Strategic Culture and the Common Security and Defence Policy – A Classical Realist Assessment and Critique

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for constructive criticism. The author is likewise grateful to colleagues who, at the Twelfth Biannual EUSA conference, March 2011, generously agreed to discuss some of the issues that I raise here.

Notes

See Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness’, Policy Review, No. 113 (June–July, 2002), pp. 3–28.

There were 27 EU countries in 2011, though the number will increase to 28 when Croatia becomes an EU member state in July 2013.

John Keegan, The Mask of Command: A Study of Generalship (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 10–11.

Hans Morgenthau famously argued that liberalism overlooked mankind's biological and spiritual dimensions and instead greatly exaggerated its rational dimension. Liberalism thus came to argue that the weapons of true order that had helped liberalism prevail against vested (feudal) interests – positive law, written constitutions, independent courts, and elected parliaments – applied everywhere. Rationality told them so. Liberalism thus became a science akin to engineering, missing out on the stuff of politics. Or, as Morgenthau wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1946), ‘Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman’ (p. 10). This revolt against rational engineering – and the hope that we can muddle our way through to progress if only we persist – fed not only classical realism but also the theology of the English School study of diplomacy as an international institution and source of stability. Such stability can be achieved if we give up on the idea that we are well-meaning and ultimately progressive and instead come to realize that we are ‘miserable sinners’. For more on Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and others, see Robert Jackson, Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 55–58.

It is commonly agreed that classical realists tended to depict their liberal opponents in naïve terms in order to promote their own realist position. E.H. Carr has widely debated the ideas of liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Normann Angel. See The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–62. However, it is uncontestable that liberals did tend to see the state as essentially a ‘structure’ which, if properly construed (as a democracy), would promote peace. This disregard for politics led to the revival of Realpolitik in the 1940s, spurred by Friedrich Meinecke and others. For liberal theory, see Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 80–123. For Realpolitik, see Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations Since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 183–186.

Pooling and sharing have been on the EU agenda since late 2010, when EU defence ministers defined the terms and urged EU action. By July 2011 the EU's Catherine Ashton (in a classified report to the EU Council) defined the issue as ‘a necessity rather than a mere option’. See Defense News, ‘Pooling, Sharing a “Necessity”’ EU Report, 19 July 2011, http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=7134177&c=EUR&s=TOP. Necessity has impacted on NATO as well, where pooling and sharing come wrapped in the agenda of ‘smart defense’ as defined in the fall of 2010 by the Secretary General.

Liberal trends ‘increase the problems and issues between nations much more rapidly than the intelligence to solve them can be created’, wrote Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932, continuing that impartial solutions are impossible because solutions are political, and strong nations have a greater say in them. Moral Man and Immoral Society (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 57 and 72. This insight also formed the basis of E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis.

Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). E.H. Carr wrote fourteen volumes in his series A History of Soviet Russia, which is considered his idealist view of the Cold War (he believed or perhaps hoped western capitalism would fail).

E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), pp. 13–19. Hans Morgenthau later wrote in a similar vein that ‘[t]he kind of freedom a particular society is able to realize in a particular period of its history … depends upon the kind of political order under which it lives’. ‘The Dilemmas of Freedom’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 51, No. 3 (September 1957), pp. 714–723.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: CUP, 2007).

A classical realist would accept that we can generalize about power dynamics. However, motives are by definition contextual.

The most eloquent statement in this respect continues to be Hedley Bull, ‘International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach’, World Politics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (April 1966), pp. 361–377. Ido Oren has more recently criticized modern realists for being confused by their own calls for scientific objectivity while admonishing decision-makers to favour certain policies over others, which is akin to political thought in action. Classical realism is built on this idea of political thought in action, Oren concludes, which modern and scientifically ambitious theory is not. ‘The Unrealism of Contemporary Realism: The Tension between Realist Theory and Realists’ Practice', Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2009), pp. 283–301.

Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation-State and the Case of Western Europe’, Daedalus Vol. 95, No. 3 (1966), pp. 862–915.

Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For ‘human race’ see p. 213; for ‘mankind’ p. 230. Gilpin's book deals essentially with power dynamics or transitions – the rise and decline of big powers. This is an inherently classical realist preoccupation because classical realists saw power as contested and therefore dynamic. Structural realists – who we shall encounter in the next section – see power as locked into structure or certain distributions of it, which leads to a preoccupation with balances of power in various guises. This view of power tends to be less dynamic, therefore. The body of thought that today comes under the heading of power transition theory belongs to the former tradition. Its origins are found in A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968), though today power transition theory tends to get mired in the kind of data computation and statistical sophistry that takes it away from the concerns with political ideas and order that were at the heart of the classical enterprise.

Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 286.

The nation-state is in fact thriving only in North America and Asia. Henry Kissinger, Does the West Still Exist? America and Europe Moving Towards 2020, Speech, Washington DC, 23 February 2007.

