The EU and NATO’s dilemmas with Russia and the prospects for deconfliction

ABSTRACT

Events in Ukraine have rekindled discussions about NATO’s post-Cold War purpose and the way it relates to the EU. Through EU sanctions and a traditional military response from NATO, the West has manoeuvred itself into a paradoxical situation where every step it takes to reassure its Eastern allies increases rather than diffuses tensions with Russia. On the one hand, it seems that decades of carefully crafted strategic narratives of de-escalation are now in limbo. On the other, it might have indeed been the sustained attempt to create a liberal post-Cold War order that produced an “integration dilemma”, and ultimately drove Russia to the defensive realist logic of a Waltzian “security dilemma”. We argue that NATO’s reaction might have been based on a stylised threat and historical resentments rather than on a carefully calculated risk. Looking beyond the EU and NATO’s recent strategic choices, we argue that the situation can only be resolved by re-engaging Russia in a renewed de-escalatory dialogue that involves both the EU and NATO with a greater emphasis on the nuanced, but important, distinctions between the integration and security dilemmas.

KEYWORDS:

• EU–NATO
• Ukraine
• Russia
• integration dilemma
• security dilemma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Simon Duke is a Professor at EIPA, and an honorary Senior Fellow of Maastricht University. He specialises in the external relations of the European Union, with a particular emphasis on foreign and security policy. He has contributed to numerous framework contracts with the European institutions. In particular, he has been responsible for designing and executing courses for the European External Action Service since its inception and, before that, the European Commission’s Directorate-General External Relations. He has consulted for the European Parliament and offered testimony on several occasions to the United Kingdom’s House of Lords and House of Commons. He is the author of several monographs on European and transatlantic foreign and security issues and has published widely on foreign and security issues in a number of peer-reviewed academic journals. He is a frequent contributor to edited volumes on foreign policy, post-Lisbon diplomacy, intelligence, defence capabilities and EU–Asia security ties. He is also co-Executive Editor of the Journal of European Integration.

Dr Carmen Gebhard is a Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Graduate School of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. She previously held academic posts at Nottingham University, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna and the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA). Her research interests are inter-organisational cooperation in security and defence, the EU’s external relations and foreign policy of small states. She is the author of two monographs and multiple book chapters as well as editor of four edited volumes, and her research has i.a. been published in Cooperation and Conflict, European Security, the European Foreign Affairs Review and Scandinavian Political Studies. She is co-editor-in-chief of Defence Studies (with Simon J. Smith).

Notes

1 NATO’s Warsaw Summit Communiqué of 8–9 July 2016, reaches 139 paragraphs.

2 At the time of writing both have 28 members. Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta and Sweden are EU members but not NATO members, while Albania, Iceland, Norway and Turkey are NATO members but not EU members (Albania is an EU candidate).

3 The ambivalence surrounding EU–NATO relations often suggests polar interpretations. An Atlanticist interpretation, especially from a British perspective, might suggest that the EU, or at least its security and defence aspects, provide a useful and largely convergent “European pillar” within the Atlantic alliance. In this view, NATO is very much the primary security actor, and any autonomy claimed by the EU depends mainly upon a right of first refusal from the Alliance’s principal members. These tensions were evident following the publication of the Anglo-French St Malo Declaration in December 1998. A more divergent, and historically Europeanist view tends to stress the lack of convergence on multiple levels, ranging from membership, to mission, security versus defence, to doubts about the reliability of the US and, ultimately, the implied nuclear guarantees. However, the Europeanist camp never went so far as to propose formal separation (see Zyla 2016). Even France, under de Gaulle, did not leave NATO completely but only left its Integrated Military Command.

4 The VJTF is still in an interim format, with the bulk of the forces being provided by Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. The VJTF will come into full operation in 2017.

5 Despite the differences in borders implied by the slightly differing membership of the EU and NATO there was no perceptible difference in the geopolitical assessment of the resulting littoral security challenges.

6 Brexit has also refuelled discussions about duplication, for example by reopening the option of an autonomous EU military command structure – a move the UK had worked against for a number of years (Biscop 2012).

7 The Eastern Partnership is a joint policy initiative launched at the Prague Summit in May 2009 that aims to deepen and strengthen relations between the EU and its six Eastern neighbours: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

8 By way of comparison, NATO’s Exercise Steadfast Jazz in November 2013 involved 6000 personnel.

9 NATO currently has four candidates for membership while the EU has five (albeit with no ambitions to consider further enlargement prior to 2019 in the latter’s case).

10 There are three DCFTA countries to the EU’s east (Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) with the first two having entered into force in July 2016. Charap and Troitskiy (2013) are correct to argue that DCFTAs imply exclusivity in the sense that participation legally prohibits engagement in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) (as in the case of Armenia who is an EEU member). But, it is worth noting the voluntary nature of the Association Agreements with the EU and membership of the EEU, with a significant trimming of Putin’s original ambition to create a “distinctive pole of influence in a multipolar world by reversing the ‘civilised divorce’ of the former Soviet republics of the USSR” (Popescu 2014, p. 7).