Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communities in European Security and Defence Policy

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Discourse, Ideas, andEpistemic Communitiesin European Security andDefence PolicyJolyon HoworthPublished online: 06 Aug 2006.

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The end of the Cold War represented a shift in the tectonic plates of history,politics and international relations comparable in significance to those of1789–95, 1917–19 and 1945–49. The major difference with those previousturning points was the absence of war and violence as midwife. Ideas, aswell as ‘reality’, were able to come fully into play. For the first time in twocenturies, history offered international actors a relatively blank sheet ofpaper on which to write the outlines of a new world order. It also seemed tooffer a reasonable breathing space during which to draft that blueprint. Andyet, as a recent collected volume has demonstrated (Niblett and Wallace2001), most European governments initially responded neither rationally (assome insist they do) nor constructively (as others suggest they can). Instead,the picture was, at least until 1997, at best one of ‘disjointedincrementalism’ (Wallace 2001: 286), at worst one of dithering, drift andperceived impotence. Sir Michael Howard (1990), pondering the 30-year-long stranglehold of Cold War ideas, noted in his Alastair Buchan lecture toIISS1 in March 1990: ‘We became so accustomed to the prison that historyhad built for us that, like recidivists or long-term hospital patients, webecame almost incapable of visualising any other kind of existence. Noother world, it seemed, could exist.’ Yet this was the first major shift in thegeology of international relations since the establishment of the disciplineitself. Research institutes and think-tanks existed in all European countries.Ideas abounded, and policy papers tumbled off the printers in a never-ending stream. New thinking and new ideas eventually played a vital role inthe shift towards new policy preferences and even a new policy paradigm.The role of legitimating discourse is more complex. In some countries itworked, in others it did not. This article will attempt to explain why.

Stuart Croft (2000) analysed the clash of ideas involved in four ‘securitynarratives’ that competed with each other in the immediate aftermath of theCold War. He suggested a variety of largely politico-ideational reasons for

Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communitiesin European Security and Defence Policy

JOLYON HOWORTH

West European Politics, Vol.27, No.2 (March 2004), pp.211–234ISSN 0140-2382DOI: 10.1080/0140238042000214883 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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the mid-1990s ‘victory’ of the one narrative which, in early 1990, hadseemed the least likely to prevail – the re-emergence of NATO (NorthAtlantic Treaty Organisation) as the dominant security actor in Europe. Onesignificant feature in Croft’s analysis is that the original ‘NATO narrative’was substantially transformed through the absorption of key ideas from theother contending narratives, thereby constituting (or constructing) a newoverall idea which was not present at the outset. Ideas, though notunconnected to interests, can take on a life of their own. The aim of thispaper is to scrutinise the policy-making process in order to understand theconnection between interests, ideas and discourse in the construction of yetanother security narrative emerging in 1998/99 – European Security andDefence Policy (ESDP) – which many were led to believe posed a challengeto the apparently triumphal NATO narrative of the mid-1990s. This studyconcentrates on the role in this process of three countries – Britain, Franceand, to a lesser extent, Germany – not only because they are the mainsecurity players in Europe, but also because they offer strikingly contrastingpictures of the metamorphosis of a policy community, of the seminal role ofideas, and of the importance of appropriate political discourse. It takes as amethodological framework for the development of this analysis theapproach to discourse pioneered by Vivien Schmidt in several recentpublications. Discourse thus has both an ideational dimension, withcognitive and normative functions, and an interactive dimension, with co-ordinative and communicative functions (Schmidt 2000).

Painfully slowly, and in many cases with genuine reluctance, WestEuropean élites gradually constructed, in the second half of the 1990s, atransformative discourse of foreign and security relations, bit by bit puttingflesh on the bones of mere acronyms (CFSP 1990; ESDI 1994), tossed intothe ring years earlier, before they were endowed with substance or meaning.These elites produced a new transformative idea in international relations:the Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP). Thattransformation is still in process.

How did this happen? Study of the influence of ideas on security anddefence policy is hardly even in its infancy. Goldstein and Keohane (1993)examined the impact of ideas on foreign policy, but avoided addressingsecurity, still less defence issues. It is generally assumed that the impact ofideas – as distinct from, but not necessarily as opposed to – interests isweakest in the field of security and defence policy. And yet it has becomebanal to record that almost all of the realist, interest-based analyses of theearly 1990s proved to be incorrect: that the US would abandon Europe andthat NATO would collapse (Mearsheimer 1990; Waltz 1990), that NATO

POLICY CHANGE AND DISCOURSE IN EUROPE212

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would not enlarge eastwards (Mearsheimer 1994–95); and (though the jurymay still be out on this one) that the Europeans would prove incapable ofmoving towards a co-ordinated security capacity (Gordon 1994). In anycase, it is almost impossible, in globalised 2004, to define with any degreeof accuracy the notion of ‘national interests’.2

How did policy élites construct a radically new discourse on Europeansecurity – which facilitated a wholesale transition from the world of theCold War to that of ESDP – essentially a new ‘coordinative discourse’(Schmidt 2000b; 2002: 232–4) or référentiel (Muller 1995; Jobert 1992)?What was the role, in that construction, of ideas (Hall 1993), of epistemiccommunities (Haas 1992), of advocacy coalitions (Sabatier 1998), of theinterplay of inter-subjective norms, values and identities (Katzenstein 1996;Wendt 1999)? And how did those ideational forces interact with theperceived ongoing interests of nation-states? How much of the debate wasinternational or transnational and to what extent was such rethinking as didtake place re-thought over and over again within each national community?How did different countries shift from long-held shibboleths (British‘Atlanticism’, French ‘exceptionalism’, German ‘pacifism’ and‘civilianism’) towards a common acceptance of integrated Europeaninterventionism, based not solely on the classical stakes of national interest,but also on far more idealistic motivations such as humanitarianism andethics, thereby introducing a new normative paradigm into internationalrelations? How successfully did European leaders succeed, via a‘communicative discourse’ (Schmidt 2002: 234–50), in putting this newvision across to a public unschooled in the niceties of neo-realism or offoreign policy itself? How do we explain anomalies such as Tony Blair’sapparent 180-degree pirouette on European defence within 18 months?3 DidBritish interests change radically within that brief time-frame, or did ideasmake the difference?

