The International Relations of the EU

Steve Marsh, Hans Mackenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317873433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

In an incisive and lively discussion International Relations of the EU examines both the economic and security dimensions of European Union external relations. The book adopts an innovative approach that combines International Relations with International Political Economy.

Set against a backdrop of EU enlargement and disarray over military intervention in Iraq, International Relations of the EU is a timely contribution to our understanding of the Eu's role as an international actor.

The text is suitable for advanced undergraduate courses in Politics and International Relations.

The European Community and international security: from World War Two to Post-Cold War

CHAPTER 1

In November 1993 a European Union (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) came into force. In December 1998 an Anglo-French summit meeting at St Malo laid foundations for the development of an EU Rapid Reaction Force (EURRF). In December 2002 the Union decided at the Copenhagen Summit to admit a further ten countries to full membership, the majority of which were formerly communist Central and East European countries (CEECs). These are but three of the dramatic changes that the EU has undergone in its evolution as an international security actor since the end of the Cold War. Yet to assess how and why these changes were made, and to appreciate fully their significance, it is just as necessary to understand the past as it is the present.

This chapter places the development of integration and of the European Community (EC) as a security actor in the context of international systemic change. It examines how the legacies of World War Two (WW2) and post-war international events helped first to catalyse integration and then to mould the EC’s subsequent development as an international security actor within a bipolar system where the security environment was dominated by Cold War concerns. It then explains how a fine blend of purposive action, serendipity and changes in the international system help account for the EC’s rise as an influential international security actor and how the transatlantic relationship served as a sensitive barometer of the Community’s growing role and impact. Finally, it outlines how the collapse of the Cold War suddenly recast the security assumptions of four decades’ standing and introduces some of the enormous changes and challenges with which the EC was newly confronted.

Post-war Europe – no place for integration?

Winning the peace has throughout history often proved to be as difficult as winning the war, if not more so. This fact was amply demonstrated by the onset of WW2 just two decades after the conclusion of World War One (WW1), the so-called war to end all wars. It was a fact, too, not lost on those in power during WW2. The failure of collective security under the League of Nations, the United States’ (US) retreat to isolationism, the weaknesses of the Versailles peace settlement, ideological rivalry, historical enmities – such as those between France and Germany – and a severe economic recession that produced conditions ripe for political extremism: these were but some of the factors identified as contributing to Europe’s descent once more into war in 1939.

Allied leaders thus planned for a post-war order that would combat such factors and provide instead for a new international system and lasting peace. This planning was driven predominantly by the US and Britain and was modified by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as best as it could. The envisaged post-war order was still to be based on independent sovereign states and its design reflected a calculated blend of old-style realist power politics, collective security idealism and neo-liberal institutionalism. Collective security, based on the notion of all for one and one for all, was to be provided through the creation of the United Nations (UN). The installation, though, of Britain, China, France, the US and the USSR as the veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council demonstrated the tempering realism of great power politics. It also marked an implicit recognition of traditional spheres of influence in which each great power bore particular responsibility and in which its legitimate security concerns would be recognised.

In addition, the US sought to install itself at the helm of a new international monetary regime that would prevent a recurrence of destructive inter-war parochialism and drives for self-sufficiency by promoting economic reconstruction and multilateral free trade. The foundation for this was laid in 1944 in the form of the Bretton Woods system. The dollar replaced sterling as the world’s dominant currency. Currency convertibility and fixed but adjustable exchange rates were established and the twin institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) were created to facilitate system stability, capital flows and balanced economic growth. This was augmented three years later when the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) helped to compensate for the failure of a proposed International Trade Organisation (ITO).¹

