give its global role security and a transatlantic anchor underlines the potential of a more structured EU-NATO dialogue.

Great-power competition also has important implications for capability development. A key challenge is to ensure that the EU’s new defense initiatives help reinforce NATO’s ongoing efforts in deterrence and defense. One way to do that would be to give the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy the authority to bring together the industrial and politico-strategic aspects of the union’s defense policy and thus act as an effective bridge between the EU and NATO. The last three years have witnessed a steady flow of self-congratulatory remarks about unprecedented progress in the relationship between the European Union and NATO. Their joint statements in 2016 and 2018 provided a compass for greater cooperation between them. But it is important to put this in perspective and ensure that the relationship keeps apace with a rapidly changing— and worsening—geostrategic environment. Discussions on EU-NATO cooperation remain stuck on a 1990s wavelength, taking crisis management and transnational challenges as their key referents. As NATO leaders meet in London and the EU undergoes a leadership transition, they should revamp their dialogue around the increasingly important theme of great-power competition.


Crisis-Management Cooperation

Ever since the EU stepped into the realm of security and defense in 1999, discussions on EU-NATO relations have been intimately linked with the notion of European strategic autonomy. See, for example, Jolyon Howorth, European integration and defense: the ultimate challenge? European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2000. Whereas European countries tend to see the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) as a useful means to curb over-reliance on the United States in security matters, the latter has traditionally perceived the EU’s ventures in this domain as both an opportunity and a challenge. This equivocal attitude on the part of NATO’s leading member has also reflected on the EU-NATO relationship, which has always displayed a mix of competition and cooperation.

From the outset, the United States warned that any attempt by Europeans to pursue security cooperation in the EU framework should avoid duplicating existing NATO structures, discriminating against non-EU NATO members, or decoupling the EU from the transatlantic security architecture. Yet, it also recognized that there was a growing political demand for European strategic autonomy. More importantly, perhaps, this demand came at a time when the United States was adopting a less direct and engaged approach to European security affairs, as it sought to shift its attention to other regions. For this shift to be successful, Europeans would have to do more in the security sphere. Howorth, European integration and defense.

From a U.S. viewpoint, there was a way to square the European security circle: CSDP would be welcome as long as it helped overcome Europe’s strategic introspection and generate the capabilities needed for expeditionary operations while being firmly embedded in the NATO framework. Key EU member states like the United Kingdom and Germany were sympathetic to this vision. Thus, a sort of balance emerged, with the EU explicitly acknowledging NATO’s monopoly in collective defense and confining its venture into security policy to the realm of external crisis management, and more particularly to those contingencies where NATO as a whole was not engaged. This arrangement would still work for those countries, like France, eager to underscore the EU’s autonomy vis-à-vis NATO and the United States. The absence of great-power competitors and the salience of transnational challenges meant that collective defense and deterrence were not really on Europe’s politico-strategic radar. In this vein, the 2003 European Security Strategy noted that “ large-scale aggression against any Member States” had become “improbable” and that Europe was facing “new threats” such as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts in the European periphery, “failed states,” or organized crime. The focus was not so much on high-end warfare against peer-adversaries, but rather on external crisis management in militarily semi-permissive environments.

When it comes to external crisis management, the EU and NATO have been cooperating and competing at the same time. On the one hand, the 2002 Berlin Plus agreements granted the EU access to NATO assets for the planning and conduct of such operations, while efforts to coordinate capability-development processes in the EU and NATO outlined the complementarity between them. On the other hand, the EU’s efforts to set up its own command arrangements as well as to launch operations in Africa—often at France’s behest—underlined the principle of

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