IMAGINING A NEW EUROPEAN ORDER: EDGING BEYOND

THE COLD WAR

‘1989 and all that’ happened very fast, but it did not happen in a vacuum.Evolving security and defence policy options and preferences pre-existedthe end of the Cold War in all capitals and a lively debate already ragedwithin the policy community over something called ‘Europeanisation’.Different nations interpreted that concept in different ways, but prior to1989 it was generally perceived as a process involving the construction ofsome sort of European pillar inside NATO. The reference text became the

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Western European Union (WEU) ‘Platform of The Hague’ (October 1987)in which the Europeans pledged themselves to greater collective efforts toreinforce the ‘obligations of solidarity’ to which they were committedthrough the Washington Treaty and the Modified Brussels Treaty. The keyfeatures of this new co-ordinative discourse – which distinguished it fromthat of the 1960s and 1970s – were a new willingness on the part of theEuropeans to discuss their collective interests and preferences as a caucuswithin the Alliance, and also to try to move towards greater Euro-Americanbalance in influence and responsibilities. France had signed up to thePlatform for its discursive assertion of Europeanness; Germany because itperfectly epitomised the subtle dialectic between Atlanticism andEuropeanism to which Bonn had always aspired; and Britain because thetraumas of the Reagan years had taught even a man as impervious toradicalism as the UK Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe that genuineEuropean security required greater efforts on the part of the Europeansthemselves and a new balance within the Alliance. This embryonic newconsensus – the new référentiel – which bound together the policycommunities of the leading European nations at the end of the 1980s, hadbeen painstakingly knitted together over the previous decade throughshifting patterns of interests,4 revealed and exacerbated by historicaltraumas such as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) and StrategicDefence Initiative (SDI) crises (Howe 1986; Howorth 1986/87), throughinstitutional processes such as European Political Co-operation (EPC –Nuttall 1992) and the ‘revitalisation’ of the Western European Union (WEU1987), and even through a growing European inter-subjectivity based oncultural norms and values (Kaldor 1991). Yet, within two years, the fall ofthe Berlin Wall rendered this new consensus practically redundant. Acomplete new rethink was necessary.

France was the obvious candidate to drive the rethink, but at the sametime it was the country that would have to undergo, in the process, the mostfar-reaching internal military transformation. For the new European securitypackage that finally emerged from the Treaty of Nice in 2001 involvedreplacing: nuclear deterrence with conventional intervention; conscriptionwith highly professional armed forces capable of distant power projection;military independence with force integration; exclusive national policymechanisms with shared Brussels-based institutions; and a jealouslyprotected state-run armaments industry with a Europe-wide consortium ofweapons-systems manufacturers driven by market forces.5 This was a verytall order. However, the ideational underpinning of this Franco-Europeansecurity revolution was already in place. For 50 years, France had aspired


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to create a European security order, which would enjoy relative autonomyfrom the United States within a re-balanced Alliance (Bozo 2000). Gaullistdiscourse, during the Cold War, had totally failed to convince France’sEuropean partners of the merits of that vision.6 The challenge for Paris in the1990s was to elaborate a new co-ordinative discourse – both nationally andEurope-wide – with which to promote a new version of the same idea toEuropean partners who had already repeatedly rejected it in its previousmanifestations (EDC in the 1950s, Fouchet in the 1960s, revamped WEU inthe 1970s). The historical blank sheet was there to be written on. Mostserious commentators on the ‘new world order’ in the immediate aftermathof 1990 assumed that NATO had become at best a subject for renegotiation,at worst a dead duck. This is where French discourse really did matter. For,despite the mythology, Paris had never sought to undermine the Allianceand throughout the Cold War had benefited enormously from its stabilisingeffects. What France had constantly proposed was a new balance within it.1989 appeared to offer a realistic prospect of finally achieving that goal.

Accordingly, on 19 April 1990, François Mitterrand boarded Concorde toexchange ideas with George Bush at Key Largo, Florida. The Key Largomeeting is significant because it contained in embryo the entire package ofcontradictory ideas which would continue to bedevil Franco-Americanrelations throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. It was in many ways a‘dialogue of the deaf’. But the key ideas promoted by France were alreadyon the launch-pad: (1) the Alliance should focus its remit on Article 5collective defence responsibilities and not attempt to transform itself into aninstrument for extended US political hegemony; (2) Europe, poised to debatepolitical union through a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP – anidea-project which, not coincidentally, Mitterrand and Kohl had floated thevery same day the President flew to Key Largo), would gradually take onresponsibility for collective security in Europe and its near neighbours; (3)there would be a new EU–US dialogue inside the Alliance about ultimatestrategic and political objectives leading to a subsequent debate aboutmilitary and institutional restructuring.7 France had to undergo a steeplearning curve in the construction of a convincing co-ordinative discourse topromote these ideas. The attempts were marked by early failure andconfusion. The Gulf and Bosnian conflicts temporarily hung a huge – realist– question mark over the construction of this new security arrangement. Yet,ultimately, this was in essence to be the package agreed by the EU at Nice inDecember 2000. How did we get from Key Largo to Nice?

The French President was in a position to articulate the outlines of thisideational package on behalf of his country for two main reasons. First,


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because over the course of his tenure at the Elysée he had become theundisputed master of French strategic doctrine. Second, because thatdoctrine was underpinned by a relatively sophisticated and extensiveepistemic community within France. This community, emanating from theCentre d’Analyse et de Prévision in the Quai d’Orsay and the Délégationaux Affaires Stratégiques at the Ministry of Defence, consolidated throughinstitutions such as the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale(IHEDN), think-tanks such as the Institut Français des RelationsInternationales (IFRI) and the Fondation pour les Etudes de DéfenseNationale/Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FEDN/FRS), andcommunications strategies such as those pursued by the SIRPA/DICOD,8

cultivated and sustained a genuine consensus on defence and securitypolicy, a co-ordinative discourse or référentiel which commandedsubstantial support across the entire political class (Gregory 2000: 22–32).The fact that Mitterrand himself, from 1990 onwards, progressively lost histouch and fought shy of the essential structural reforms9 that wouldeventually underpin the strategy he had outlined at Key Largo, is incidental.The existence of that crucial epistemic community was the guarantee thatwhatever needed to be done to pursue and implement the overall strategywould be done. And so, over the next few years, the wide-ranging debatewhich took place throughout this broad-based community generated theentire range of ideas which would progressively be refined and distilled viathe various Lois de programmation militaire, Budgets de la Défense, the1994 Livre Blanc and 1996 defence reforms (Une Défense Nouvelle1997–2015) into a new European project (Howorth 1998). Ideas, inabundance, put the flesh on the bones of the Key Largo project. It isimportant to note that, at this stage, this co-ordinative discourse was beingconstructed at a purely national level, albeit with a very wide reach.