Despite the wartime calls of Resistance movements and encouraging rhetoric from political leaders such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the principal architects of the proposed post-war order perceived no need for states to move beyond co-operative arrangements and consequently envisaged no specific place for European integration. However, their post-war ‘grand design’ depended upon maintaining workable relations between, in particular, the US, Britain and the USSR. This was possible between the former two on account both of their so-called ‘special relationship’,² which was based around common values, shared experiences and unprecedented co-operation during the war, and of US leverage over Britain due to the latter’s accelerated wartime decline and dependence on American economic aid.³ The same was not true of the USSR. It only joined the Allied cause in a Faustian pact in 1941 once the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact proved chimerical and its subsequent co-operation was laden with distrust. For example, as the USSR endured massive casualties on the eastern front, Stalin and the Soviet Politburo feared that the West would either conclude a separate peace with Germany or leave the Red Army to engage the bulk of Hitler’s Wehrmacht by delaying D-Day. Also, although provision was made for state-controlled economies in the Bretton Woods agreement, the promotion of neo-liberal institutions and international capitalism was anathema to the communist system, and ideological differences subsumed to combating the Axis powers progressively returned to the fore as attention shifted to the spoils of war. Indeed, there was recurrent mutual suspicion about post-war intentions, and Soviet insecurity was exacerbated by successful US development of the atomic bomb, the American monopoly over which offset the USSR’s superior conventional forces in Europe.

By the end of 1945 key post-war questions remained unanswered, despite the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Inter-Allied relations were deteriorating rapidly, a trend exacerbated by the breaking of the wartime Roosevelt–Churchill–Stalin triumvirate owing to the death of the US President and Churchill’s general election defeat. Germany’s fate was foremost of the outstanding issues. Traditional problems posed by its Mittellage⁴ were exacerbated by its potentially pivotal role in economic reconstruction, widespread fear of German revanchism and the developing East–West distrust that made any solution to temporary quadripartite Allied occupation of Germany a vital security concern.

Meantime the West and the USSR engaged in a series of actions that each, rightly or wrongly, interpreted as ‘unfriendly’. From Moscow’s perspective history, ideology and security demands arising from the USSR’s geo-strategic position underscored the need to strip German assets and to establish buffer zones that could serve as defensive barriers against future German revanchism or against the West in general. It was thus logical and justifiable to re-incorporate the Baltic states, which protected maritime access to the central Russian plain and land access to Leningrad, to secure communist control over Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary – all of which had been willing German wartime accomplices – and to establish a Polish state that would be responsive to Soviet concerns, not least because Poland had been the launch-pad for three invasions of Russia within the preceding thirty years.⁵ It was equally reasonable to regard with concern the exclusion of Soviet forces from the occupation of Japan, Western demands for national self-determination within Soviet-controlled Europe and, particularly, the apparent reneging on commitments made at Potsdam when in September 1946 US Secretary of State Byrnes aired plans for German rehabilitation and self-government, at least within Anglo-American zones of occupation.

Conversely, history, ideology and realpolitik seemingly justified Western suspicion of Soviet expansionism, particularly following Stalin’s call for Soviet rearmament in 1946 and his refusal to withdraw forces from Iran that same year. Likewise, Western criticism of Soviet tactics in Poland appeared well-founded in view of agreements reached at Yalta and the fact that Britain and France had nominally gone to war to protect Polish independence against the Third Reich’s quest for lebensraum. In addition, salutary lessons drawn from inter-war appeasement of Nazi Germany, value clashes between liberal democracy and totalitarian regimes and the inherent conflict between capitalism and communism underpinned predictions contained in George Kennan’s famous 1946 Long Telegram of inevitable Soviet expansionism and his consequent call for resolute Western containment of this threat.⁶

Europe, indeed the world, was slipping into the Cold War. Although its precise origins remain a source of debate,⁷ the Cold War brought about an international order very different from that envisaged by Allied wartime planners. Moreover, Europe became the first major test of wills as East–West suspicion deepened, reciprocal threat perception heightened and the US acknowledged its interdependence with continental Europe. In 1947 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that the principal threat to American national security was economic collapse in Western Europe and the consequent accession to power of communist elements.⁸ Europe had experienced a general post-war political shift to the left. Communists were in coalition governments between 1945 and 1947 in France and Italy and national Communist Party membership in these countries exceeded 1 million and 1.7 million respectively in 1946. Worse still, American officials who visited Europe – such as Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William Clayton – found that economic distress was far more serious than anticipated, that political and social collapse was probable and that this could benefit only communism. The response of the US Truman administration, containment policy, was to shape the Western world’s security for over four decades. It was also to open the door for the development of European integration.

