KEES VAN DER PIJL: EU DEFENCE PLANS IN THE CRISIS

INTRODUCTION:
EU DEFENCE PLANS IN THE CRISIS

KEES VAN DER PIJL

On 27 August 2019, in a speech to the country’s top diplomats assembled in Paris, French president Emmanuel Macron declared that the world was in the midst of “a major transformation, a geopolitical and strategic re- composition.” This transformation, the president declared, amounted to nothing less than “the end of Western hegemony over the world.” After this surprising assessment (for a Western leader that is), he continued:

We were accustomed to an international order which, since the 18th century, rested on a Western hegemony... Things change. And they are now deeply shaken by the mistakes of Westerners in certain crises, by the choices that have been made by Americans for several years which did not start with this administration, but which lead to revisiting certain implications of the conflicts in the Near and Middle East and elsewhere, and to rethinking diplomatic and military strategy, and sometimes elements of solidarity that we thought were immutable, eternal (“des intangibles pour l’éternité”, Macron 2019, emphasis added; cf. The Saker 2019).

Not long afterwards, an unknown corona virus outbreak was responded to according to a “worst case scenario” of the sort US strategists had been drawing up since the 1990s (Zylberman 2013; 2016). “Things change” indeed: by March 2020, large parts of the world were in some form of lockdown, ushering in a social paralysis and economic depression of historic proportions. Well might Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, claim that the virus “will only increase the need for a stronger EU security and defence and for a stronger Europe in the world” (cited in Erlanger 2020), but with the bloc’s financial situation fast deteriorating, this is not likely to be implemented any time soon. Via Quantitative Easing (QE), by which central banks buy up problematic

government and commercial bonds so that investors have the means to continue purchasing financial assets, vast amounts of money are pumped into the financial sector. The European Central Bank alone raised the QE ceiling to €1.35 trillion in June 2020. The QE costs in combination with government emergency spending have been compared to a “war debt” requiring several generations to pay off (The Conversation 2020).

It is not difficult to see that the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in November 2016 served as the trigger for some of the leaders of “Old Europe” to question, as the president-elect himself had done to begin with, the usefulness of NATO. Trump was the first real outsider in the White House in modern times: not a single figure in his original foreign policy team was a participant in either the Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, Atlantic Council, or comparable networks, central in the previous three administrations, both Republican and Democrat (De Graaff and Van Apeldoorn 2019: 19-20).

Soon after his own election in 2017, Macron identified one possible route out of the impasse: the European Union should end the exclusive security reliance on NATO and create an EU general staff to provide “strategic autonomy” (cited in Cabirol 2017). In the same year the European Union launched the “permanent structured cooperation on defence” (PESCO) to coordinate arms purchases and lend substance to the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions for a common foreign and defence policy.

However, the group of four continental EU member states ready to commit to greater strategic autonomy on this issue (France, Germany, Spain and Italy) faced a bloc of smaller EU states led by The Netherlands, which lack major arms–industrial complexes of their own. Far from being united on the issue, then, the EU is divided on whether to achieve strategic autonomy or not, and whether developing a military-industrial complex of its own is worth it—or not. The Covid-19 paralysis has only intensified the dilemma. Yet as epidemics too are being increasingly interpreted in security terms, a matter of bolstering state power in times of crisis (Elbe 2009: 15), we should not conclude too quickly that European defence is off the agenda.

Four major geopolitical and related economic developments constitute the broader framework determining the EU’s turn to militarization, and continue to do so:

1. The NATO advance into the post-Soviet space after 1991. As we can see today, the unwillingness on the part of the seemingly victorious Atlantic bloc to negotiate a comprehensive peace deal ending the Cold War cast a long shadow. Instead the West chose to dictate the path by which Soviet

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president and Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev was to dismantle the Soviet command economy; it then encouraged Russian President Boris Yeltsin to declare the USSR’s dissolution and apply a neoliberal shock therapy (Klein 2007: 219; Lane 1996: 131). What ensued was a strategic drive to fill the vacuum that had opened up in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet border-lands. The promises made by Secretary of State James Baker and others to Gorbachev that eastern Germany would not become militarized if a united Germany joined NATO, and that once Russia pulled out its 24 divisions, the alliance would not advance one inch eastwards, were soon forgotten (Sarotte 2014; Itzkowitz Shifrinson 2016).

Right after the Soviet collapse, the Defence Planning Guidance for 1994-1999, commissioned by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, laid down that the United States, now the sole superpower, should maintain a structural military-technological advantage over any possible rival and maintain a defence spending level ensuring its unchallenged supremacy on a world scale (DPG 1992). Premised on the principle of full spectrum dominance and with the express commitment never to allow a rival to impose a nuclear stalemate on the US again, the Wolfowitz Doctrine inaugurated a process of upgrading the US nuclear arsenal. Eventually, this would entail the dismantling of the Cold War arms control treaty structure, beginning with the abrogation of the 1972 US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and more recently, followed by the unilateral US withdrawal from the INF Treaty.

