European Security and Defence Cooperation

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Research Note

Squaring the Circle? Leadership and Legitimacy inEuropean Security and Defence Cooperation

Bastian Giegericha and Eva GrossbaInternational Institute for Strategic Studies, 1315 Arundel Street, London WC2R 3DX, UK.

E-mail: [email protected] of International Relations, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London

W2A 2AA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

This research note addresses the trade-offs between legitimacy and effectiveness inthe European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The contemporary securityenvironment creates a dual deficiency where neither individual states nor theEuropean Union (EU) can provide effective and legitimate solutions. Leadership isnecessary but has to be balanced with the norms of consensus and equality, deeplyengrained in EU foreign policy making. The increasing scope and ambition forESDP in an enlarged EU with 25 members exacerbate this fundamentalcontradiction. We present a number of internal and external adaptation pressures

that lead to this situation and link them to wider conceptual debates about securitygovernance. Noting that the existing academic literature has not paid sufficient andsystematic attention to the associated dilemmas, we then outline a comprehensiveagenda for research that includes both empirical and conceptual matters worthexploring.International Politics (2006) 43, 500509. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800170

Keywords: EU; security; European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP); foreignpolicy; security governance; legitimacy; multilateralism

Introduction

As the European Union (EU) grapples with a fundamental political crisis that

peaked with the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in the Dutch and French

referenda of 2005, the problems of getting an ever larger political entity to act

and transform at the same time have become more apparent. As a remedy,

French interior minister, president of the conservative French party Union pour

un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy has

thought aloud about a core of the six biggest EU members which would

collectively propose major initiatives to the remaining states in the Union

(Financial Times, 2005). Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schu ssel used thecommencement of his countrys EU presidency in the first semester of 2006 to

issue a stark warning against such a move (Financial Times 2006) European

International Politics, 2006, 43, (500509)r 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/06 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/ip


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questions of flexible integration. It is high time that the academic debate

explores major issues related to this matter in the context of the enlarged EU.

The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in particular brings out the

tensions inherent in these conflicting positions in stark contrasts and, serves as

the starting point for our deliberations.

In the realm of security and defence national governments can no longer

provide effective solutions on their own a dilemma that has been magnified in

the post 9/11 security environment. While this is true across the board, it poses

a particular challenge for the EU and its member states. Having integrated

further than any other grouping in the world, member states are nonetheless

reluctant to move beyond intergovernmental cooperation in the area of

security and defence, despite the recognition of the necessity to cooperate. The

ESDP, created partly in response to the lessons learned from the want for

effective cooperation during the 1990s, has been widely criticized for a

persistent lack of political will on the part of the member states. A particular

instance where this lack of political will is manifest in is the inability to align

the EUs capacity for action with assertive rhetoric on the part of its member

states.1 Despite the fact that political rhetoric and the creation of unrealistic

expectations easily obscure the very real advancements that have been made in

the institutional construction and practical application of ESDP instruments,

the fundamental question on the nature of the obstacles to cooperation andeffective policy action remains.

We argue that one of the major underlying problems lies in balancing

simultaneous and conflicting demands for effectiveness and legitimacy in a

changing international environment. The key question is, we suggest, whether

and under which conditions ESDP can generate both? While this question is

of mounting relevance in an increasingly demanding security environment

coupled with an increasingly ambitious vision for the EUs foreign policy, it

has to date not been given thorough scholarly attention.2 In the sections that

follow, we further define these practical and conceptual problems and outline apossible research agenda to remedy the lack of understanding of the

phenomenon and to provide an avenue for exploration of this issue. We focus

on two interrelated conceptual issues surrounding legitimacy and security

governance in a multilateral setting, and suggest that case studies focussing on

ESDP stand to corroborate these conceptual problems empirically.

Why is This Relevant?

In essence, the core problem in matters of security and defence is a dualdeficiency: ineffective national solutions on the one hand and a non-existent

supranational solution on the other This in itself might be sustainable if a

Bastian Giegerich and Eva GrossEuropean Security and Defence Cooperation

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within ESDP relies on consensus and unanimity to provide this solution. Our

argument is that escalating external and internal adaptation pressures make it

increasingly unlikely that ESDP can be an effective policy instrument if

everything has to happen in unison to the extent that consensus and

unanimity has been conducive to swift and effective action to begin with, of

course. As actorness becomes more difficult, ESDP effectiveness in turn is

likely to suffer as a result.3 This is due to a number of external and internal

pressures. While none of these are necessarily novel, their aggregation in a

changing security environment along with internal changes within the EU is.

Together with rising aspirations for ESDP they magnify the problem at hand.