Integration’s Cold War stimulus

The US emerged from WW2 in an unrivalled position. It held a monopoly over the atomic bomb, led the world in conventional weapon technology, had almost doubled its gross national product (GNP), possessed the vast majority of the world’s financial reserves and had access to enormous domestic and overseas sources of vital raw materials, such as oil. Nevertheless, it needed a revitalised Europe to provide effective Cold War allies in the containment of communism and healthy markets to help prevent severe economic depression. In consequence, the Truman administration decided to extend security guarantees, provide aid for economic rehabilitation and, crucially, rethink American wartime planning and projected international commitments.

Considerations of hard security began to dominate the international agenda. The US had little to fear in 1947 from the USSR’s military threat, but West European nations were much less secure. Hence, in March 1948 Britain, France and the Benelux countries concluded a mutual defence agreement by setting up the Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO). This, however, was targeted at least in part against a future German threat and, with Germany occupied, France and Italy devastated and Britain in financial crisis, could do little should the 2.9 million men that the USSR still had under arms be ordered to march across continental Europe. Under considerable pressure from European countries and from a perceived mounting communist threat, the Truman administration reluctantly sought to allay European fears and to combat communist pressure on countries elsewhere, such as Greece and Turkey. In 1947 President Truman made a revolutionary pledge, in what became known as the Truman Doctrine, of a US peacetime commitment to Europe and to help nations to resist aggression from internal and external sources. More concretely, in April 1949 the US agreed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an intergovernmental military alliance that provided for mutual defence and that dominated West Europe’s hard security arrangements throughout the Cold War.

Still, though, events seemingly moved against the West. A US recession badly exacerbated the economic difficulties of Western Europe, China was lost to communism and in September 1949 a Soviet atomic test broke the US monopoly over the atom bomb, hitherto the shield behind which risks involved in containment policy could be undertaken in relative security. The Truman administration responded again, this time with a strategy that changed the face of the Cold War and the nature of containment. Formally developed in National Security Council Resolution 68 (NSC-68), the US globalised and militarised its containment strategy.⁹ Kennan’s original conception of containment was stripped of its flexibility and a grossly simplified perspective of international relations developed. Viewed through the lens of containment strategy, the international system was bipolar in configuration, being composed of two antipathetic ideological blocs. The US and the USSR were each hegemonic within their respective bloc and international relations were reduced to a ‘zero-sum game’ whereby any gain for communism was perceived as a loss to the West and vice versa. Also, NSC-68’s prescriptions meant that loss of the atomic bomb monopoly had to be compensated for by the search for even more powerful weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and a massive accretion of conventional military power.

None of this, however, was possible if economic devastation led Western Europe either to succumb to communism or to be incapable of undertaking the required massive rearmament programmes. The US thus had to stimulate West European economic reconstruction and co-operation if communism were to be combated, transatlantic recession prevented/mitigated and the necessary weaponry and wealth generated to enable declining West European states to contribute effectively to European military defence and to maintain their overseas commitments. This conclusion was tremendously important for European integration because it persuaded the Truman administration to sacrifice America’s drive for multilateral free trade upon the Cold War altar and instead to countenance and encourage regional integration, which it had hitherto considered an obstacle to its trade objectives.

Put simply, the new international situation meant that the potential benefits of integration to the US now outweighed the downside risks. First, integration provided an opportunity to remake ‘the Old World in the likeness of the New’¹⁰ – strength and prosperity could be returned to Europe by applying to it the American model of interstate trade and a single market. Second, integration could be a vehicle for political reconstruction and psychological reconciliation. The collective European memory had somehow to be quickly overridden such that nations that had been on opposing sides during WW2 would co-operate in order to combat together a new threat. Third, Europe’s potential economic powerhouse, Germany, had to be rehabilitated. Co-operation, deepening interdependence and, in particular, supranational controls offered a potential means to overcome slowly the wartime legacy of acute distrust and recrimination.¹¹

In 1947 the US backed its conviction in transatlantic interdependence and its new-found enthusiasm for European integration ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 The European Community and international security: from World War Two to post-Cold War
• 2 The European Community’s rise to economic might: from regional free-trade arrangement to global economic power?
• 3 The European Union and external relations
• 4 The post-Cold War EU–US security relationship
• 5 Friends or foes?: the EU–US economic relationship
• 6 The EU and security in Central and South-Eastern Europe
• 7 The EU’s economic relations with its European and Mediterranean neighbours
• 8 The EU and global security
• 9 The EU as a global economic actor
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index