2. The fact that the EU in its eastward advance was forced to abandon its civilian profile. With German reunification in 1991, France’s policy of keeping the lid on its neighbour’s political and economic aspirations had exhausted itself. Simultaneously, the axis of EU enlargement swung from the south to the east, following in NATO’s footsteps (Holman 1996, 1998). This reorientation at first was primarily economic, aimed at exploiting the new opportunities as a lever for abrogating the post-war social contract with organised labour. Through the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), capital headquartered in the EU identified “inflexible labour markets” as hampering “competitiveness” and advocated reforms to shift to a neoliberal, financialized capitalism after the Anglo-American example (Van Apeldoorn 2002: 67-8).

During the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, NATO military intervention served to overcome the hesitations of key EU countries such as France and Italy to use force unauthorised by the United Nations. In 2003, Germany, France and Belgium joined the broad coalition with

Russia, China and a UN majority against the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Yet this Atlantic fracture proved short-lived and the EU instead switched to joining the advance to the east again. Although its enlargement was not entirely coincident with NATO’s, the EU in the process did discard its self-image of a peacefully advancing economic giant (Cooper 2004: 59-61; Nazemroaya 2012: 51-3, 59). Besides locking in the principles of neoliberalism in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 (by which the EU effectively enacted the “European Constitution” rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands two years earlier), accession countries were also required to align their defence and security policies with those of NATO.

This was also the subtext of the invitation to a number of former Soviet republics to join an Eastern Partnership with an EU Association Agreement attached, in an obvious riposte to Russia’s plans for a Eurasian Union. In 2008, there had already occurred a short war when post-Soviet Georgia, offered NATO membership earlier in the year by George W. Bush (but still vetoed by France and Germany), attacked Russian peacekeepers deployed in its breakaway province of South Ossetia (Van der Pijl 2018: 25-30). The Eastern Partnership, therefore, was a velvet glove with an iron fist underneath; it directly challenged Moscow’s plans for Eurasian integration. With respect to Ukraine, the cradle of Russian civilization, the EU acted as a subcontractor to the NATO enlargement strategy. In the words of Richard Sakwa,

The EU was launched on the path of geopolitical competition, something for which it was neither institutionally nor intellectually ready. Not only was the Association Agreement incompatible with Ukraine’s existing free- trade agreements with Russia, but there was also the Lisbon [Treaty] requirement for Ukraine to align its defence and security policy with the EU. This was an extraordinary inversion: instead of overcoming the logic of conflict, the EU became an instrument for its reproduction in new forms (Sakwa 2015: 41, emphasis added).

3. The declaration of the “War on Terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks. The bombings of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Patriot Act, and the US invasion of Afghanistan under NATO auspices, followed by a series of regime changes in the Middle East and North Africa, made “terror” an additional regulator of the political process.

The association of terror incidents with radical Islam had been one of the ideas floated in a series of high-level conferences between 1979 and 1984, organized by the Likud Party leadership in Israel, which had come

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to power in 1977. Heirs to the Revisionist Zionist movement which from the 1920s had rejected any accommodation with the Arabs or Islam, the Likud solicited American support, if need be by provocation, to compel the United States to fight Israel’s wars with its neighbours under the banner of a War on Terror. In 1982, a plan named after the Israeli strategist, Oded Yinon, replaced the original revisionist Greater Israel project by a strategy to cut up Arab and Muslim states into small ethnic or sectarian entities powerless against a regionally superior, nuclear-armed Israel (Bollyn 2017: 23-6; Sabrosky 2013). In 1984, another Likud conference in Washington drew together the two strands (Netanyahu 1986). Except for Britain, however, EU involvement in the development of this strategy was negligible.

Since the Israeli strategy was to inscribe their regional security concerns into the new Cold War launched by the Reagan administration, the collapse of the Soviet Union also undermined the War on Terror project, but not for long. In the timely assessment by veteran US strategist Samuel Huntington (1993), the post-Cold War era was defined in terms of a “Clash of Civilizations” pitting the liberal West against Slavic, Confucian, and Islamic contenders. As to the latter, Huntington predicted that given Islam’s inherent tendency to violence, the bulge of unemployed young men in the Middle East was bound to become a source of terrorism (Huntington 1998: 116-20, 254-7).