Henry Kissinger, ‘A Global Order in Flux’, The Washington Post, 9 July 2004, http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp070904.html. Colin Gray has written that among his great geopolitical fears is an independent Europe (EU) because it will be weak and dependent on Russia for energy, and it will therefore align with a Sino-Russian alliance. Colin Gray, ‘Document No. 1: The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), 2006, and the Perils of the Twenty-First Century’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), pp. 141–148.

Henry Kissinger, The Intellectual Underpinnings of the Trilateral Partnership in the 21st Century, Remarks to the Trilateral Commission Tokyo Plenary Meeting, April 26, 2009. Julian Lindley-French is less downbeat than Kissinger when it comes to the potential of the transatlantic alliance. Lindley-French perceives a European opportunity to shed its role as a ‘junior partner’ by taking on vital ‘stability and reconstruction’. For Lindley-French Europe can choose to make itself strong; for Kissinger this choice is less real because the limits of the CSDP are rooted in the dissolution of the nation-state. Julian Lindley-French, ‘Enhancing Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations: A Report of the Global Dialogue between the European Union and the United States’, CSIS Report, January 2009, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090122_lindley_enhancingstabil_web.pdf, and ‘Stabilisation and Reconstruction: Europe's Chance to Shed its “Junior Partner” Status’, Europe's World, Autumn 2009, http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21472/Default.aspx, last accessed 31 October 2011.

Reinholdt Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), p. 234.

Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1978), pp. 167–214; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Kenneth Waltz is regularly cited as a father of defensive realism but the link is not unambiguous. Waltz developed structural realism (neorealism) and did not make strong claims regarding the motives of states: states ‘are unitary actors who, at a minimum, seek their own preservation and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination’. Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power’, in R. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 117. This overview and the following three paragraphs draw on Sten Rynning, ‘Realism and the Common Security and Defence Policy,’ Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2011), pp. 23–42.

Barry Posen, ‘European Union Security and Defense Policy: Response to Unipolarity?’ Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2006), pp. 149–186; Barry Posen, ‘ESDP and the Structure of World Power’ The International Spectator, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2004), pp. 5–17.

T.V. Paul, ‘Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy’, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 46–71; Robert J. Art, ‘Europe Hedges its Security Bets’, in T.V. Paul, J.J. Wirtz and M. Fortmann (eds), Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

For balance-of-threat theory, see Stephen Walt, Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); for an overview of this debate see Anders Wivel, ‘Balancing Against Threats or Bandwagoning with Power? Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship after the Cold War’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2008), pp. 289–305.

William Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’, International Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1999), pp. 5–41; Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, ‘American Primacy in Perspective’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2002), pp. 20–33; Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, ‘Reshaping the World Order’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 2 (2009), pp. 49–63; also Joseph M. Grieco, ‘Realism and Regionalism: American Power and German and Japanese Institutional Strategies During and After the Cold War’, in E.B. Kapstein and M. Mastanduno (eds), Unipolar Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, ‘Security Seeking under Anarchy: Defensive Realism Revisited’, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2000/01), pp. 128–161; and Anders Wivel, ‘The Power Politics of Peace: Exploring the Link between Globalization and European Integration from a Realist Perspective’, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2004), pp. 5–25.

Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, ‘Hard Times for Soft Balancing’, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 72–108; Kier A. Lieber and Gerard Alexander, ‘Waiting for Balancing: Why the World is not Pushing Back’, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 109–139; G. Press-Barnathan, ‘Managing the Hegemon: NATO under Unipolarity’, Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2006), pp. 271–309; Stephen Walt, ‘Alliances in a Unipolar World’ World Politics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2009), pp. 86–120.

John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 38.

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1990), pp. 5–56.

Mearsheimer, Tragedy (note 26), pp. 393–396.

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The Future of the American Pacifier’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 5 (2001), pp. 46–61; Seth Jones, ‘The European Union and the Security Dilemma’, Security Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2003), pp. 114–156 and ‘The Rise of a European Defense’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 121, No. 2 (2006), pp. 241–267.

EU, EU Police Mission in Afghanistan Fact Sheet, January 2011; Luis Peral, ‘EUPOL Afghanistan’, in G. Grevi, D. Helly, and D. Keohane, (eds), European Security and Defence Policy: The First Ten Years, 1999-2009 (Paris: EUIIS, 2010), pp. 325–338. Available at http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/ESDP_10-web.pdf, last accessed 31 October 2011.

House of Lords, The EU's Afghan Police Mission, European Union Committee – Eighth Report, 1 February 2011, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldselect/ldeucom/87/8702.htm, last accessed 31 October 2011.

