Ahead of the Nato summit in Wales in September, both sides of the transatlantic divide need to reappraise Nato's fundamental strategic purpose. While the European project has become dominated by a technocratic obsession with monetary union, increasing the sense of inequality among its members, Nato's purpose and funding have been allowed to drift for far too long. It is ironic that Nato is currently the most effective organ of European cooperation, precisely because it has not sought to impose a federal grand bargain on its European members. Nonetheless, the Atlantic Alliance needs to be reinvigorated and its strategic purpose reconfigured in order to safeguard the postwar stability of the continent.
While Europe's political leaders attempt to envisage reform that will answer domestic dissatisfaction with the EU, they must not waver from the task of articulating collective security through Nato. The twin pressures of domestic frustration with a largely economically focused European Union and the challenge to the borders of democracy from Russia should force Nato to return to its founding purpose — the defence of continental Europe and ideals of free trade and democracy.
Due to historic mistrust of the US, France in particular has long believed that the EU needed to assert its independence from Nato, which it ultimately regards as a tool of American foreign policy. So the line of reasoning goes: without an independent European defence force, there can be no independent European foreign policy. These sentiments, though longstanding, have found significant recent support in the Front National.
Such reasoning has been a continuous tension in Nato. By 1966 President de Gaulle completed France's gradual withdrawal from Nato's command structure and it did not fully rejoin until 2009. It is unsurprising that since the late 1990s France has been at the forefront of trying to develop a distinct EU military capability. The process of defining such a capability has been extremely limited, in part due to American insistence that EU capabilities should be, in Madeline Albright's words, "separable but not separate" from Nato. In practice, the EU Common Security and Defence Policy has limited itself to the so-called Petersburg Tasks, primarily concerned with humanitarian and peacekeeping missions and crisis management. Nato has effectively remained the sole guarantor of continental European defence.
Europe is in a sense a victim of its own success. Relative political stability means that the EU and Nato have succeeded in keeping peace between member states, to the extent that it seems out of the question that a member state could once again pose a military threat to the others. In other words, war as an instrument of politics has become de facto and de jure unthinkable. This seems to have also translated into Nato's European domestic security considerations, such that Nato has spent much of the last decade more concerned with "out of area" operations. Where territorial defence has been pursued, it has largely been concerned with the hugely contentious issue of ballistic missile defence, one of the causes of acrimony with Russia.
The idea of autonomous EU defence seems to have broken down and in practice promise and policy have never kept in step. The first key pillar was supposed to be that a community with a common currency could not leave defence solely in the hands of individual nations. The second pillar was that in times of austerity European nations might be more willing to spend money on their defence rather than on transatlantic undertakings. Given the uneven and now seemingly unpopular level of European integration, the logic behind autonomous European defence is starting to crumble. The European elections, far from undermining Nato, in fact show the need for collective security to be bolstered outside the auspices of the EU.
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