4. The malfunctioning of neoliberal, finance-driven capitalism. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Western military strategy was recast to include the defence of the unified global economy as well. As noted by Claude Serfati, writing at the dawn of the new millennium, “the defence of ‘globalization’ against those who would threaten it, [was] placed at the top of the security agenda” (Serfati 2001: 12). However, globalization as a project of Anglo-US-centred finance capital is running aground. It has not been able to offer a meaningful social contract anywhere, and repeated injections of QE money at zero interest have merely served to reactivate speculative, “money-dealing” capital—its responsibility for the financial collapse of 2008 notwithstanding (Rasmus 2016; Van der Pijl 2019a). Yet without real investment, social inequality continues to grow and social unrest will resurface.

After the onset of the corona crisis, a centripetal restructuring of class relations, away from finance-driven globalization, has become apparent. This is bound to affect security arrangements too. Much depends on whether the “Great Reset”, envisaged as a way out of the crisis by the globalizing bloc of forces, will actually come off the ground (World

Economic Forum n.d.; Schwab 2020). It is more likely that short of war, the US military juggernaut, expanded across the globe, is going to lose its purpose and NATO with it (Nazemroaya 2012). Yet the future of any “European” alternative is uncertain too. The EU role in the corona crisis has been dismal; lockdowns and other presumed health measures have been highly unequal, not least because neoliberal policies have weakened health infrastructures across the Union and the West at large (Desai 2020; Magdin 2020).

In the process of the contested restructuring of both the Western ruling blocs and their defence arrangements, they are confronted by social formations which certainly have switched from state socialism to capitalism, but which have nevertheless retained a distinctive measure of state control of the economy and a foreign policy to match. In his speech to French diplomats, Macron mentioned Russia, China, and India: “They have a much stronger political inspiration than Europeans today. They think about our planet with a true logic, a true philosophy, an imagination that we have lost a little bit” (Macron 2019). The centre of gravity within this bloc is China. With its One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR) it is reaching out to create an economic infrastructure that includes Europe (Engdahl 2016; Lane and Zhu 2018).

Therefore, from two different angles: the faltering of finance-driven globalization radiating from the West, and the part-privatization of state- led economies acting as contenders for power, the geopolitical economy is entering a new era of uncertainty. Whether the unifying trend, in which governments the world over seek to exploit the corona panic to discipline their populations, or else, centrifugal forces arising from rivalry and competition, will gain the upper hand, cannot be predicted. However, a European security structure is bound to become part of any new configuration of forces.

Chapter Outline

The collection is organised as follows. In chapter 1, Kees van der Pijl argues that an EU security structure is a fundamentally political project, motivated by the interest to maintain the established political and economic order. In a context of uncertainty about US and NATO guarantees in his respect, ideas about creating an integrated defence under EU command have arisen by default; at issue is the restoration of a monopoly of violence. Such a monopoly is the hallmark of a sovereign state and is also at stake in the current corona emergency. The one example of a European attempt to assert sovereignty in the face of both

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internal unrest and external interference was the De Gaulle episode in France from 1958 to 1969, which led to the country’s withdrawal from NATO’s military and intelligence structures. Whether the response to the corona crisis is accelerating the decline of the US and the UK is also discussed in this chapter.

In chapter 2, Iraklis Oikonomou documents how European weapons manufacturers have moved into the forefront of the European integration process, in concert with the Commission in Brussels. From a relative outsider role in the past, the military-industrial complex has been upgraded to a “normal” sector benefiting from a wide range of policy instruments. Oikonomou analyses the ascent of the defence industry in the European integration process as a corollary of the internationalization of military- industrial capital, which made it necessary to enlist the EU as an additional support structure for arms manufacturers, a domain hitherto reserved for national states. Hence weapons producers have been introduced to European policies, programmes and funding tools previously reserved for civilian industries. Indeed, once we recognise the active role of the industry itself, these were “hijacked” by it. The civilian self-image of the European integration process has been altered accordingly.

Yet as Claude Serfati argues in chapter 3, at no point did defence industry consolidation in the EU cancel the national interests of the main players in Europe. France has seen its sphere of influence, notably in Africa, become destabilized by unrest and looks to European support to stem the tide. At the same time, the Macron proposals for strategic autonomy of 2017 are an attempt to exploit France’s competitive advantage in the EU—its military industry and army. Its initiatives in favour of the European defence agenda after the 2008 financial collapse build on the country’s existing military-industrial and research partnerships, notably with Germany and Great Britain. Addressing in particular the political economy of a European future fighter aircraft(s), which as a weapon system is by far the most important from an industrial and military perspective, Serfati demonstrates that it actually serves as an example of Europe’s failure to collaborate.

In chapter 4 Hans-Jürgen Bieling poses the question to what extent German reunification in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc has also implied a return to a new imperialism, both in Europe and beyond. His concern is to what extent this “imperialist turn” has retained the cosmopolitan and rule-of-law-based modes of state cooperation adhered to by the Federal Republic in the previous epoch. Developing the concept of cooperative imperialism, Bieling asks whether as a consequence of German unification, the European crisis and conflicts in the external

environment have changed the self-perception of the German ruling bloc and the German role in the militarization of the EU; in particular, its response to French initiatives discussed in the previous chapter. Since Germany suffered less from the corona crisis than hard-hit Italy, France, Spain, and Belgium, its pre-eminence in the EU will only be reinforced in the years to come.