External and Internal Pressures

Contemporary threats and risks to European security make cooperation ever

more important and ever more difficult. Given the proliferation of relevant

actors, the de-territorialized nature of most threats and the connectedness

between them, individual governments are stretched beyond their means. While

this speaks for increased cooperation, the current international environment

also makes it likely that responses to external conditions diversify as well, in

turn making cooperation increasingly difficult. Indeed, the unifying influence

of terrorism or proliferation both normatively and militarily seems consider-ably weaker than that of the Soviet Army on the other side of the border. Some

analysts have asserted that the end of the Cold War and 9/11 in particular have

led to a crisis if not demise of the transatlantic security community (Cox, 2005),

but it is as well by no means clear that this did not have a detrimental effect on

European cohesion as well: disagreements over and the fallout from the war in

Iraq starkly illustrated what happens when European leaders do not agree.

Second, security and defence policy is an issue area that is usually seen as the

last bastion of national sovereignty. As it is ultimately about the external use of

armed force, this is understandable. But, putting concerns about sovereigntyaside, successful crisis management needs fast, coherent, and often secret

deliberations. The bigger the group that is involved, the more difficult it

becomes to achieve this.

On the internal, EU, side there are three factors that exacerbate the problem.

First, the Constitutional Treaty is dead in the water, at least for the medium

term. This means that the envisioned clauses on increased flexibility in security

and defence policy and CFSP more generally, will not be implemented. Second,

the 2004 enlargement has magnified the differences in the security and defence

capabilities of EU member states. With the exception of Poland, all newmembers are small states with very limited capacity to make a useful

contribution to the EUs overall capability The group of those who can is


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the development of ESDP up to date offers various examples in which small-

group leadership mostly in the form of an Anglo-French-Germandirectoire

was instrumental in moving the EU as a whole along and instil some substance

into the debates. Resulting from this is the charge that ESDP risks becoming

(or remaining, given that the debate on core and periphery within the EU,

including CFSP, has been ongoing in various guises over the years4) the

playing field of the great powers (defined in a European context). As will be

explored below this also raises issues over taxation and representation: in other

words, the extent to which countries with disproportionally small defence

contributions can or do expect to have a say in how these capabilities should

be used.

At the internal/external nexus, lastly, lies a growing concern with the

external dimension of the EU as a policy actor, the growing role and ambition

of EU foreign policy, including a security and defence dimension. The

European Security Strategy (ESS), even if it arguably constitutes more of

a statement on the EUs global role and aspirations rather than a specific

recipe for action, defines and as such widens the scope of the EUs potential

global responsibilities and aspirations, including (military) crisis management

(EU, 2003). The problem of leadership and legitimacy, therefore, stands to be

exacerbated in this framework.

Legitimacy and Security Governance the Conceptual Issues

Is Consensus Dead? The Problem of Security Governance

The mixture of internal and external pressures points towards a situation where

the consensus norm on which cooperation in ESDP is built, along with the

unanimity norm is under pressure. However, the direction this pressure is

coming from is not the one that institutionalism predicted (Smith, 2004; 1998).

Intergovernmental cooperation in security and defence is not about to evolveinto supranational integration despite increasing levels of institutionalization.

Rather, the signals point the other way: we are moving away from government

to governance. Fragmentation is usually interpreted to be one of the

characteristics of governance, including the governance of security. This

implies that a broader range of actors is involved in policy-making through a

wider spectrum of institutional settings characterized by varying degrees of

formalization (Krahmann, 2003; Webber and Croft, 2004).

Consensus and unanimity provide legitimacy at the cost of reduced

effectiveness. Heavy symbolism is involved in ESDP for two reasons. Thefirst is the core of sovereignty argument already mentioned. The other is that

unanimity suggests equality among EU member states In security and defence


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paraphrase a former US Senator, there are indeed EU member states that

cannot fight their way out of a wet paper bag. However, there are others whose

abilities are among the most advanced in the world. If the paper bag fighters

decide what the others can and cannot do, one side of the argument goes,

ESDP will always fall short of its aspirations. Input into policy decisions,

accordingly, ought to be a function of a countrys contribution, either in terms

of expertise, troops or money (Everts, 2000).

Consensus without Legitimacy?

Unanimity and equality provide legitimacy in the sense of input legitimacy. In

crude terms, this means that the members of a polity participate in the decision-

making. Transparency and democratic accountability in this reading are

considered of value. Obviously, in Western democracies this participation is

delegated to elected representatives. However, effectiveness can also be

understood as legitimacy. This would be the idea that government should

not only be by the people but also for the people. Hence, effectiveness can be

interpreted to be output legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999): the ability of a policy to

deliver increased levels of a certain public good such as security. This notion

of output legitimacy differs from that of public support for ESDP and that of

legitimacy as a democratic good (Wagner, 2005). Instead, it conceptualiseslegitimacy as a by-product of effectiveness: while the public is in general

