CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch. Issue 43
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CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch. Issue 43
www.ceps.eu/files/NW/NWatch43.pdf
Editorial by Michael Emerson: «Security Architecture, Security Community»
The European Union is due in December to see publication of its second Security Strategy document, updating that published in 2003. Since then the context has changed from one dominated by the Al Qaida terrorist threat. Al Qaida and its followers have not been eliminated, as Mumbai has shown during these last days. But also some old-time threat perceptions have resurfaced within Europe, as announced initially in Putin's Munich speech of February 2007, and intensified now by the Georgia-Russia war in August.
The wider reverberations of the small war in Georgia have been fanned into broader threat perceptions through President Medvedev's statements that Russia would defend its citizens anywhere. Such language might come from any government in the world and in most cases taken as a banal remark threatening no-one in particular. However in the Russian case it is interpreted as signaling a willingness to act as in Georgia elsewhere in its neighbourhood where there are Russian minorities, maybe in the Baltic states, or where people have been recently ‘passportised', or are still now in the course of receiving Russian citizenship in this way (Crimea for example). The validity of these threat perceptions may be a speculative matter, but Russia's actions and discourse have made them a politico-psychological reality.
In addition President Medvedev has added a wider strategic dimension in his speech on 5 November, the day after Barack Obama's electoral victory, complaining about the proposed US missile defence system and “unbridled expansion of NATO and other similar ‘presents' to Russia – we therefore have every reason to believe that they are simply testing our strength”. He went on to announce that “we will deploy the Iskander missile system in the Kaliningrad Region to be able, if necessary, to destroy the missile defence system … Finally electronic jamming of the US missile defence system will be carried out … from Kaliningrad”. So there is Kaliningrad, enclave within the EU, window on Europe, or missile base aimed at Europe.
The EU Presidency replied on 7 November that “this [Kaliningrad] statement does not contribute to establishing a climate of confidence or improving security in Europe, at a time when we are hoping for dialogue with Russia on matters regarding the security of the entire European continent and Russia has put forward proposals in this connection”.
Indeed, at the same time President Medvedev has been insistently advocating a new pan-European security architecture, citing his war with Georgia as underlining its rationale. To which the EU Presidency press release after the 14 November EU-Russia stated: “President Sarkozy proposed holding a meeting in mid-2009, perhaps in the framework of the OSCE, to lay the foundations of what could be the future security of Europe”. To which President Medvedev replied in his press statement after the summit that “I am pleased to see that that this idea is gaining supporters among European leaders…I fully agree that until we sign a special agreement on ensuring European security, we should refrain form taking any unilateral steps that would affect security” (meaning presumably a verbal suspension of the Kaliningrad ‘decisions', which were a questionable move tactically with which to greet the new US President-elect).
So what should be the essence of the pan-European security regime? Medvedev's Evian speech (reported last month) boiled down to a collection of conventional ideas enveloping his real message: stop Nato expansion and US missile deployment. Even if European reservations over Nato enlargement will mean no go-ahead for Membership Action Plans for Georgia and Ukraine at the December Nato ministerial meeting, the Medvedev agenda is nowhere near being plausible content for a new treaty.
So how should the EU respond? So far the debate within the EU does not seem to have got beyond discussion whether or when to respond. One concrete idea would be to strengthen both the OSCE and the EU's role in pan-European security by the EU taking a full place within the OSCE, rather than remain just an observer amidst the 56 sovereign member states, and to explore the idea of a core group perhaps to be named ‘European Security Council' which the EU would share with the other big players.
But there are fundamental conceptual matters to be tabled, on which the EU should come forward without delay. The EU is recognized by political scientists as representing a ‘security community', which is first of all a philosophical concept, but then also an institutional one. A security community is one in which warlike threat perceptions among a given group of states are zero, as for example today between Germany and all its immediate neighbours, notwithstanding the last century's history of world wars. The EU as a security community corresponds well to the political scientist's observation of states that behave according to norms that shared values and identities have constituted (As developed in E. Adler and M. Barnett eds., ‘Security Communities', Cambridge, 1998). The security community can be seen in answers to such questions as ‘who am I ?' and ‘who is the other?'.
By contrast threat perceptions of Russia are – as noted above – not zero, and Russia's leadership has in fact been constructing paranoiac threat perceptions at home in order to help legitimize itself in the eyes of its domestic public opinion. Russia has in its leadership's discourse been making the West ‘the other', while it lays claims to norms of its own. As a would-be great power it says it has its own norms (e.g. its ‘sovereign democracy'). This is not a plausible route for getting a pan-European security order. The European security community is both a philosophy and a reality in the larger part of the continent. The EU should set it out in its forthcoming security strategy, and make it the conceptual foundation of its position for the proposed OSCE summit. And Russia's leadership should think about it more. A pan-European security architecture can only come in reality as part and parcel of a European security community.
№12(28), 2008