Ever since European Union (EU) member states decided to create the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) in 1999, both ESDP and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have occupied the institutional space of crisis management. Despite American suspicion of an autonomous European security institution,Footnote 1 EU member states created an alternative to NATO crisis management activities.Footnote 2 Both organizations have operational credibility. ESDP has conducted 22 operations and missions since it was declared operational in 2001. At the same time, NATO has conducted 17 operations. Some of these operations took place in the same theater, and at times ESDP operations have relied on NATO assets. Nonetheless, as NATO's General Secretary recently observed, “it is astounding how narrow the bandwidth of cooperation between NATO and the Union has remained. There is a remarkable distance between them.”Footnote 3
ESDP and NATO are typically examined in isolation, perhaps because of the relative absence of interaction between them.Footnote 4 But institutional overlap has important repercussions for both institutions and their member states. In line with this symposium, I explain some important consequences of international regime complexity in the field of international security.
Overlap between ESDP and NATO has two effects. First, overlap has generated chessboard politics shaping member state strategies. I discuss these strategies in examining the implementation of the framework agreement outlining the parameters of inter-institutional cooperation called the Berlin Plus agreement,Footnote 5 which attempts to manage overlap between the two institutions. Second, institutional overlap has generated a number of feedback effects. The prior existence of NATO shaped the conceptualization and organization of ESDP at its creation, and the existence of two alternative security institutions continues to influence how the institutions evolve—how each institution defines security interests and how states adjust the mandate of each institution to address changes in the security environment. Because both institutions are intergovernmentally organized and consensus based, the actions and decisions of both institutions reflect the agreements of members. Chessboard politics and feedback effects are consequently interrelated—states strategize to affect outcomes in one venue or another, and decisions in one institution can feed back, affecting decisions and behaviors in the other institution.
The resulting lack of inter-institutional cooperation and coordination has created inefficiencies in the crisis management interventions of each institution, including delays in troop deployment and a lack of strategic guidance in operations. While it is hard to characterize the NATO-ESDP relationship as either competitive or cooperative, overlap has clearly impeded the development of an efficient division of labor between the two institutions.
Mapping ESDP and NATO Institutional Overlap
Overlap between ESDP and NATO occurs along three institutional dimensions: membership, mandate and resources.Footnote 6
Membership
At ESDP's creation in 1999, 11 of NATO's 19 members were also part of ESDP and four out of 14 ESDP members were outside NATO's membership. Today, 21 states are members of both ESDP and NATO. Five NATO member states are not part of ESDP, and six ESDP states are not part of NATO (refer to figure 1). The 21 states that are members of both institutions can strategize across institutions, while the eleven states that are members of one institution and not the other can maneuver within a single institution (ESDP or NATO) to undermine the interests of states in the other institution.
Membership overlap in 2008
*Denmark opted out of ESDP.
**But members of NATO's Partnership for Peace (which includes a security agreement with NATO).
Mandate
ESDP and NATO mandates are largely similar and do not specify either a functional or geographic division of labor between the two institutions.Footnote 7 Both institutions engage in crisis management interventions to address violations to international peace and security. These crisis management mandates comprise the so-called “Petersberg tasks”: humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping, and combat-force tasks (including peacemaking).Footnote 8
Resources
The two organizations rely on both national and common assets to plan and conduct military operations.Footnote 9 Military hardware is primarily a national asset. However, command and control structures are crucial common assets for both institutions: NATO has the common Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and ESDP has its common Civil-Military Cell and Operation Centre (OpsCen). SHAPE has undergone many changes since the end of the Cold War and it best equipped to plan and conduct high-intensity operations.Footnote 10 Conversely, ESDP's Civil-Military Cell and OpsCen are best equipped to plan and conduct battalion size military operations as well as civilian missions in combination with military operations.Footnote 11 Hence, if ESDP wants to conduct a high-intensity military operation, it requires NATO assets; and if NATO wants to plan and conduct a civil-military operation, it requires the assets of an institution such as ESDP.Footnote 12
As each institution's degree of autonomy is linked to the command and control structures at its disposal, planning capabilities quickly became a contentious element of institutional overlap. The so-called Berlin Plus agreement of 2003 aims to regulate how the newer ESDP would have recourse to NATO common assets as well as how confidential information would be shared between NATO and ESDP.Footnote 13 However, as the next section will show, there are a number of ambiguities in the agreement that have given rise to conflicting interpretations, affecting its implementation.