Focusing on one particular axis of German power projection, the Baltic, Kees van der Pijl asks in chapter 5 how the EU’s energy links with Russia may become part of the possible unravelling of the US/NATO monopoly of violence in Europe. In 2014 the South Stream gas pipeline projected across the Black Sea fell victim to the US-orchestrated, anti- Russian seizure of power in Ukraine in February and the subsequent secession of Crimea and the uprising in the Donbass. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, planned to double the throughput of Russian gas across the Baltic, for the moment appears to be safe from such disruption—bar a late incident. Here too, establishing an effective monopoly of violence is the key. Germany’s assumption of the command of NATO’s Baltic naval infrastructure, making it available for EU and national German operations as well, appears a step in that direction and is well placed to serve its energy needs.

In chapter 6 Iraklis Oikonomou documents how the establishment of the European Defence Fund constitutes a key moment of militarization of the Union via the formal introduction of a funding line for military research and the development of weapons. He shows how the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD, an outcome of EU defence industry consolidation) and the parallel Kangaroo Group have succeeded in setting the policy agenda in Brussels. By their interventions (with respect to the European Commission and the Parliament, respectively) and proposals for fostering security research, EU military- space policy, and related activities, these bodies have guided the ascent of the arms-industry bloc, making weapons producers an integral part of the historic bloc governing the Union. Thus Oikonomou develops his thesis of a “hijacking” of the European integration process posited in chapter 2 in greater detail.

Weapons fuel wars and contribute to refugee flows, which are bound to resume once the response to the current health crisis settles in a stable pattern. In chapter 7, Mark Akkerman gives an overview of the European companies that sell arms used in the wars raging in the Middle East and North Africa and other conflict zones. He demonstrates that they are largely identical with the providers of border security to keep the victims out, profiting from the EU’s policy of militarizing its borders. Frontex, the

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European organization tasked with organizing this perverse defence, has developed a range of policies reciprocated by a security sector eager for their expansion. Through the externalisation of borders, third countries in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, have turned into border outposts to try and keep refugees bottled up beyond the actual EU, expanding this market even further.

In chapter 8, Yury Gromyko draws a grim picture of the new arms race unleashed as a result of US and NATO policies. As the power of the globalized financial world is waning, the relatively more territorialized military-industrial complexes of the US and to some extent, the EU, are becoming more prominent, entailing a quest to master technologies associated with new generations of weaponry. Warfare is also broadened to include ideological offensives and regime changes aimed at destabilizing countries bordering on strategic antagonists such as Russia and China. Gromyko pleads for a civilian retooling of new technologies to dispel the spectre of a nuclear holocaust. EU defence, if it breaks with NATO, may contribute to rein in the aggressive impulses of the Anglo- Saxon core, but if not, will merely contribute to the rise of overall defence outlays and increase the likelihood of war.

In a concluding chapter 9, Claude Serfati wraps up the volume by assessing how the EU plans in their current form, and the forces driving them, will affect the existing NATO military and military-industrial integration. Arguing that NATO means different things to the main member-states, he maintains that the calls by Trump and Macron to raise defence expenditure and demonstrate transatlantic and European solidarity, respectively, are thinly veiled expressions of these different perspectives. For the US and to a lesser extent, Britain, NATO is part of a global projection of power; France wants to carve out a European pillar within the alliance to serve its aspirations in controlling the French sphere of influence in Africa. German aspirations to have a greater say in NATO, partly accommodated by the Framework Nation set-up, are of a different order still.

In the end, Serfati concludes, we are looking at a hybrid process of integration in which defence (and also the police), is ultimately resistant to full internationalization, unlike monetary integration as achieved in the Eurozone. The means of coercion embody the principle of state sovereignty and their integration will always be subject to reservations related to its monopoly of violence. This is different in the case of monetary-financial integration, where capital accumulation has become the determining factor.

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The idea for this collection was conceived at the No-to-NATO conference in Brussels in May 2017. The editor was a plenary speaker at that event, which was attended by participants from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries. It coincided with a mass protest demonstration on the occasion of President Trump's visit to NATO headquarters.

At the conference the Dutch delegation was invited to organize a follow-up seminar on EU defence, which was held in April 2019 in Amsterdam. It was attended by participants notably from Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

For the present volume contributors were invited on account of their specific expertise and reputation in the field. All chapters have been written specifically for this collection. The editor gratefully acknowledges support for the project by Professor Radhika Desai, director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Centre (GERC) at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and Dr Alan Freeman of the website NewColdWar.org.