By contrast, British policy in this period was characterised by an almosttotal absence of ideas. Margaret Thatcher through conviction, and JohnMajor through political caution and inhibition, attempted to cling to asecurity order that had essentially disappeared (Forster and Wallace 2001).Thatcher’s policy was largely irrational and emotional, informed by anatavistic sense of British interests and identity (Wallace 1991), and amisguided Germanophobia, which led her to try to forestall Europeandevelopments already well under way (Thatcher 1993: 791–9). Shesurrounded herself with ‘Yes-men’ and ignored alternative ideas beingtentatively formulated in Whitehall. Major, while pragmatically aware thatthe emergence of some form of European pillar or identity was becoming ahistorical inevitability, refused steadfastly to engage his European


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colleagues in discussions on such a project and worked exclusively withWashington, with NATO, and with the more Atlanticist Defence Ministriesof Europe10 to try to ensure the pre-eminence of NATO in any emergingEuropean security architecture and the pre-eminence of Britain within thatNATO-centred framework. The Labour Party was no more imaginative,restricting its 1992 election manifesto to a one-line pledge on NATO.11 AsMajor progressively became a hostage of the Europhobic extremists insidehis parliamentary party, such limited thinking on European defence issuesas did take place in London was predicated on the perceived electoralnecessity of distancing the UK from the dangerous and heretical Europeantheories being spun in Paris. This climaxed in the quasi-hysterical tour ofEuropean capitals by Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind in spring 1997,threatening hell and high water if the ‘continental’ project for EU–WEUmerger were not dropped. Rifkind’s discourse had nothing whatever to dowith defence or security policy and everything to do with his bid to succeedMajor as party leader after the expected Tory defeat in the forthcomingparliamentary elections. In short, events in the early 1990s conspired toprevent any developments towards a new security discourse within theBritish political class.

Meanwhile, in the corridors of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) andForeign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the bunkers of Bosnia and theoffices of the think-tanks, it was becoming obvious that current British(non-) discourse on defence and security was not only unsustainable butactually counter-productive. Bosnia offered two linked lessons. First, as hadin any case become abundantly clear from the burden-sharing debates onCapitol Hill, Uncle Sam’s cavalry was no longer available on request tomanage minor European security crises. Second, Franco-British co-operation on the ground in the Balkans had brought home to militaryplanners in both countries that the shift within Europe from deterrence tointervention was forcing London and Paris into one another’s arms.National interest, to the extent to which it could be perceived, was no longergoing to be served by clinging to US apron-strings which were visiblyfraying. Those whose job it was in London to come up with new ideas werefaced with a serious task. The alpha and omega of the new project was theretention and enhancement of the Alliance, which was increasinglyperceived to be in deep trouble. Somehow or other – paradoxically – aEuropean instrument had to be found to solve the problem. The onlysignificant partner in this strange project was France, whose starting pointwas diametrically opposite: the alpha and omega for Paris was Europe, thepotential instrument Atlanticist. But there was one ray of light at the end of


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the tunnel. France, for largely pragmatic reasons, had begun its re-entry intothe NATO orbit. Both countries therefore shared a NATO–EU conundrum.Could they come up with an idea that would bridge the gap between theirrespective starting (and finishing?) points?

THINKING ABOUT WEU: PART OF THE SOLUTION OR PART OF

THE PROBLEM?

One idea that was to cause enormous confusion – and to constitute a three-to four-year distraction from the real focus – was WEU. In a sense, WEUwas always little more than an idea – and one, to boot, whose time never didcome. WEU had been the focus of the new consensus in the late 1980s(Platform of The Hague) and was identified at Maastricht – given theabsence of alternative candidates – as the key to the EU’s securityconundrum. A vast literature began to appear in the mid-1990s geared tosolving the almost impossible EU–WEU–NATO equation. WEU becamethe central focus of the security and defence debate during the 1996 Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) discussions. It appealed to governmentsbecause it was intergovernmental; it appealed to military people because itwas Europe’s only quasi-military organism; it appealed to institutionalistsbecause it posed a fascinating institutional challenge; and it appealed toexperts on Europe and especially on European security because it wasEuropean. And the ideas went round and round in circles (Deighton 1997;Dumoulin and Remacle 1998; Rees 1998). But already, by 1996/97, in bothParis and London, small policy-making communities had begun to come upwith another idea, which in fact proved to be the key to ESDP: abandonWEU in favour of a straightforward direct relationship between the EU andNATO. Little by little, a co-ordinative discourse to this effect emerged, firstamong national elites and then at bilateral Franco-British level andeventually at trans-European level. The idea that WEU, instead of being thesolution, might in fact be the main problem was first generated by a verysmall handful of policy-makers in Paris and London – quite independentlyof one another.12 The strategic thinking in each case was quite different. ForParis, abandonment of the (increasingly impossible) WEU conundrum,while risky, had the advantage of leading logically to a direct EU militarycapacity. For London, abandoning WEU implied a division of labourbetween an EU political capacity – based on new institutions – and a NATOmilitary capacity – based on European Security and Defence Identity(ESDI) and Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs). The French approach wasstrategic: how to reach the ultimate goal; the British essentially tactical: how


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to stay on track. Thus, by the time the Blair government was elected in1997, a very similar solution existed, at least at the level of ideas, in theminds of policy planners on both sides of the Channel. What was nowrequired was a co-ordinative discourse that would generate élite consensus,followed by a communicative discourse that could sell the project to thepublic. In France, this was unproblematic since the idea fitted perfectly withlong-established policy preferences and cultural norms and values. InBritain, it was highly problematic since it involved justifying a significantpolicy shift whose rationale was no clearer to most non-specialists thanwere its consequences. It also appeared to fly in the face of cherishedAtlanticist norms and values.