Strategies on the Chessboard: Berlin Plus and Beyond
Chessboard politics manifest themselves in member state strategies that I call “hostage taking,” “turf battles,” and “muddling through.” Here, I explain these strategies with examples drawn from the politics surrounding the Berlin Plus agreement and its implementation.
Hostage Taking
States that are members of just one institution can use their membership to obstruct the relationship between both institutions, holding them hostage in pursuit of narrow interests.Footnote 14 Turkey, a NATO member outside the EU, and Cyprus, an EU member outside NATO,Footnote 15 have both taken positions that essentially held the larger institution and the inter-institutional relationship hostage by using their veto powers within their own institution. Ankara does so in the interest of advancing accession negotiations with the EU, while Nicosia's obstructionism demonstrates Cyprus's state sovereignty vis à vis Turkey.Footnote 16 Overlap enables these states to transform an otherwise relatively marginal institutional position into far-reaching influence.
Turkey insists that Berlin Plus is the general framework under which NATO and ESDP interact, granting NATO a right of first refusal when it comes to deciding when and where to intervene, and hence, allowing NATO to interfere in ESDP planning of all its operations.Footnote 17 One of the many effects of this strategy is that NATO and ESDP can only meet formally to discuss concrete Berlin Plus operations,Footnote 18 while every other security issue cannot be talked about. Invoking the terms of the Berlin Plus agreement, Turkey refuses to allow Cyprus to participate in discussions regarding Berlin Plus operations.Footnote 19 Turkey did the same to Malta prior to it joining NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) in April 2008. In return, Cyprus, and Malta prior to 2008 have blocked any other formal meetings.Footnote 20
Turf Battles
Some European countries aim for ESDP to become the primary institution dealing with crisis management, partly to exclude the U.S. from influencing European policy, partly to increase their range of action independently from NATO. Certain NATO members, especially the U.S., would like to expand NATO's turf into civil-military crisis management, which is currently occupied by ESDP.Footnote 21 These state interests manifest themselves in the form of turf battles over the geographic and functional scope of both organizations, and in fights over resource acquisition and access. In this competitive strategy, countries advocate policies that shape the capability and mandate of one institution—often at the expense of the other.
Perhaps the most important turf battle has been between the U.S. and those ESDP member states—particularly France, along with Belgium, Luxemburg, and Spain—that want to develop ESDP as an alternative to NATO. These European states argue that Berlin Plus is not the cornerstone of the inter-institutional relationship. Instead, these states seek to assure full ESDP autonomy without eventually having to rely on NATO via Berlin Plus. One concrete example can be seen in the long-running dispute over the creation of a permanent operational headquarters inside ESDP (EUOHQ). Dissatisfied with the EU's dependence on NATO's SHAPE for planning capabilities under the Berlin Plus agreement, the French, Belgian, Luxembourg, Spanish, and German governments want ESDP to have a headquarters capability that would provide it the autonomy to decide when and how to intervene in any crisis or conflict.
Muddling Through
With hostage taking and turf battles impeding formal cooperation, states interested in a division of labor between ESDP and NATO, or even modest cooperation between them, are forced to find informal alternatives—in essence, to cooperate by muddling through.
The United Kingdom, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Germany initially hoped that the Berlin Plus agreement would become the cornerstone of a cooperative NATO-ESDP relationship.Footnote 22 These governments lament the inefficiencies that the competitive dynamics of hostage taking and turf battles have created, and have initiated informal meetings on the ministerial level, the so-called “transatlantic luncheons and dinners.” Because these meetings are informal, there is no record taken, no communiqué issued and no decisions are presented to the public. More importantly, the British and Dutch governments are suspicious of a EUOHQ and regard a potential ESDP headquarters as undermining the de facto “right of first refusal” that Berlin Plus gives NATO when it comes to high-intensity crisis intervention. But as a compromise amongst EU members, and in the spirit of operability, ESDP members agreed to establish a Civil-Military Cell, an OpsCen with a peacetime permanent staff, and liaison teams between NATO and ESDP.Footnote 23
Indeed, rather than resolving tensions that might result from institutional overlap, the ambiguity of the Berlin Plus agreement is itself an artifact of international regime complexity and is heavily implicated in the politics of institutional overlap. As a result, differences over how to implement Berlin Plus are at best very time consuming; at worst, they waste scarce resources, delay troop deployment, and put military and civilian personnel in danger, as I will discuss.
