Europe needs to stop relying on US brawn
It ought to take responsibility for its own security — and that means becoming a ‘tough power’
There is something both pathetic and surreal about France’s obsession, at the moment, with a rather unremarkable economic reform bill (the “loi Macron”) while to the east and to the south, in Ukraine and Libya, real threats are edging closer to Europe.
It is time to wake up! Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe needs to redefine its entire security policy. The question lies in whether it can do so within the European Union’s (EU) institutions or rather through the individual but coordinated efforts of its member states.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of the Cold War, Western European countries — with the notable exception of France and Britain — handled defence issues within the framework of Nato and thus placed their security, for all intents and purposes, in the hands of the US. The choice proved a wise one. The war remained cold and the Soviet system collapsed — a victim of its own contradictions.
But success can be both misleading and dangerous. Lulled by the illusion that security issues were a thing of the past — the Balkan wars being just an anachronism — the EU very quickly looked to a post-modern future, seeing itself as both a guide and a model. Europe was from Venus and America was from Mars, as Robert Kagan commented in an essay that hit the bull’s-eye, even though Mars soon found itself entangled in its contradictions in the Middle East.
To guarantee its security, Europe had three cards at its disposal. The first was the US, which you could criticise or denounce at will but served, nevertheless, as a sort of ultimate life insurance. The second, that of EU enlargement, which proved particularly effective at the beginning of the 21st century as an incentive mechanism. “Do you want to join our peaceful and prosperous club? Behave.” But this policy, which worked well in the Balkans and in Central Europe, could never be a universal model.
The EU could not nurture the ambition to integrate, in successive waves, all countries around it, close or far. That is why since 2002, and this was its third card, the EU expressed the will to develop an area of prosperity and stability on its extended borders. Thus was born the European Neighbourhood Policy. This led in 2008 to the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean and in 2009 of its eastern twin, the Eastern Partnership.
Necessary steps
The problem today is that all three of these cards are outdated. Cannons are roaring, men are dying and chaos is gaining ground — less than three hours from Paris. The neighbourhood policy, in other words, must be entirely revamped. The power to convince is one thing. The power to compel is another. When Italy is calling for help in the Mediterranean in the face of Daesh’s (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) advance in Libya, when Poland or the Baltic countries worry about Russia’s rising ambitions in Ukraine, can Europe really act as if nothing or not much is happening?
Better control of internet access and border entry points are certainly necessary steps. But given the world we now live in, there is also need to increase defence budgets. Europe cannot, as used to be the case, rely on the US to defend itself. America is still strong, but it no longer has the means or the will to be the sole policeman of the western world and its values.
Salvation will not come from China either. It is too far away. Nor can we rely on southern neighbours like Egypt, Turkey or Algeria, which are too obsessed with their own security and the survival of their regimes, and which look at us with a mixture of historical resentment and cultural, if not directly religious, ambiguity.
Simply put, we are back to a point where we must enforce our own security. Nobody else will do it for us. There is, however, a structural contradiction between the EU’s mechanisms, which were intended to offer a new sovereignty model in the post-modern world of the 21st century, and the now absolute necessity to reinvent a culture of security to defend our values and our models.
Faced with those who dream of recreating the Soviet Union and those who state their ambition to conquer Rome, Europe has no other choice. It has to become once again a “tough power”. This is not about sinking into some sort of imperial or colonial nostalgia. It is simply a matter of clarity, lucidity and common sense. “If you want peace, prepare for war,” the Romans used to say.
Should Europe intervene once more in Libya, three years after toppling Muammar Gaddafi and his regime? The answer is probably yes. There is an emergency. The threat is edging closer to Europe and the continent cannot afford another failure in its attempt to reconcile the will to change and the desire for order and stability.
Dominique Moisi is a French political scientist and writer.