Another key actor was Germany. Here, the role of ideas, norms andvalues was paramount. Germany positively bristles with foreign andsecurity policy think-tanks, institutes, experts and commentators whoselinks to government are close and permanent.13 A robust and deeplyembedded co-ordinative discourse, particularly on security policy,constructed by a wide range of actors, has been a feature of German policyfor most of the post-war period, with the exception of the INF/Euromissilesepisode in the early 1980s. The cardinal ideas informing the Germandiscourse in the early to mid-1990s were relatively few and straightforward:(1) Contrary to the fears of many in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,there would be no German national pathway (Sonderweg), but a stronginternational, predominantly European, embeddedness; (2) ‘neutralism’would not be an option; (3) German military capacity would remain tightlypegged to NATO’s Article 5 collective defence commitments and Germanforces would not be used in out of area operations; (4) conscription (asopposed to professionalism) would both underpin the sense of republicanidentity and norms that the Bundeswehr epitomised, and guard against anyprospect of a return to the errors of the past; (5) a European securitycapacity would be an important – and growing – part of CFSP as a factor ofintegration, but it would be tightly pegged to NATO; (6) German budgetarycommitment to European security would derive more from investment,development and stabilisation aid in Central and Eastern Europe than froman increased defence budget, and there was a marked preference fordiplomatic, economic and civilian instruments in pursuing foreign andsecurity policy goals. Increasingly, under pressure of events and alliedpersuasion, the Bundeswehr assumed a more extended role in crisismanagement and peace support operations (Sarotte 2001), but here again,this was the direct product of a cross-party co-ordinative discoursesophisticatedly stage-managed by ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Checkel 1998) or


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‘norm entrepreneurs’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) such as Volker Rühe,Joschka Fischer, Rudolph Scharping and Karsten Voigt. Although in manyways Germany felt closer to the UK in security policy preferences, it chose– for reasons connected with the centrality in Berlin of Europapolitik – toprioritise the security partnership with France, however unsatisfactory andcomplex that option might prove to be. A European defence initiativeseemed a natural development for a nation that saw federal perspectivesdown every road.

THE ‘BLAIR REVOLUTION’ IN BRITAIN: IDEAS WITHOUT DISCOURSE

The election of Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister in May 1997 came as anenormous relief to security policy-makers not only in Britain but across theContinent. It is an open secret in Whitehall that officials in both the FCOand the MOD had, by 1997, reached their wits’ end in trying to feed newsecurity ideas into a government that simply did not want to listen. Yetdefence and security were not high on Labour’s policy agenda and thinkingwithin the party had not really shifted much since 1992.14 Blair’s firstserious foreign policy speech had to await the Lord Mayor’s dinner inNovember 1997. It was a rather unimaginative rehearsal of standard Britishaspirations to act as a bridge between Europe and the USA. But within theFCO and the MOD, and in think-tanks such as the Centre for EuropeanReform, ideas were on the move. The Foreign Office had, for most of the1990s, been exchanging officials with the Quai d’Orsay and theAuswärtiges Amt and had established CFSP and European Security unitswith the express task of co-ordinating policy approaches with Paris andBonn/Berlin. The MOD had set up a European Security unit in 1996 andsenior officials up to the level of Director of Policy were increasinglyinteracting with their opposite numbers in the major European capitals.Internal papers, such as the seminal Robert Cooper memorandum of 1997,were increasingly reflecting a new approach embracing the one idea which,for 50 years, had been taboo in Whitehall: a defence and security remit forthe EU itself. These ideas coincided with those emanating from the think-tanks (Grant 1996). While by no means distancing themselves fromAtlanticist norms or from NATO, this small handful of policy-shapersbecame convinced, by 1997, that Britain had to cross a European Rubicon.Richard Whitman (1999) has recounted in detail the story of how theseideas were fed into the Downing Street mill with the result that, by the timeof the informal summit of EU leaders in Pörtschach, Austria (24–25 October1998), Blair indicated that he was prepared to cross that Rubicon.


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His crossing was assisted by two factors. The first was that, by late 1997,the new UK government was beginning to receive a very clear messagefrom Washington. Far from a European security capacity being perceived inDC as prejudicial to the Alliance (as London had believed for 50 years), itwas now being openly touted as the very salvation of the Alliance: unlessEurope got its security act together, NATO was dead in the water. This wasan idea that galvanised British security cultural thinking.15 The second factorwas the gathering of fresh storm-clouds over the Balkans. When Blair wasfirst properly briefed, in mid-1998, on Europe’s seriously defective capacityto react to a hypothetical crisis in Kosovo, he was appalled. Europe, heconcluded, simply had to turn its attention to defence. The rest followed:Pörtschach, St Malo, Cologne, Helsinki and Nice.

However, a key feature of the British paradigm shift was its restrictedcommunity. It is no exaggeration to say that fewer than two dozenindividuals were involved in constructing the co-ordinative discourse thatgenerated the UK side of the St Malo paradigm shift. This handful of topofficials should be differentiated from the broader defence community inthe UK, which had been involved in redefining national defence policy in1998 through the Strategic Defence Review (SDR). The SDR involvedthousands of individuals – service personnel, parliamentarians, officials andexperts – throughout Labour’s first year in office. Revealingly, the Reviewwas conducted with virtually no reference to or consultation with Britain’sEuropean partners. Constructing a co-ordinative discourse capable ofconverting this broader community to the heresy of Europeanism wouldhave been too serious a challenge at this stage. And yet the SDR did containone seminal sentence referring to the ‘vital role of the EU’ in defencepolicy-making, a phrase which went unnoticed at the time, but which in factprovided the ‘key to Saint-Malo’.16 That handful of UK officials responsiblefor the new thinking was, however, becoming part of a new internationalepistemic community that was to take up the new paradigm and refine it.The teams of officials working on a new approach to European defence inthe Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) and MODs in Paris, London andBonn/Berlin were getting to know one another, to generate something of awavelength, and to speak a language which, while not identical, was at leastmutually comprehensible. The French seized on Blair’s Pörtschachbreakthrough and proposed that the forthcoming Franco-British summit inSt Malo become the opportunity for a significant statement on Europeandefence. Blair agreed and requested a text. The first draft came from theQuai and was deemed non-negotiable by the FCO. It contained no referenceto NATO. Accordingly, when the British delegation arrived in St Malo in the


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late afternoon of 3 December 1998, blank sheets of paper were provided andthe two MFA Political Directors, with one or two assistants, jointly draftedthe text which, around 3.00 the following morning, was silently pushedunder the bedroom doors of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. The St Malodeclaration contains one reference to the Treaty of Washington, tworeferences to the Atlantic Alliance and four references to NATO. It alsocontains ten references to the European Union, three references to theEuropean Council and, most significantly of all, the word which really letthe genie out of the bottle: ‘autonomy’.17 The Political Directors had strucka deal: ‘European autonomy’ would underpin the ‘vitality of a modernisedAtlantic Alliance’. The first element satisfied the French; the secondsatisfied the British. It all seemed very neat. The French knew more or lessexactly what they understood by that formula. It was not the same thing aswas understood by the British (Howorth 2000b). Nevertheless, St Malorepresented a paradigm shift in European security thinking.