Feedback Effects: Reverberation and Competition
Competition is not the sole mode of interaction between NATO and ESDP. However, one cannot deny that the relationship is partly driven by competitive dynamics. Competition is usually seen as a means to induce efficiency. An efficient division of labor would witness NATO and ESDP develop complementary strengths. To some extent, ESDP's focus on smaller operations represents complementarity with NATO by default, if not by the design of several of its more ambitious and ardent Europeanist member states. But there is also evidence that “reverberation” and “competition” lead NATO and ESDP to move in similar directions regarding institutional resources and mandate. Rather than diverging, the two institutions have continued to overlap significantly. The way that the two institutions have conceptualized security and have designed their mandate and resources is largely duplicative. This results in inefficiencies rather than efficiencies.
Conceptualizing Security
Contemporary crisis management involves military and civilian elements: the military component includes the deployment of military forces for deterrence and coercion in peacemaking and peacekeeping, while the civilian component includes policing, training, rule of law, institution building, and other peacebuilding tasks. NATO has historically focused on the military aspects of security, and left civilian elements to organizations such as the OSCE or the UN.
When ESDP was being created in 1999, its future member states had a chance to improve on existing templates, focusing on civilian aspects and leaving the military aspects to NATO, or finding a way to balance the two approaches. It would have made sense for ESDP to focus more on civilian crisis management, as most European states lack the military capabilities needed for high-intensity operations and the European Commission was already active in this area. Such a coordinated division of labor between NATO and ESDP was always an option, but did not occur. Instead, the French government sought to occupy NATO's turf to increase its range of possible options to conduct multilateral security policy. The British government, in the interest of building up a European security institution and cooperating with European partners and NATO, went along with the decision.
Thus, with NATO's successful Kosovo operation Allied Force as a primary referent, NATO's template fed back into the design of ESDP. ESDP's core documents stressed security's military component, including plans for a Rapid Reaction Force of 60,000 troops sustainable for one year.Footnote 24 The desire of some ESDP member states to develop military crisis management capabilities autonomous from NATO's also led ESDP to replicate NATO's organizational structure, including a political body, a military body, and international military and civilian staff. ESDP copied NATO's structure even though the architects of ESDP were aware that NATO's institutional design had contributed to poor coordination between military and political bodies.Footnote 25
Over time, ESDP and NATO have failed to agree on a division of labor, but have instead continued to develop in similar directions. After its creation, ESDP member states also started to invest in civilian crisis-management capabilities that gave ESDP a comparative advantage over NATO, which remained focused on the military side.Footnote 26 When ESDP started to incorporate civilian crisis management into its planning and operations, building up civilian command structures and a police force, there was therefore another opportunity to develop a division of labor whereby NATO would concentrate on the high-intensity military operations, and ESDP would assume primary responsibility for civilian, civil-military and low-intensity military operations.Footnote 27 Instead, at the insistence of the U.S. and Turkey, who have pursued turf battle and hostage taking strategies, NATO has followed ESDP in incorporating civilian elements into its doctrine and operations.Footnote 28 ESDP, on the other hand, continues to aspire towards the capabilities to autonomously conduct high-intensity military operations.Footnote 29 Arguably, this reflects an important example of competition across the institutions, as without ESDP, NATO would have been less pressured to reconceptualize its approach to crisis management operations to become more comprehensive, and could have left civilian crisis management to the UN or OSCE.Footnote 30 Indeed, the success of ESDP operations with extensive civilian elements contributed to NATO's appreciation of civilian forcesFootnote 31 and NATO has borrowed from the EU's success with civil-military missions.Footnote 32
Capabilities often come to define what actions are taken. Noting how crisis management increasingly involves military and civilian elements, rather than focusing on one or the other, a British official who observed the repetition lamented “it was a mistake that the setup was so similar.”Footnote 33 The result is that both institutions define security in civilian and military terms, seeking to pursue both objectives rather than stepping back to decide who is best equipped to do one or the other.
