Non-offensive Defence For The Twenty-first Century

Bjorn Moller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429720338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This anthology constitutes an attempt to take stock of the debate on non-offensive defence after the Cold War, providing information on a research project that was initiated in 1985 at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Research in Copenhagen.

PART ONE
NOD and Security Policy

1
Does NOD Have a Future in the Post-Cold War World?

Barry Buzan

Is NOD Still Relevant?

The idea of non-offensive defence (NOD) was a child of the Cold War. It developed during the late 1970s and 80s as a synthesis between previously antagonistic lines of thought in Strategic Studies and Peace Research. From Strategic Studies it took the principles that defence is necessary and that military means Eire acceptable. From Peace Research, it took a high level of sensitivity to the security dilemma, and the desire to break the cycle in which the defensive measures of one side were perceived as threatening by the other. Politically, NOD is rooted in the Realist idea of independent states operating in an anarchic international system. It is about consolidating national independence while avoiding the security dilemma. The objective of NOD thinkers was to design military forces that would provide defence (and deterrence) by offering a stout obstacle to invasion or occupation, but which would not themselves threaten others with invasion or obliteration. They wanted to draw back from the dangerous mutual terrorizing that marked the confrontation of increasingly offensive conventional and nuclear deployments and doctrines during the later years of the Cold War. They were concerned about the risks of accidental war and uncontrollable escalation built into NATO and Warsaw Pact military policies, and wanted to stop the frenzied dialogue of arms racing that was driven by these offensive military postures. The NOD synthesis of previously antagonistic positions was an important step towards a more balanced thinking about the realities of military security under conditions of high interdependence.

These origins mean that NOD was designed primarily in and for a bipolar world in which strategic and ideological rivalry dominated great power relations, and in which military security had top priority. Its focus was European, and it therefore assumed states with a relatively high degree of sociopolitical cohesion (strong states (see Buzan 1991: 96-107)). Such states could be capable not only or organizing a sophisticated territorial defence in depth, but also of leading an attempt to wind down the unnecessarily high levels of tension and mutually threatening armament in East-West relations. During the Cold War, NOD was fairly marginal. It had strong intellectual support in Germany, Denmark and several neutral states, but only had a strong influence on policy among the latter, notably Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Yugoslavia. No great power except Japan came close to adopting it.

This Cold War world started to crack during the late 1980s. In 1989 it began visibly to break up, and by the end of 1991, to the general amazement of nearly all observers, it had disappeared into history. During this process, NOD enjoyed a brief prominence. Gorbachev appeared to embrace it during 1987 as a principle not only for restructuring Soviet armed forces, but also for setting East-West military relations as a whole in a much less confrontational and hair-trigger posture. Once this openingwas made, some other leaders, notably the German foreign minister Genscher, also took up the idea. Sufficiency of force levels and defensive deployment postures became organizing ideas for the extensive arms reduction negotiations of that time (START, INF, CFE) and also for thinking about future relations between Europe and a Soviet Union that was still strong, but much friendlier and less immediately threatening.

But at the same time a whole set of developments seemed to point away from NOD. In Europe, the implosion of Soviet power in 1991, virtually removed the Soviet Union as a military threat to the West. Some nuclear threat remained, but the threat of invasion, on which the logic of NOD largely rested, evaporated with the fragmentation of Soviet armed forces. The emergence from the ashes of the inner Soviet empire of a new regional international system of fifteen successor states erected a massive military and political buffer between Western Europe and the remnants of Russian military power. The uncertain characteristics of this new regional system, and its high potential for ethnic, economic and territorial conflict, seemed to guarantee that its members could not and would not pose an invasion threat to Europe for many years to come. This meant that there was a sharp decline in the salience of the military security agenda generally in Western Europe, including NOD. It also meant that the main state carriers of the NOD idea in Europe were themselves thrown into a policy crisis (Waever 1992). Sweden, Finland, Austria and Yugoslavia all found their longstanding policy of neutralism and nonalignment made irrelevant. This, in turn, raised questions about the self-reliant NOD policies that these states had developed as expressions of their neutral status. Most of them turned swiftly towards the EC, but Yugoslavia, released from the constraints of the Cold War, disintegrated into civil war.

Given that Yugoslavia was one of the few living demonstrations of a NOD-type of defence policy, this was a serious blow to the idea. Forces designed for territorial defence in depth turned out to be a good foundation for secession. Armed militias showed themselves quite capable of savage behaviour in the highly charged atmosphere of inter-ethnic hatreds. Some aspects of the Yugoslav war seemed to support NOD theory, notably the early success of Slovenia in standing off the federal army and the later ability of the Croats and Serbs to hang on to contested territory. But the cost has been high. The terrible cost that territorial defence inflicts on the defenders, and the risk of NOD policies supporting conditions for civil war in weak states are both revealed by the Yugoslav experience. The lessons of Yugoslavia for NOD have yet to be fully assessed, and some of the conclusions will not be attractive.