In addition to the restricted community behind it, another key feature ofthe British paradigm shift was the lack of any parallel effort to generate awider co-ordinative discourse bringing other élites into the loop or, still less,a communicative discourse geared to explaining to the public what wasgoing on. St Malo was simply announced to the watching world as aFranco-British breakthrough that was supposed to help ensure that futureBosnias did not happen. Blair’s real problem was that he actually neededfour separate discourses: one for his European partners (assuring them ofthe UK’s earnest in this radical shift), one for his Washington partners(assuring them that there was, in effect, no real shift at all), one for UK élites(explaining to them in cognitive terms exactly how the new Euro-Atlanticbalance was intended to work), and one for the British public (persuadingthem in more normative terms that this crossing of the European Rubiconwas in line with the Atlanticist values that had for so long underpinned UKdefence policy). This was an impossible task – politically and linguistically.The result: no discourse at all. Or rather, a misleading and in some waysdisingenuous discourse. When Madeleine Albright and the Washingtondefence community woke up on the morning of 5 December, they wereshocked by the St Malo text. Albright responded with her famous ‘ThreeDs’,18 whereupon the UK government embarked on the line to which it hasstuck ever since: that the important component in St Malo is the ‘revitalisedAtlantic Alliance’. All that ‘autonomous’ was supposed to mean was that theEuropean component would only come into effect ‘where the Alliance as awhole is not engaged’. In private, most British policy-makers wouldconcede that it was extremely difficult to imagine circumstances where that


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would be the case, even though such a hypothesis had been a causal factorbehind the paradigm shift itself. For the British government at any rate, StMalo was Atlanticist business as usual.

There was, in the UK, no attempt to discuss the new approach with thebroader policy community, or to construct an internal co-ordinativediscourse that would make sense of it. Whereas the SDR had involvednumerous public workshops and colloquia to which politicians, journalists,academics and other experts were invited, no such initiative accompaniedthe ‘European defence initiative’. There were two main reasons for this.First, the UK did not wish to draw too much attention to the fact that theAtlantic Alliance was felt to be in trouble, since this might open up anunwelcome discussion at the worst of all possible junctures – just as Kosovowas blowing apart. Secondly, there was no genuine ‘European project’behind the Blair initiative, other than a pragmatic desire to solve a realproblem within the Alliance – the likely absence of the necessary (US)instruments for crisis management. Those many analysts who have seen inSt Malo a Tony Blair essentially seeking to play a leadership role in Europehave missed the key factor. Consequently, when everything blew up inNovember 2000 at the time of the first Capabilities CommitmentsConference (CCC) and the UK press suddenly awoke to the emergence of a‘European army’, there were precious few voices around to defend orexplain the government’s case. Even within the Labour Party itself, the co-ordinative discourse simply did not happen. The influential chair of theHouse of Commons Select Committee on Defence, Bruce George, by nomeans an ‘Old Labourite’, was not consulted – and remains unconvinced.Former Labour defence heavyweights such as Denis Healey simply did notunderstand the new thinking. The range of individuals from the centre-ground of British politics (the territory Blair was supposed to haveoccupied) who protested vehemently at the time of the CCC in November2000 indicates the absence of any attempt to get the message across – evento the policy élites. And there was no attempt whatsoever to construct acommunicative discourse in an effort to sell the project to the public.

FROM ST MALO TO COLOGNE: BRINGING THE GERMANS ON BOARD

It is almost certain that there would have been a much bigger media-orchestrated public outcry about St Malo in the UK had it not been for twofactors. The first was that, only weeks after St Malo, the Kosovo crisiserupted, offering a practical demonstration of how the British and theFrench (who co-chaired the Rambouillet Conference) could now assume


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security policy leadership and not simply defer to the US. Few were fooledby the Franco-British ‘leadership’ at Rambouillet, but it did provide adistraction. Moreover, the military dimension of the Kosovo crisis actuallyfurnished further concrete proof of the need for St Malo. The second factorwas that the St Malo project itself was handed over to the Germans, whoassumed the Presidency of the EU (and, coincidentally, that of WEU) inJanuary 1999. Germany took full advantage of this opportunity to bring itsown ideas and discourse into line with the changing reality of security inEurope. First, the German Presidency gently but decisively put the final nailinto the coffin of WEU. Second, largely under the impulsion of JoschkaFischer and Rudolf Scharping, Germany determined to use the Franco-British initiative to promote European political union and to create agenuine ESDP, which would be a much bigger project than ESDI. Third,instead of concentrating on the military capacity of ESDP (where Germanywas weak), Berlin engaged in an intensive round of institutional engineeringto create the EU structures within which the German voice could be heardmost effectively. Fourth, while actively promoting this European project,Germany made it absolutely clear that the project would only work in closecollaboration with NATO. The harmonious EU–US outcome of the 50thAnniversary NATO summit in Washington DC in April 1999, at the heightof the Kosovo war, was in no small measure due to German inputs stressingthe indivisibility of the new ESDP with NATO. Thus, the Germans wereable temporarily to bridge the gulf between the French and the Britishinterpretations of St Malo. The various German position papers circulatedat Amorbach (January 1999), Reinhartshausen (March 1999) and at theGeneral Affairs Committee (GAC – May 1999) constitute a brilliantexample of co-ordinative discourse, which successfully tied together therather different aspirations of the US, France, the UK and the FederalRepublic (Jopp 1999). They also paid full attention to the concerns of theneutral countries. Coming as they did during Germany’s first out-of-areamilitary engagement since 1945, these papers (which were elaborated withwidespread consultation among the many German think-tanks and securityexperts) also allowed Germany itself to edge its security culture closer toacceptance of military intervention.19 The German Presidency was crucialand instrumental in taking forward a rather vague and inchoate declaration(St Malo) and turning it into the embryo of an ESDP. It offers anunparalleled example of co-ordinative discourse in action.