Practicing Security
The consequences of international regime complexity and the presence of multiple policy-making venues have also affected substantive policy decisions. Without overlapping institutions and the competitive strategies they engender, the practice of crisis management would be substantially different, and arguably, more efficient.
First, in post-conflict reconstruction operations where both organizations are on the ground but responsible for different tasks (i.e., NATO for military operations and ESDP for civilian or civil-military missions),Footnote 34 no common code of conduct has been established between the two institutions and no delineation of tasks is possible due to the hostage-taking strategies outlined earlier. Technical arrangements such as guidelines for the cooperation between the military (NATO) and police (ESDP) forces become politically controversial between members such as Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, and France. Turkey insisted that ESDP operations be put under the terms of Berlin Plus, which ESDP refused.Footnote 35 Cyprus, on the other hand, delayed the deployment of ESDP troops because it argued that as long as Berlin Plus is an option and it is not privy to all the information, it could not vote in favor. Hence, the organizations have had to muddle through by relying on the member states themselves, as well as on cooperation based on the social skills and entrepreneurship of their respective personnel on the ground in these operations. But people on the ground, constrained by mandates that reflect divisions among member states, cannot fully compensate for the absence of strategic cooperation at higher levels.Footnote 36 This significantly slows the deployment of EU operations into areas where NATO is already present, and can jeopardize the safety of both ESDP civilian forces and NATO troops in crisis areas.
Second, in situations where both organizations are equipped to conduct the same operation, there is competition to assert institutional presence, which hampers coordination efforts, resulting in negative feedback effects such as the duplication of efforts and even unnecessary deployments. For example, at the insistence of several member states, both the EU and NATO have conducted almost identical civil-military operations in Darfur in support of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) II.Footnote 37 Another example can be found in ESDP's recent African operations. ESDP's Artemis operation in DR Congo was a military operation undertaken, at the initiative of France (who arguably could have done it alone), largely to prove that ESDP can act militarily autonomous of NATO.Footnote 38
Conclusion
The relationship between ESDP and NATO is characterized by neither outright cooperation nor competition. Instead, the interests that are pursued through different member state strategies have led to an ambiguous relationship. Competition arises through turf battles and hostage taking as states maneuver within each organization to promote their specific policy preferences even as a certain degree of cooperation is achieved by muddling through. In addition, feedback effects result in inefficiencies as well. These dynamics have weakened NATO's role as Europe's primary security organization, despite U.S. insistence that it retain the primary role in European security.Footnote 39 Clearly the U.S. would have more influence if NATO were the only collective security institution in Europe. Speaking of ESDP's increasing autonomy from NATO, EU's High Representative Javier Solana has said “it won't happen in a way that will destroy NATO. It's true that the United States may lose some leverage as Europe gets stronger, but this is inevitable and by no means an unhealthy thing.”Footnote 40
Another result of these strategies has been to undermine institutional performance in ways that cannot be compensated for by simply muddling through on an ad hoc basis. Observers and practioners alike say that the impasse between the two institutions has wasted resources and political capital in Darfur and has made the Afghan operation less effective than it could have been, with many fearing that the same will occur in Kosovo.Footnote 41 Learning and institutional memory are impeded because no lessons-learned documents are written in common. Instead, the inter-institutional relationship experiences competition and cooperation on various operational levels at the same time with the result that mandates of both institutions remain in flux.
The heart of the issue is that there is no strategic consensus regarding whether NATO or ESDP should deal with crisis situations and in what capacity. The decade since ESDP's emergence has witnessed important changes in crisis management, as member states alternatively cooperate and compete around ESDP and NATO. Perhaps these differences will be alleviated. A number of recent developments point towards increased cooperation. The U.S. has signaled new support for ESDP in exchange for stronger European support in Afghanistan, while France has taken steps towards reintegration in NATO, alleviating turf battles that have marred cooperation. Malta has recently rejoined NATO's Partnership for Peace, while Cyprus has taken a step towards reviving the peace process with its February 2008 elections, meaning that two persistent hostage takers could have new incentives for strategic cooperation between ESDP and NATO. However, Turkey is unlikely to join the EU in anything but the long term and will likely persist in impeding formal cooperation where it can. Whatever the case, member state strategies around crisis management and feedback effects mean that both institutions are likely to exercise an important influence on one another in coming years, resulting in enduring inefficiencies.
