Between Actor and Presence: The European Union and the Future for the Transatlantic Relationship

Chapter 4. A Presence at the Creation: EU Expansion and Security-Building in Central and Eastern Europe

4 A Presence at the Creation: EU Expansion andSecurity-Building in Central and Eastern Europe CHARLES PENTLAND Introduction "We are not in business, we are in politics," said Walter Hallstein, first President of the European Community's Commission. Until very recently it has been thought imprudent for his successors to speak another such truth, that despite appearances, European integration is also about security and always has been. Since the end of the Cold War, however, and especially since the Maastricht Treaty, old taboos about discussing matters of defence and security in association with the European Union (EU) have dissipated, even as institutional rivalries and debates over who should do what have surfaced. This overdue discussion of the EU's role in European security has been intensified in the last fewyears by the prospect of the eastward enlargement of both the EU and NATO, to embrace former members of the Warsaw Pact and even former Yugoslav and Soviet republics. The implications, for European and Atlantic security, of NATO's 1999 expansion to include the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, continue to be debated, as does the question of whether to extend the alliance further to the east and southeast. The parallel process of EU expansion, formally activated by the Commission's document Agenda 2000, presented inJuly 1997, has generated a similar debate centred on economic and, to a lesser extent, political issues. It would be wrong, however, to consign security issues exclusively to the NATO debate. What the EU undertakes in Central and Eastern Europe (GEE) will have profound effects on the security of those countries, and of Europe as a whole. 80 BETWEEN ACTOR AND PRESENCE The EU and European Security Any discussion of the EU's security role must recognize that it has both a direct, explicit and an indirect, implicit aspect. The former, once largely limited to the defence-industrial side of the single market , now centres increasingly on what the Maastricht Treaty calls the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Descended from, and expanding on, the process of Political Cooperation dating from 1970, the CFSP is where the EU aspires to make and implement common policies in the "high politics" of war and peace: to act as a complex coalition with elements of statehood, pursuing its members' interests in the international system through a diplomacy based on the exercise of "civilian power." Since the fall of 1998 the EU has taken steps to add to this an autonomous capacity for military intervention in humanitarian and peacekeeping activities where NATO might not wish to be engaged.1 It is in this sense that the EU is often described as being, or becoming, an actor in international politics. The EU's indirect or implicit security role, on the other hand, is the outward expression of the liberal institutionalism that has always animated European integration: by virtue of what it is (a customs union en route to economic and monetary union) and what it does (trade and aid), the EU provides security for its members and for many other states as well. This chapter, then, explores the transformative effects on its neighbours of the EU as a regional presence: in particular, how, and to what extent, it enhances the security of Central and Eastern European states aspiring to membership or at least close relations with it. The question invites us to examine the relationship between the spread of markets, democracy, and the rule of law, on the one hand, and the emergence of a pan-European security -community, on the other. Enlargement and Security Since the early 1990s the most obvious manifestation of the EU's liberal institutionalism has been in its approach to the flood of requests for membership coming from Central and Eastern Europe. While each of its previous three rounds of enlargement had implications for European security, those attending the fourth round initiated with the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) are arguably the clearest A PRESENCE AT THE CREATION: EU EXPANSION AND SECURITY-BUILDING 81 and the weightiest. The EU's response has been to develop a fairly elaborate structure of "conditionally" that links aspiring members' access to its markets and assistance to their achievement of standards of economic, legal, political, and diplomatic performance.2 The "liberal " element here lies in the substance of what is expected of applicants : policies to set in motion the presumed virtuous cycle of free markets, democracy, and peace. The "institutional" part...