No country has done as much to build a European security identity as France has. Successive French governments have pushed the European Union to take on military tasks, while ensuring that NATO gave the twenty-seven member bloc sufficient space to develop its own capabilities.
If US President Harry Truman is the father of NATO, then ESDP owes its parentage to a succession of French leaders, starting with General Charles De Gaulle. But like children, whose needs change as they grow older, so ESDP’s teenage years will require a different parenting style than what went before. Can France change its child-rearing skills to fit the new task ?
In the early years of ESDP, the premium was on getting agreement in principle to a European security dimension, especially from the EU’s other military power, Britain ; and then to lay out a set of targets that the EU would hope to achieve. Hence the commitment by EU leaders in Helsinki to create rapidly-deployable force of EU 60.000 soldiers.
From this came the drive to create smaller, but more easily-developed force “packages”, such as the EU battle-groups, rapidly-deployable units of 1500 soldiers. To improve procurement, the European Defence Agency was set-up, a proto-headquarters built in Brussels while EU-badged troops rolled into Bosnia and Chad and European ships set sail for Somalia’s coast. In this, Paris has played the role of an ever-present guardian – pushing, cajoling and supporting.
Transition difficile
But those were ESDP’s formative years. As ESDP becomes a teenager, its needs are changing. Now the focus must be on developing not only guns and grunts, but marshalling the civilian assets required to fight the wars of the future – conflicts that will demand not only the means to kill, capture or contain the enemy, but require that the EU has the people, funds and skills to protect local populations and kick-start the all-important reconstruction process. In this new task, France still has much to learn.
In the first-ever assessment of the civilian capabilities of all 27 member states France came in, not in the top group where it naturally belongs, but on a 11th place alongside Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Romania.
The survey showed that while the French government has done better than most EU countries in deploying police officers on ESDP missions -– sending 255 abroad this year alone -– according to a range of other measures, such as pre-deployment training, planning for missions, and recruitment practices France falls behind others.
Though the French police totals more than 150,000 employees, the government only promised to deploy small numbers to EU missions. In the same vein, it only dispatched 17% of the 1,424 civilian experts it promised the EU in 2008. Unlike in the US, each government ministry has its own roster of civilian experts, with the Quai d’Orsay responsible only for those experts than do not work for the government. Nobody has an overview of all the experts available – and hence the gaps that need to be filled. As each government ministry has to pay for the deployment of its own officials, the incentives to offer staff up for overseas work is limited.
Training experts that deploy into missions is also a problem. Though they are invited, few diplomats and police officers attend classes at any one of the country’s many first-class military schools. This means military officers and civilian experts often meet each other, for the first time, in the field. Corporation can often be difficult.
The truth is that France still has a strong military-first culture and many parts of the security establishment remains suspicious that too much focus on civilian, as opposed to military, ESDP will undermine the EU’s drive for a NATO-like security role. This is despite a commitment by the French government in the Livre Blanc to improve “civilian force generation” and a drive by the military to update its Doctrine de Contre Rébellion, which now for the first time acknowledges the political nature of modern warfare – and therefore the need for the civilian tools to engage and support local communities.
Deux défis
So in developing a future-proof ESDP, France faces two challenges. To make the development of the necessary civilian capacities –- experts, training, funding -– as important as the drive to build the military’s readiness ; and, second, to push as aggressively for civilian ESDP as the French government once did for military ESDP. On the former, an easy way forward would be to commit to drafting an official National Strategy and invite other EU countries who already have such documents, like Finland or Germany, to peer review it after a year. This method has worked well inside the OECD, where France’s aid policies for example were peer-reviewed in 2008 by Britain and Sweden.
If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, the work of developing ESDP capabilities will be made easier, in part because a new EU diplomatic corps will be set-up that will facilitate civil-military cooperation. But even with the treaty in place, progress on ESDP will still require France to show the way forward. It can do so in a number of ways, for example by backing the establishment of a civilian reserve for those EU members who are interested. Or by offering to turn one of its military schools into a civilian National Security Academy for use by all EU states.