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FROM COLOGNE TO HELSINKI AND NICE: MORE BRITISH IDEAS,

BUT STILL NO DISCOURSE

The Kosovo crisis appeared to legitimate the St Malo/ESDP project and todeflect from its European connotations a British media that is instinctivelyhostile to anything that smacks of integration. During the Finnish Presidencyof the EU (June to December 1999), the project made great progress. Whilethe UK was not opposed to institutional engineering (indeed the key organismthat became the Political and Security Committee – PSC, more usuallyreferred to by its French acronym COPS – was initially Robin Cook’ssuggestion), London was aware that the German Presidency had prioritisedinstitutions for its own reasons. George Robertson, still UK DefenceSecretary, had, in March 1999, gently mocked this approach: ‘Institutional re-engineering alone will solve little – you can’t send a wiring diagram to acrisis’. What mattered to London (and Washington) was military capacity.This became the key idea promoted by Britain, which, during the FinnishPresidency, engaged in a great deal of backseat driving. However, by now, thisidea, too, had taken on a life of its own and moved on beyond the originalBritish plan to base that capacity in CJTFs. France had gambled on theabandonment of WEU leading logically to the need for an EU armed force.Britain had no alternative but to concur. Thus, the two ‘great leaps forward’which characterised the Helsinki Council meeting in December 1999 (the‘Headline Goal’ project for a European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF); andthe arrangements for the planning and conduct of EU-led military operations)were both the result of British-generated policy papers, albeit with importantFrench input.20 The same was true during the Portuguese Presidency (Januaryto June 2000) where the key policy paper, ‘Elaboration of the Headline Goal:“Food for Thought”’’, was again generated from the offices of the PolicyDirector of the MOD in Whitehall – as were the compromise proposals ofApril 2000 which broke the Franco-British deadlock over the involvement inthe ESDP process of the six non-EU European members of NATO (seeHoworth 2000a: 56–9).21 But in all of these UK initiatives, co-ordinativediscourse was far more international than national. The various papersreferred to above were well thumbed at NATO HQ in Brussels and in thestrategic planning sections of the French and German Ministries of Defenceand even the MFAs. But they were hardly known in the UK outside the tinycircle of official policy-makers behind the paradigm shift. And there was noattempt whatever to communicate the new thinking to the broader public.

Thus, while the Capabilities Commitments Conference scheduled forNovember 2000 was being actively prepared from February 2000 onwards,


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the British press seemed to be unaware that such a significant developmentwas taking place. Both the cognitive and the normative functions ofdiscourse were lacking. Since no attempt had been made to explain to the‘policy forum’ – the political class and the security élites in parliament andthe media – quite what the Headline Goal was all about, why it wasnecessary, and how it would work, the brouhaha at the time of the CCC washardly surprising. Even less surprising was the astonishment expressedacross large swathes of British public opinion at the ‘discovery’, late inNovember 2000, that the new norms for British defence policy involved aEuropean initiative, hand-in-hand with the French, to create what the mediasimply would not refrain from calling a European army. For several weeks,the British government devoted itself full-time to ‘fall-out management’,which basically involved the repetition of a discourse which cameperilously close to denying that there was any meaningful Europeandimension to the proposals for the RRF. Thus, for instance, the onlyreference made to the European defence initiative during the PrimeMinister’s keynote speech on ‘Britain’s Choice: Engagement not Isolation’at the Guildhall, London, the very week before the CCC, was a singlesentence: ‘On defence, we are engaged in a debate that will ensure Europe’sdefence policy proceeds absolutely consistently with NATO’ (Blair 2000).The same message was carefully crafted into the seminal document onESDP that emerged from the European Council in Nice in December 2001(EU 2000). This document, basically drafted in Paris to transmit a Frenchmessage about the autonomous ambitions of ESDP, was also substantiallyre-worked in London to superimpose a British message about the centralityof NATO. The cognoscenti found it terribly confusing.22 But constructiveambiguity had worked at St Malo and both Paris and London were happy togive it another whirl.

As far as the wider public was concerned, the communicative messagethat accompanied what few speeches were delivered on the subject hadmuch more to do with ‘Third Way humanitarianism’ than with Europe.Since the government could not admit in cognitive terms exactly what it wasdoing (creating an armed force with its EU partners – politically suspect –in order to shore up a declining Alliance – strategically inadmissible), itresorted to explaining why it was doing it, with the emphasisoverwhelmingly on the normative legitimation. The best example of this isTony Blair’s speech ‘Doctrine of the International Community’ to theEconomic Club of Chicago in which the military campaign in Kosovo wasjustified in terms of an entirely new approach to international relationsrequiring democracies to intervene with tyrants in order to defend the


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human rights of oppressed peoples:

This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions, but on values.We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of humanrights within other countries if we want still to be secure. We arewitnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of internationalcommunity. No longer is our existence as states under threat. Nowour actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interestand moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end,values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the valuesof liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then thatis in our national interests too. (Blair 1999)

It is significant that the only (fleeting) reference to the European defenceinitiative in this long and land-mark speech on international security camein a sentence in which Blair recognised the need for the Europeans to domore to help the USA assume its responsibilities as sole superpower.23 Thisspeech, delivered at the height of Blair’s ESDP commitment, prefiguresmuch of the switch of priorities that was to come after the events of 11September 2001.

DISCOURSE SINCE THE ADVENT OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

The absence in both Britain and France of any significant communicativediscourse on security and defence during the general elections heldrespectively in 2001 and 2002 reflected a common concern in both countriesnot to muddy further parliamentary waters that were already sufficientlymurky. In the case of the UK, the Conservatives, having previously hadtheir fingers badly burned on Europe, decided not to play this particular card– much to the relief of Prime Minister Blair, who, for his part, was happy(yet again) not to have to attempt to explain to the electorate what ESDPactually amounted to. In the case of France, the absence is explained bothby unresolved tensions within cohabitation and by temporary uncertainty asto how to play the defence and security card in the context of Le Pen and AlQuaeda. The contrast could not be more stark with the German case, whereChancellor Schröder’s adroit manipulation of security discourse inSeptember 2002 succeeded in snatching electoral victory from the jaws ofdefeat – at the price of poisoning US–German relations (Daalder 2002).This was all the more remarkable in that, less than one year previously,Schröder had deployed considerable resources of co-ordinative discourse inorder to generate a majority in the Bundestag in favour of the dispatch of


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German combat troops to Afghanistan. These two (contradictory) eventsdemonstrate perfectly the complexities of Putnam’s ‘two level games’ forstatesmen engaged in foreign policy. Appropriate discourse is capable ofdelivering valuable – though not necessarily compatible – prizes.