Sven Biscop, ‘Permanent Structured Cooperation and the Future of the ESDP: Transformation and Integration’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter 2008), pp. 431–448; Nicolai von Ondarza, ‘Less than the Sum of its Parts: The CSDP Capability Gap and Prospects of EU Military Integration’, Studia Diplomatica, Vol. 63, Nos. 3/4 (2010), pp. 81–104; Sven Biscop, ‘Permanent Structured Cooperation: Building Effective European Armed Forces’, Paper for 12th biannual EUSA conference, 3–5 March 2011, http://euce.org/eusa/2011/papers/4i_biscop.pdf, last accessed 31 October 2011.

For neo-classical realism see Stephen E. Lobell, N.M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro (eds), Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 31 and 224; for the critique see S. Rynning, S., ‘The High Cost of Theory in Neoclassical Realism,’ H-Net/H-Diplo (July 2009), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24339. For an attempt to apply neo-classical realism to the EU's CFSP/CSDP, see Z. Selden, ‘Power is Always in Fashion: State-Centric Realism and the European Security and Defence Policy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2010), pp. 397–416. For the argument that the study of ideas is incompatible with general theory, see Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1984).

Jolyon Howorth, ‘European Defence and the Changing Politics of the European Union: Hanging Together or Hanging Separately?’ Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2001), pp. 765–89; “Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communities in European Security and Defence Policy,” West European Politics, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2004), pp. 211–234; ‘The Political and Security Committee: A Case Study in “Supranational Intergovernmentalism’”, Les cahiers Européens, No. 1, March 2010; Jolyon Howorth and Anand Menon, ‘Still Not Pushing Back: Why the European Union is not Balancing the United States’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2009), pp. 727–744.

See Frédéric Mérand, Stéphanie Hofmann, and Bastian Irondelle, ‘Governance and State Power: A Network Analysis of European Security’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2011), pp. 121–147.

David P. Calleo, Rethinking Europe's Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Follies of Power: America's Unipolar Fantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Calleo, Rethinking Europe's Future (note 36).

For this balance of pathologies, see Rynning, ‘Realism and the Common Security and Defence Policy’ (note 20).

Stanley Hoffmann concurs, arguing that US policy reflects ‘dogmatism’ where European policy builds on ‘empiricism’. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘US-European Relations: Past and Future’, International Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 5, pp. 1029–1036. True, Europe was split on the issue of Iraq and it may be difficult therefore to speak of ‘Europe’ but, as Hoffmann also writes, the Bush administration deliberately – aided by Tony Blair – sought to divide the European Union by soliciting the support of Atlantic-minded political leaders. Stanley Hoffmann, America Goes Backward (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004).

Russia has long pushed for just one security pillar from Vancouver to Vladistok, which of course would put it at the main table next to the Western powers. Atlanticists typically prefer a two-pillar scenario whereby Russia is outside and Western Europe and the United States and Canada are united on the inside. Some Europeanists and, as we have seen, American ‘offshore’ proponents prefer a three-pillar structure with Russia, the EU, and the United States. For Calleo, see Follies of Power (note 36).

Michael Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Casper Sylvest, ‘John H. Herz and the Resurrection of Classical Realism’, International Relations, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2008), pp. 441–455; J.S. Barkin, Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

It should be noted that Sterling-Folker is mostly known as a neo-classical realist, but it should be noted that she has a very broad understanding of neo-classical realism. Jennifer Sterling-Folker, ‘Realism and the Constructivist Challenge: Rejecting, Reconstructing, or Rereading’, International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2002), pp. 73–97; ‘Realist Theorizing as Tradition: Forward Is As Forward Does’, in A. Freyberg-Inan, E. Harrison, and P. James (eds), Rethinking Realism in International Relations: Between Tradition and Innovation (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). The observations in this paragraph on classical realism and contructivism draw on Rynning, ‘Realism and the Common Security and Defence Policy’ (note 20).

For the pedigree of classical realism and also this view of modernity, see Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially chapters 7 and 8.

Hans Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil’, Ethics, Vol. 56, No. 1 (1945), pp. 1–18.

S.S. Monoson and M. Loriaux, ‘The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral Norms: Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy', American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 2 (1998), pp. 285–297.

Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 1993), pp. 235–250; Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (London: Phoenix, 2000), pp. 1–6 and 144–176.

Hoffmann, Obstinate or Obsolete (note 13), pp. 914–915.

M. Loriaux, ‘Realism and Reconciliation: France, Germany, and the European Union’, in E.B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (eds), Unipolar Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 378.

Julian Lindley-French, ‘In the Shade of Locarno: Why European Defence is Failing’, International Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 4 (2002), pp. 78–812.

Sten Rynning, ‘Toward a Strategic Culture for the EU’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2003), pp. 479–496; ‘Less May Be Better in EU Foreign and Security Policy’, Oxford Journal of Good Governance, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2005), pp. 45–50.

Calleo, Follies of Power (note 36), pp. 165–166.

Ibid.

Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil’ (note 43); also and more generally Politics Among Nations (note 45).