Outside Europe the main events of 1990-91 also pointed away from NOD. The Gulf War was a triumph of offensive military strategy and equipment on both sides. It underlined the political utility for great powers of having highly mobile attack forces capable of operating at great distances: exactly the kind of forces that NOD advocates wished to remove. It also demonstrated the unsuitability of NOD ideas for the defence of small Third World states against larger aggressive neighbours. Even worse, it associated offensive great power forces with an operation sanctioned by the United Nations to redress an unlawful invasion and annexation by one state of its neighbour. The Gulf War thus legitimized offensive forces in the new world order (NWO) regardless of whether that order was seen as resting on American power or on a more prominent global management role for the UN Security Council. The war and its aftermath also accelerated worries about nuclear proliferation in the Third World. These worries were amplified by fears both that weapons and military knowledge were leaking out of the decaying body of the Soviet Union, and that several Third World countries were acquiring the technology for offensive missile delivery systems and weapons of mass destruction. These concerns did not suggest a strong place for NOD. Instead they seemed to reinforce the need for Western interventionary forces, and breathed new life into the vast technological project to develop and construct defences against ballistic missiles.

By 1992 it was clear that the new world order was not going to be just a more congenial version of the old one. As one would expect with the ending of a world war (albeit a cold one) in the utter defeat of one side, NWO was going to be something completely different. There is still much debate about the shape and nature of the NWO. Virtually all observers can agree that the great rivalries over industrial ideology that so plagued the twentieth century are now over. Liberal democracy has for the time being decisively seen off its fascist and communist challengers. There is also near consensus that bipolarity is dead, albeit some nuclear shadow of it still remains. Whatever the new power structure might be, it is not based on the domination of the international system by a pair of superpowers. These two developments underpin a third, which is that the political space of the Third World has shrunk sharply. Tiersmondisme is in full retreat, and developing countries face the prospect of reverting to the status of being a weak periphery to a strong capitalist centre.

Beyond this, the political structure of the NWO Is sharply contested. Some see it as enshrining the United States as the sole remaining superpower. In this vision, the NWO Is a unipolar order, with only the United States having the combination of economic and military power and political will to play a leadership role. Others focus less on the United States and more on the dominant coalition of capitalist powers as the key. Here the vision is of a multipolar system dominated by a single coalition—the security community of North America, the European Community and Japan. Yet others fear a new world disorder. They see a declining and increasingly self-centred United States no longer willing to play a global leadership role, with Japan and the EC too weak and unwilling politically to be possible successors. In this view, the likely drift is Into regional blocs with each of the main power centres more concerned about itself than about the system as a whole. The gloomiest versions see increasing protectionism and trade rivalry, neglect of the commercially uninteresting parts of the periphery, and possibly a reversion to international relations structurally reminiscent of the 1930s, albeit without either the ideological rivalry or the prospect of military competition over empires. A less gloomy version sees a reversion to regional blocs as potentially stabilizing. So long as the blocs themselves are voluntarily organized rather than imperial, as seems likely from present trends in Europe, East Asia and the Americas, then such a system might constitute a welcome retrenchment from an overstretched global international order¹. If the political resources do not exist to handle the global operation of a liberal economy, then liberal blocs may be an appropriate solution.

Wherever it may be going this emerging new world (dis)order would seem to pose a crisis of relevance for NOD. Is NOD a universal principle that in theory could be applied to any set of international relations? Or was it an idea historically specific to European conditions during the Cold War, which therefore passes into history with the coming of a new era? I will argue that NOD is a universal principle, but also that it may have trouble asserting its relevance in the more diverse, multipolar world that is now unfolding.

Dangers for NOD in the New World Order

The challenges to NOD that developed during 1990-91 are not just transient events in a period of unusually rapid and deep political change. They represent durable issues that will not soon disappear from the security agenda. In Western Europe, which is the heartland of NOD thinking, its short and medium term prospects look rather bleak. Given the precipitate decline of military threats to Western Europe, interest in military strategy for homeland defence has plummeted. Within the EC/EFTA area none of the states poses military threats to any of the others. The steady political and economic integration of this security community makes defence policy per se, including NOD, largely irrelevant for the whole set of international relations among this group of countries. One can only imagine a revival of the role of NOD for relations within this group if the integration process suffered a serious reversal. Should the EC process break down, NOD could become a very attractive way of founding a security regime among the European states.

Between this group and the states to the east, Western European governments are for the time being anxious to treat the new states In Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union as friends. Their inclusion in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) is a strong symbolic, and perhaps practical, gesture In this direction. During the sensitive period of transition away from communism it would thus be inappropriate to give much political consideration to military defence policies against these countries—even friendly NOD ones. There is little prospect that this situation will change quickly. Only Russia remains capable of mounting a military threat to Europe. Although this possibility cannot be written off entirely, the consuming economic and political problems of the country, and the uncertainty of its relations with its many new neighbours, point strongly in the opposite direction. The Middle East is too fragmented and too consumed by Its own internal disputes to mount threats of invasion against Europe. For at least a decade ahead, it therefore seems safe to say that Europe's security concerns will be primarily socioeconomic in character. Migration, economic and financial health, and identity issues will dominate the security agenda (Wasver et al. 1993).