After 11 September 2001, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac foundthemselves faced with a similar dilemma: how to combine the attractions ofEuropeanism with those of Atlanticism. Given the context, constructiveambiguity was no longer an option. The two men chose radically differentpaths, thereby potentially blowing the carefully constructed ESDP projectclean out of the water. It is significant that, whereas on ESDP, the PrimeMinister’s communicative talents were kept on a very tight leash (seeabove), on the war on terror, discourse practically drove policy forward.From Blair’s impassioned speech to the Labour Party on 3 October 2001 tohis masterly opening remarks in the House of Commons debate on the Iraqwar (18 March 2003), via dozens of similar orations, co-ordinative andcommunicative discourse came into their own as the Prime Minister soughtto build a majority, both in the political class and in the country, for his newsecurity priorities. No longer did he face the normative dilemma ofexplaining (away) a suspect European project, engaged in with (from aBritish popular perspective) an even more suspect partner, at the apparentexpense of a much cherished ‘special relationship’. The Blair agenda since9/11 has focused on a global (rather than a European) priority, a traditionaland trusted (rather than a new and untried) ally, and high-intensity militaryoperations (rather than regional peacekeeping). These objectives fit muchmore closely with UK self-perceptions and norms than did ESDP. AndBlair’s own passionate conviction informed and animated the discourse.Moreover, his occasional speeches on Europe continued to purvey the sameAtlanticist message: ESDP is essentially about the consolidation of NATO.24

This orientation could not be more different from that chosen, in summer2002, by Jacques Chirac. Unencumbered by the constraints of cohabitationand elected by a record 85 per cent of French voters, the triumphantPresident embarked on a security discourse which sought not only to placeEurope centre-stage, but also to challenge head-on the unilateralist and pre-emptive tendencies of the Bush administration. Chirac found, perhapssomewhat to his surprise, that this message chimed perfectly not only withFrench public and élite opinion (his approval ratings soared close to 90 percent as the Iraq war got under way), but also with German and, increasingly,with Russian policy preferences. Indeed, the impassioned speech deliveredby his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin at the UN Security Councilon 14 February 2003 achieved the unprecedented feat of drawing


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spontaneous applause across the Council chamber, signalling that supportfor the Chirac approach was even more widespread. Does this mean,therefore, that ESDP, born of ambiguity in December 1998, died ofconflicting discourses in the spring of 2003?

CONCLUSIONS: THE POWER AND THE WEAKNESS OF DISCOURSE

This article has suggested that ideas and discourse, particularly at times ofrapid historical mutation, when traditional guidelines and familiar norms areabsent, can constitute powerful vectors of policy change – even in foreignand security policy, a realm traditionally considered immune to such forces.This is particularly so if the new thinking is shared internationally amongactors who are structurally bound to co-operate in other policy areas.However, it is only likely to be successful if the new orientations reflectgenuinely shifting national interests and if the elements of ambiguity thatinevitably attend its early stages are progressively ironed out in favour ofgreater transparency. Moreover, it can only be successful if élites arecommitted to, and capable of, communicating the new ideas both to thepolitical class and to the wider public. In the case of France and Germany,the promotion of ESDP fit comfortably both with widespread policypreferences among élites and with normative responses on the part of thepublic. In Britain, this was not the case. The policy-makers who launchedESDP probably saw the potential for discursive compatibility with theirEuropean opposite numbers. But the government, for reasons of electoralcalculation, never saw fit to work at that compatibility. A communicativediscourse was generated which presented ESDP as emanating from a two-fold logic: strengthening NATO and making the world fit for democracy andhuman rights. These elements were indeed integral to UK thinking, but noattempt was made to explain how they fit with the European nature of theproject (indeed, this was occasionally denied), or with the parallelorientations of the major European partners. In other words, there was littleserious measure of cross-national learning involved. Both sides stuck totheir respective interpretations of the rationale behind the paradigm shift,deploying constructive ambiguity in order to avoid confrontation. This didnot matter very much so long as both sides prioritised the European essenceof the project. Whether, subsequently, the ambiguities of the text might haveallowed them to narrow the gap and to move towards more genuine cross-national learning, we may never know. If history had continued to give aboost to the initial impetus, then the gap may well have narrowed and theposition of each contracting party could have been modified in light ofmutual listening and collective learning.


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When, after 9/11, history appeared to head off in another direction, theproject entered into stormy seas. The crusading passions and the shiftingpriorities of the British Prime Minister resulted in a considerable de-emphasising of the ESDP project. It was not abandoned. Indeed, a multitudeof parallel speeches, mainly from the Defence Secretary and other officials,testifies to the continued relevance of the project. The historical reasons whyESDP came to the fore were not negated by the war on terror. If anything,they were strengthened, both politically (the need for ever more tightly co-ordinated and efficient European security policy-making in light of the urgentnew situation) and militarily (the accelerated distancing of US military assetsfrom the European theatre made European autonomy even moreindispensable). The Franco-British summit at Le Touquet in February 2003and ever closer policy co-operation in the Balkans had the paradoxical effect,in the spring of 2003, of seeing Britain and France screaming at one anotherover Iraq, while simultaneously embracing one another over many ongoingdimensions of ESDP. One problem was that the war on terror and particularlythe war on Iraq took (massive) precedence in UK eyes over the still valid butsubsidiary significance of European security integration. Another was that atriumphalist French President and an opportunistic German Chancellorrefused to engage politically with the new security discourse emanating fromWashington, preferring to confront it with easy absolutes. And the passion ofthe discourse over Iraq – on all sides – led rapidly to the emergence of aprofound division between two seemingly mutually hostile ‘Europes’.

Is Europeanisation still a viable ambition? And what role might be playedby discourse in its hypothetical re-launch? Neo-realism would suggest thatthe ESDP project was always fatally flawed, since the competing ambitionsof nation-states as the primary actors of international relations undermine thevery notion of security integration. Of course, the existence of NATO itself– not to mention the EU – belies such a view. Constructivism, on the otherhand, shows its limitations when ideas fail to constitute genuine newpathways as a result of the maintenance of conflicting national interestsmasked by discursive ambiguity. Liberal institutionalism, however,emphasising multilateralism, transnational dialogue and international fora,offers a highly appropriate model for the re-launch of the ESDP project. Thedeep-rooted causes which gave rise to ESDP in the first place – endogenous,arising from the highly political nature of European integration, andexogenous, deriving from the rapid recalibration of the international order inthe post-Cold War world – are as relevant and as powerful as ever. Thelessons to be learned from this first rather unsatisfactory experience of adiscourse-driven experiment in ESDP would appear to be the following.


