THE ROADMAP TO BETTER EU-NATO RELATIONS By Tomas Valasek The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, recently signalled that he would like French officers to return to NATO’s military command. He also said that France should stop treating in a speech to the French ambassadors’ NATO as a ‘bogeyman’ and that it should ‘renovate’ its relationship with the alliance.1 In doing so, Sarkozy has broken a long-standing taboo in French conference in Paris on August 27th 2007, and in an interview with the New foreign policy, and opened the possibility of a dramatic improvement in EUNATO co-operation. York Times on September 23rd 2007. 1 Nicolas Sarkozy has laid out his ideas
Sarkozy’s predecessor, President Jacques Chirac, viewed relations between NATO and the Euro p e a n security and defence policy (ESDP) as essentially a zero-sum game: what was good for one was bad for the other, and vice versa. NATO-ESDP co-operation has, with a few exceptions, been meagre in recent years. While NATO and the EU talk on some things, like Bosnia, they are not allowed to discuss other import a n t issues, like Kosovo. Sarkozy’s words now promise to end this ruinous quarrel between Europe’s two main security org a n i s a t i o n s . But for the new French president to prevail, a number of conditions must be met. France and Britain will need to reconcile their competing views on ESDP. The United States and Turkey will also need to respond with compromises of their own. This briefing note outlines what a possible future agreement among all parties could look like. The problems that will need to be overcome are real but they are practical rather than philosophical. The significance of Sarkozy’s initiative is that for the first time in the brief history of ESDP, none of the governments involved in Europe’s security is seeking actively to undermine either the EU or NATO. The United States, an original critic of ESDP, dropped its opposition long ago, and France has now followed suit.
Brothers in arms or brothers at war? NATO and the EU make very poor friends. Even though the membership of both institutions is nearly identical (21 of the 27 EU member-states are also in NATO), the two barely talk. Worse, they compete for the member-states’ defence money, and for the attention of others. For example, in 2005 they could not agree on who should support the African Union’s mission in Sudan, so each organisation now runs its own operation there. Occasionally, the rivalry between the EU and NATO leads the member-states to sabotage much needed equipment purchases, like NATO’s plans to acquire a fleet of C-17 transport aircraft (which France long opposed). This competition leaves everybody worse off. Member-states divide their already scarce defence budgets between the EU and NATO. Both institutions have given their member-states a long ‘shopping list’ of new equipment needed for military operations (the so-called ‘capability goals’) but the EU and NATO have failed to reconcile those lists. Each organisation is thus asking the same cash-strapped governments for slightly different things. Not surprisingly, when either institution tries to put military force in the field, it invariably
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