When it comes to defence, reluctance just won’t do

By Ilana Bet-El

Date: 20/10/05

A recent study by Generals Klaus Naumann and Joseph Rawlston, a former chairman of the NATO Military Committee and a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, saw a flurry of dramatic headlines about the state of the continent's military forces.

The study's results are clearly valid and valuable; nonetheless, there is something deeply and wearingly familiar about them. The mantra that Europe is ignoring its military capabilities has probably been around since the end of the Cold War and definitely since the European failure to deal with the Balkan wars. The warning that Europe is failing to meet its commitments to NATO and thereby endangering the alliance has been heard repeatedly since the NATO airstrikes in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999.

Officially, the explanation for these trends has been that European states, unlike the US, chose to take the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War: to accept the resulting peace as the end of all threats rather than the end of a specific one and thereby to discount the need for continued investment in defence.

This conventional wisdom has increasingly become a fig leaf for an uncomfortable reality: that whilst European states have clearly cut their defence budgets in the past decade, many are also in a quandary over whether to proceed militarily down the NATO path or whether to develop an alternative EU capability.

The issue is one of leadership as much as commitment. It has often been said that after the Kosovo bombings, the US decided it did not want to repeat the experience of conducting war by committee and therefore prefers to go it alone. But many - if not all - European NATO allies also learnt that conducting a war in which one nation had absolute and supreme power was an experience to be avoided wherever possible.

European states seem more reluctant to accept an interpretation of the alliance as one of undisputed US leadership and hegemony. And so, whilst the Europeans agreed to a NATO operation in Afghanistan and have contributed troops to it, most have adamantly refused to involve the alliance actively in Iraq. Instead, and after immense US pressure, some Iraqi officers are being trained by NATO, mostly in Europe.

The corollary to this declining commitment to NATO, at least in terms of capabilities, has been the evolution of the EU defence capability - including an independent military staff, an EU deployment into Bosnia and the EU Security Strategy. These are significant achievements, but it would be wrong to misinterpret them: they are initial steps but not determined ones.

Europeans have so far been reluctant to grapple positively with the issue of defence - choosing to do less in NATO and a bit more in the EU. But defence is becoming increasingly important and reluctance will not suffice. Like all matters related to the EU, some leadership is needed.

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

Author takes a look at Europe's reluctance to commit to investment in military capabilities as repeatedly called for by the US and at the development of EU structures parallel to NATO.