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First, there is little point in papering over policy differences with words.These have to be properly transcended by a robust diplomatic process.

Second, it is urgent to concentrate on the long-term. Between 1998 and2003, UK and French officials tended to avoid discussion of ‘finality’,fearful that they might disagree on the details of the itinerary. In a ‘journeyto an unknown destination’ it is not essential to know in advance the identityof the final port of call. What lies beyond the horizon is constantly shifting.But it is essential to agree on the general horizon to be aimed for.

Third, it is vital to explain fully and clearly, not only to élites, but alsoto the public, what lies behind the journey and what it might entail. It isunrealistic to imagine that such an explanatory discourse will be identical inall countries participating in the project. Different countries and cultureswill read similar discourses through different cognitive and normativelenses. But for the project to succeed these differences need to be properlyunderstood, openly confronted and subjected to constant ideationaliterations in order to narrow the gaps.

Finally, it is necessary to listen – carefully – to what partners are reallysaying. A dialogue of the deaf, on the part of responsible world leaders, isutterly inexcusable.

NOTES

1. The Alastair Buchan Memorial lecture at the International Institute for Strategic Studies inLondon is a major set-piece annual event for the international strategic studies community.

2. An FCO/Chatham House study group on ‘British Foreign Policy for 2000’, of which theauthor was a member in the mid-1990s, took as one of its starting points the proposition thatthe United Kingdom has no definable ‘national interests’.

3. At the European Council meeting in Amsterdam in June 1997, Blair vetoed the very proposalhe himself signed up to at the Franco-British summit in St Malo in December 1998: a directdefence and security role for the EU.

4. Throughout this period, the USA and the EC/EU clashed increasingly over issues such asGATT, trade with the USSR, high-technology research within the military-industrialcomplex, etc. – see Smith 1984 and Palmer 1987.

5. I shall not attempt in this paper to address the transformation of the European armamentsindustry, in which ideas, market forces and advocacy coalitions played a much greater rolethan government policy-makers or traditionally conceived strategic interests. On this aspect,see Schmitt 2000.

6. Gaullism as an alternative vision of European security is still fundamentally misunderstood,in large part because Gaullist discourse conflated France and Europe. While this made sensein France, it made very little sense elsewhere.

7. For a discussion of the alternative set of ideas proposed by George Bush at Key Largo, andof the significance of this ‘dialogue of the deaf’, see Howorth 2000a: 16–18.

8. The Service d’Information et de Relations Publiques des Armées (SIRPA) was replaced bythe Délégation à l’Information et à la Communication de Défense (DICOD) in 1998 with amandate to explain defence policy to the general public.

9. Downgrading of nuclear weapons, especially short-range ones, professionalisation of thearmed services, European mergers in the armaments industry, rapprochement with NATO.


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10. In both Bonn and Rome, the Defence Ministries have traditionally been openly Atlanticist,while the Foreign Ministries have been far more Euro-centred. This is also true, though to amuch lesser extent and in a different way, of Paris.

11. ‘As the party which took Britain into NATO, Labour will base its defence policies on UKmembership of the alliance’.

12. Interviews in Paris and London, 1995–9713. There is, nevertheless, a lively debate about the degree of influence of these actors/thinkers

over the details of government policy (Bulmer and Paterson 1996: 24)14. Author’s interviews with key Labour policy advisors, June 1997, revealed a determination to

continue with the main lines of the Major policy approach.15. Ever since the negotiation of the Treaty of Dunkirk in 1947, this had been an item of

significant disagreement between the British and the French. The author was told in 2000 bya senior UK official that, had the UK not been convinced that the Alliance was in serioustrouble, ‘we would not have touched Saint-Malo with a barge-pole’.

16. In the opinion of the man who almost certainly drafted that key sentence, Richard Hatfield,Policy Director of the MOD, in a speech to IFRI, Paris, entitled ‘The Consequences of Saint-Malo’ (28 April 2000). Hatfield considers that the acceptance of a defence remit for the EUitself ‘let the genie out of the bottle’.

17. In fact, although it is often asserted that the word ‘autonomy’ makes its entry onto theEuropean defence stage at St Malo, it does not. The relevant phrase is ‘the capacity forautonomous action’.

18. Madeleine K. Albright, ‘The Right Balance Will Secure NATO’s Future’, Financial Times, 7Dec. 1998. The 3 Ds (to be avoided) were: Duplication, Decoupling, Discrimination.

19. The CDU had reached this point some years earlier. What was significant about the periodof the German Presidency was that it also allowed the co-ordinative discourse to bring theSPD several steps closer to the new consensus. See, on this Hyde-Pryce and Jeffery 2001 andRathbun 2002.

20. The Headline Goal was proposed by the UK at the GAC on 15 November 1999 and refinedten days later at the Franco-British summit. The ‘Tool Box’ paper entitled ‘Military Bodiesin the European Union and the Planning and Conduct of EU-led Military Operations’ wasdrafted in the UK MOD during the summer of 1999.

21. The role of the British ambassador to Lisbon, Sir John Holmes, in keeping the Portuguese‘on message’ over ESDP was also very important.

22. See the debate on the interpretation of the Nice document in New Europe (2001: 59–69). Itis clear that two parallel – and contradictory – readings of the text are entirely possible.

23. ‘America’s allies are always both relieved and gratified by its continuing readiness toshoulder burdens and responsibilities that come with its sole superpower status. Weunderstand that this is something that we have no right to take for granted, and must matchwith our own efforts. That is the basis for the recent initiative I took with President Chiracof France to improve Europe’s own defence capabilities.’

24. ‘we must get in on the ground floor of decision-making so that the decisions are ones we arehappy with. That is why when I saw the debate over Europe’s common defence policydeveloping, I decided Britain should not hang back but step up front and shape it, inpartnership with France. The result will be a policy fully consistent with NATO’ (Blair 2001).‘The essence of unity in my view, is to regard Europe as it grows in power, as a partner withthe United States believe me, unless it is clear from the outset it is complementary to NATOthen it will never work’ (Blair 2002).

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Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communities in European Security and Defence Policy

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