The ending of the Cold War also affects the relationship of nuclear weapons to NOD. This relationship has always been controversial. Some, probably most, NOD advocates saw the policy as a way of reducing or even eliminating reliance on nuclear weapons. Others, whether implicitly or explicitly, saw NOD under Cold War conditions as requiring a backup of minimum nuclear deterrence. Since the ending of the Cold War there have been large strides towards minimum deterrence. This might be seen as putting one element of NOD into place, and certainly helps the advocacy of NOD by disarming some of the Cold War criticisms of it, such as vulnerability to nuclear blackmail, and nuclear blitzkrieg. But since it also takes much of the controversy out of nuclear weapons and deterrence, it undermines the political incentives to adopt NOD in the first place.

It might be thought that the dismantling of the armed confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would open up opportunities for NOD In the massive arms reductions and military restructuring that inevitably follow. Although there is still much confusion and drift in this area, NOD ideas seem unlikely to play a prominent role. In part this is because there are no "within area" threats to NATO that justify a NOD posture. In part also it is because the political changes in East-West relations, and the arms reductions in Europe, appear largely to have met the main concerns underlying NOD. Threats of invasion have been removed, mllitaiy forces have been reduced and pulled back, perceptions of enmity have been turned around, and the security dilemma has been largely stilled. Given the general lowering of concern about military security, it is hard to imagine that political resources will be devoted to pressing for a complex transformation of armed forces towards NOD configurations. Expediency, lack of concern, and a shortage of political resources suggest the more traditional policy of simply weakening the armed forces during a sustained period of low perceptions of military threat. NOD ideas may play some role in doctrinal debates and policies within the armed forces as they cope with restructuring, but they are unlikely to be prominent In political debates, where Gulf War precedents so far seem more influential.

In this context, the debate about military restructuring within NATO has focused mostly on the need to deploy rapid reaction forces for "out of area" operations. This debate has of course been much influenced by the war against Iraq. In both Western Europe and the United States (International Herald Tribune, 18 February 1992, p. 4) the relief from the steady burden of confronting the Soviet Union has turned military attention towards the Third World. There seems to be emerging a clear desire to retain a substantial capability for military intervention in the Third World. The purposes that might Justify such intervention are more problematic, though the Iraqi case suggests that major threats to Western economic interests will be a front runner. Rhetoric suggests that another leading contender may be the enforcement of nuclear non-proliferation norms, though this has yet to be put to the test. It is much less clear whether the West will adopt a generally more interventionist posture towards the periphery, and therefore whether concerns about human rights, local territorial disputes, or political disorder will be seen as justifying military Intervention. The campaign against Libya during 1992 suggested that support for terrorism might also be taken to justify intervention by the centre. Regardless of its details, this drift is wholly at odds with NOD thinking. It requires precisely the type of forces that NOD rejects, and It raises difficult political questions about the relationship of NOD thinking to broader issues of great power responsibility and the management of international order (Bull 1977, ch. 9).

In Western Europe, there is the additional complication of the attempt to construct a European defence identity within NATO, and possibly within the EC/WEU (Gambles 1991). The nature of this "identity" is still under debate, options ranging from more coordination of national policies at one end, to substantial military integration at the other. Although still Ill-formed and contentious, this debate does create an important context for equally confused national debates. It raises the stakes for NOD by putting emphasis on the European level as opposed to the national one. In parallel with neutrality, advocacy of NOD on the national level in Europe risks coming into conflict with the attempt to consolidate a European defence Identity. Advocacy of NOD on the European level faces all the problems outlined above, though it might have attraction as an organizing principle for an integrated, or multilateral, European force. These attractions would increase if there was any revival of military threat perceptions from Russia. They might also become salient If desire increased to tighten the binding of German strength into the European construction.

Opportunities for NOD in the New World Order

If the prospects for NOD in Western Europe do not seem particularly promising, that does not mean that the idea is irrelevant for other parts of the international system. In whatever form the NWO works out there would seem to be potential scope for NOD among the ex-communist states, in East Asia, and in many parts of the Third World. It might also find a place in shaping some of the norms and rules for the NWO in areas such as aid and the arms trade.

The states of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union may well present the best short-term prospects for NOD. These states are busy forming not only their new identities, but also a whole new pattern of regional inter-state relations. Up to the time of writing (July 1992) the dismantling of the Soviet Union has, considering its scale and scope, been a remarkably peaceful exercise. But there is no guarantee that relations within the region will remain peaceful. There is a lot of potential for boundary disputes, and for frictions over the economic and military legacy of the Soviet Union. Newly unleashed nationalisms may well revive historic antagonism, and the process of consolidating national identities in the new states might easily tempt unstable governments into raising the temperature with neighbours. Russian-Ukrainian disputes over the Black Sea fleet and the Crimea, Azeri-Armenian disputes over Nagorno-Karabakh, Lithuanian-Russian disputes over the Kaliningrad enclave, and many worries about the status of Russian minorities outside Russia, all under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE NOD and Security Policy
• PART TWO NOD and Military Planning
• PART THREE Regional Applications
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index