benevolent to the ESDP projects (with caveats, obviously, as hard choices such

as the increase in defence budgets in order to strengthen ESDP do not receive

much support), output legitimacy means that ESDP has to be an effective crisis

management tool. Without tangible outputs, and reliable rules of engagement

meaning, where is ESDP employed, what are its limits, and what is ESDP

supposed to encompass output legitimacy cannot be guaranteed. We suggest

to conceptualize output legitimacy in a broader framework: that of the value

added of ESDP as a tool of European integration, and a European approach ofcrisis management. In contrast, input legitimacy can be judged to be of

superior importance because the effectiveness on which output legitimacy rests

could in principle also be achieved by despotic regimes, and goes against the

normative core of the EU. Output legitimacy potentially undermines the very

essence of political rule as understood among EU member states. From this

perspective, unanimity and equality wins the day once the use of armed force

for reasons other than self-defence is contemplated.

We assert that the external and internal developments sketched previously

present EU member governments with the following dilemma: in ESDP thebalance between input and output legitimacy or legitimacy in the classical

sense and effectiveness needs to be renegotiated The key question is whether


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automatically assumed that one has to be at the expense of the other, this may

not necessarily be the case in practice. Might transparency, for instance, not be

sufficient in solving the problem as long as member states are informed of

key deliberations, and consensus for action derived from negotiation by a

directoire of whatever form actively sought, be enough to ensure legitimacy

while maintaining effectiveness? And is, if not initiating action then at least

taking a position on certain policy issues and crises, not also expected of

individual member states (this applies both to the big three Germany, Britain

and France as well as member states with a particularly close interest in the

policy problem at hand)? After all, an effective European crisis management

instrument ought to be in the interest of all member states. While, as we have

maintained before, this is a topic that has not yet received the necessary

scholarly attention, too often the debate is reduced to arguments for and

against a directoire without a deeper analysis of the trade-offs involved, or the

conceptual/theoretical issues at hand. And, of course, it is worth exploring to

what extent decision-making in ESDP can be termed democratically legitimate

at present, both in terms of its formal and informal decision-making structures

as well as the actors involved. This, then, constitutes the starting point for a

research agenda that considers more closely the problem of small group

decision-making when it comes to European security and defence.

Mapping a Research Agenda

In the following section, we outline a comprehensive research agenda to be

explored in the near future. Key points of conceptual and empirical explorations

evolve around several themes: the processes of policy-making in ESDP; who is

taking the lead, why and how; and the potential consequences of this leadership

for the broader process of European integration. Empirical crisis case studies

should look at how issues of leadership were resolved, including the processes

of bargaining and side-payments. Then, there are the debates and conflicts overlegitimacy, both in ESDP case studies as well as conceptual literature. Leadership

style and agendas, and the question of transparency in policy making are also

important issues that ought to be explored in the context of ESDP.

More specifically, we suggest structuring a conceptual and empirical

exploration along the following issue areas and research questions that result

from them:

(1) The role of directorates in the creation of ESDP as well as the planning

and initiation of missions. Are directorates a threat to legitimacy and

effectiveness? Or are they a prerequisite for effectiveness? To answer thesequestions, we need a much better understanding of the functions small-group

leadership fulfils for the actors involved and the larger framework here the


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reasonable to assume that form and function are somehow related. For

example, a directorate that fulfils the function of ideational leadership and

generator of conceptual innovation may exists as an informal and flexible

grouping whereas a directorate that forms the core of crisis decision-making,

may not. So far, much of the academic discussion on the pros and cons of

directorates remains abstract. It is very rare to find work that actually examines

the costs and benefits of small-group leadership in the EU, let alone ESDP, by

means of a case study. We are confident that the development of ESDP to date

provides several examples related to ESDP missions and major conceptual

advancements that we now can begin to progress to this next stage.

(2) The role of accountability and parliamentary input into ESDP: how can

parliamentary oversight be organized and strengthened? Is there, perhaps, a

robust trend towards post-parliamentary governance?5 Traditionally, the

policy area of security and defence is characterized by comparatively low

levels of parliamentary oversight and tends to be executive driven. The

intergovernmental ESDP seems to amplify this dynamic. This has important

implications for democratic legitimacy as work on the use of armed force in

international frameworks suggests (Born and Ha nggi, 2005). At the same time,

governance might imply that we have to adapt our analytical lenses and look

at informal mechanisms, which enable parliaments to perform their functions,

of course, also with a view to what extent this might adversely affect thedemocratic process. Still, it stands to reason that the multi-level system

of European governance could find its equivalent in a multi-level system

of parliamentary supervision. It seems promising to us to improve our

understanding of how national parliaments, the European Parliament and

interparliamentary assemblies interact and influence ESDP.

(3) The role of epistemic communities and external sources of expertise: what

is their role as it concerns decision-making in ESDP? Are these external sources

adding transparency because of increasing participation or is decision-making

actually becoming more opaque as a result of the involvement of actors such asexternal experts? What does their involvement mean for the EUs alleged

democratic deficit that is also implied in the preceding section? It is crucial to

assess how the participation of such, often transnational, actors influences

decision-making and with what consequences. Epistemic communities should

be treated as part of the emerging system of governance. ESDP, again,

provides examples in which a community of experts and practitioners has been

directly involved in the formulation of key documents such as the ESS. Aside

from the already mentioned legitimacy issues, the extend of the impact of their

contributions needs to be investigated, thereby making this matter a crucialcomponent of the larger issues involved in ESDP leadership and legitimacy.

(4) There also needs to be a theoretical underpinning of such a study It has


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including EU foreign policy: while arguments that IR and European Studies

could engage in a fruitful conceptual dialogue have been made (Warleigh,

2006), the EU is usually considered as a unique entity (Wallace, 1994) and

therefore as sui generis. This applies particularly to EU foreign policy, as even

intergovernmental decision-making rules of Pillar II activities where CFSP

and ESDP are located are impacted by other actors (such as the Commission)

as well as Europeanization processes on the part of the member states (Olsen,

2002; Wong, 2005).

It seems to us to be worth to not only incorporate ESDP in these conceptual

debates, but to focus on matters of security and defence/ESDP exclusively in

order to further explore the notions of input and output legitimacy. From

there, scholars could move on to reflect on where this fits in with the broader

conceptual literature of international and European security. ESDP seems to

us to be the most dynamic area of European foreign policy at the moment.

Hence, it is a good arena to contribute to the eclectic theory-building

that leading scholars in the field of European foreign policy have called for

(White 2004).

(5) Lastly, empirical case studies on the lessons learnt from past ESDP

missions ought to illustrate to what extent the ESDP has been and can expected

to continue to be an effective actor in international politics and to provide a

view on the future trajectory of institutional development and empiricalapplication. This includes not only the range of ESDP missions both in terms

of their civil/military nature and empirical case studies of their geographical

reach and broader issues of transatlantic/great power relations but also touches

on the limits of ESDP: how far does the EUs role stretch geographically,

where in terms of transatlantic tensions are the lines drawn, and what

determines the institutional choice between NATO and ESDP? Is there

evidence of a conflict avoidance strategy where ESDP missions are only

suggested where there is no expectation of disagreement, or have individual

member states successfully pushed the envelope on the nature, reach and scopeon ESDP? And, to what extent if any has this damaged legitimacy and

effectiveness? This last section and its focus on empirical material drawn from

actual ESDP missions would also usefully underline findings from the first four

issue areas that we have pointed out. It is time to undertake such a

comprehensive project sufficient critical mass has built in terms of ESDP

missions and debates around the theoretical and empirical implications of both

to invite a more coherent and comprehensive treatment in an academic context.

Notes

1 A di t Ch i t h Hill thi h lt d i th C biliti E t ti G (CEG)


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For ESDP, this may be even more accurate, a suggestion that the experience of the EU

throughout the 1990s corroborates (Howorth, 2005).

2 Although there has been some exploration of democratic accountability, legitimacy, and theproblem of cores and peripheries in an academic and policy context even as it applies to the EU

foreign and security policy (Pijpers, 2000; Wagner, 2005), the output has been sporadic and not

necessarily focussed on security and defence. These issues have also been touched upon as part of

the broader framework of integration and governance (Scharpf, 2005), either with a view on a

specific policy area or democratic deficit, but have not made legitimacy nor effectiveness the

starting point for exploration. Lastly, a crisis in democratic representation among member states

has been suggested as one reason why the EU cant act in international politics, but this has not

been attributed to democracy itself which is thought of as a potential asset rather than a liability

in foreign policy making on account of the values of legitimacy and transparency (Zielonka,

1998).

3 The conceptual problem of what, if any, sort of actor the EU represents in world politicshas been explored with some results in the literature on EU foreign relations (Allen, 1998;

Hill and Smith, 2005), but the term is used here to denote the capacity to act in ESDP, both

in the decision-making and assembling of missions and institutional process, the influence

of internal and external forces on this actorness, and the way ESDP is perceived by the

outside world.

4 See, for instance, Pijpers (ed.), On Cores and Coalitions in the European Union: The Position of

Some Smaller Member States. Clingendael Institute, 2000; Dietrichs and Jopp (2003). Flexible

Modes of Governance: Making CFSP and ESDP Work. International Spectator 3/2003: 1530.

5 Post-parliamentarism questions that parliaments as mechanisms of political decision-making

have much of a role to play in an increasingly globalized world, specifically not in the context of

European integration. The main reasoning behind this position is that parliaments are based onterritorial representation created for the nation state and are, hence, unable to take decisions for

highly complex societies that are linked through a growing network of supranational and sub-

national ties (see: Andersen and Burns, 1996).

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