Jean Monnet Working Papers in Comparative and International Politics

Data shows a declining percent of states bound together in defence pacts. At the same time, new forms of security arrangements are created by the state governments. The paper focuses on regional security arrangements. It proposes to interpret the decreasing interest of governments in making new pacts of military alliances and the increasing interest in creating regional security partnership arrangements as a substantial change in international security practice. After defining the concept of regional security partnership – in opposition to the concepts of military pact and security community - the paper examines NATO’s and EU’s adaptation to the present European security partnership which took form and developed along with the long experience of the Helsinki Process.

Over fifty years, the number of the state actors of the international system has grown three times, its number moving from 54 in 1945 to 187 in 1995. In the same time period, the number of military and security agreements has grown in the same way, moving from 15 in 1945 to 42 in 1992.

The creation of new states within the international system of the 20th century (the number of the states has, in fact, been increasing since the end of World War I) has been made possible thanks to the legitimisation of the principle of self-determination of the nations and thanks to the de-legitimisation of the practice of colonialism. These changes in the principles regulating the political organisation of the world system were introduced through the Versailles peace accords at the end of World War I, although they have characterized international politics especially after World War II (Figure no.1).

In the post-WWII international system, also the number of military alliances and their importance have taken special characters when compared to the number and importance of the military alliances of past international systems.

In the COW project, military and defence alliances are divided in three classes: defence pacts, neutrality pacts and ententes. They are defined as follows:

Short of defence pacts in the second part of the 1950s, the number of military agreements has been growing in the past decades [Figure no.2]. But – as shown in Figure no.3 – over time the percent number of states in defence pacts (Class I) has become smaller. In the 1950s, 65 % of the states were members of at least one defence pact. In 1964, the figure falls to 53 %. In the following years, it goes on decreasing with the only remarkable exception of the year 1977. In 1991 and 1992, the states member of a defence pacts are less than 40 % of all the states of the world.

The occurrence of security agreements and military alliances in an international system is linked to the structure and politics of the system. There are at least two system structure and politics attributes which can explain the number of military alliances in a system:

The significance of the first attribute, which has been demonstrated by analysts like Gibler and Vasquez [1998] and Levy [1981], will be the object of a future study. The second attribute has been analysed in conceptual and empirical terms by different schools of International Relations like, for example, the realist school, the security community schools à la Deutsch [1957], Adler [1998] and Krause [1999], the school of regional security complexes [Buzan, 1991] and the school of the zones of peace and war [Singer and Widlavsky, 1993; Solingen, 1998]. However, this attribute deserves further analysis in order to explore the trend shown in Figure no.3.

Practices and instruments of security have been changing in the past decades. New instruments and practices have been invented, experimented and gradually consolidated into security measures among specific groups of governments, most notably among the European states. In general, during the past thirty years the governments have shown a decreasing interest in signing binding pacts of military alliances. Here it is assumed that regional agreements of security partnership are taking the place of defence pacts in the preference of the national governments. In particular, in this paper, the role of NATO in the European security system and the EU’s security and defence policy are analysed in harmony with the interpretation of the curve of the relative number of military pact members in the contemporary international system [Figure no.3] which is briefly presented in the following paragraphs.

Before falling in disgrace as the most preferred security agreement in the last decades, the defence alliances had already taken some attributes different from the ones shown in the past.

Usually created by small groups of countries, the defence pacts of the past international systems had a clear definition of the rationale of the alliance pact. The casus foederis was contained in the most important clause of the pact which defined the conditions of the reciprocal aid of the parties in case of aggression by a third party. However, the contracting parties hardly took long term and large range obligations on their freedom of selecting among different foreign policy options. In making an alliance, the concern of the governments was circumscribed by the contingent interest of overcoming the perceived security threat(s). The alliance pact was silent on the domestic affairs and politics of the contracting countries.

Unlike the defence pacts signed immediately after World War II (as, for example, the Brussels Pact) which had the same nature of the pacts of the past system, the most important defence pacts signed in the second half of the 1940s and during the 1950s (as, for example, the Atlantic, Warsaw, Manila, and Baghdad Pacts) were different from the pacts signed in the past. They were signed by large groups of countries, not infrequently belonging to distant areas of the world. The rationale of these alliance pacts was seldom circumscribed to the contingent interest of the avoidance of the security threat. Beside the military and strategic rationale and the casus foederis, a wide cooperation among the governments was contemplated in the pact. Obligations on the social and political internal structure of the member countries were also contemplated in the pact. Non-strategic cooperation was so important that the fate of the alliance was conditioned by the quality of the broad cooperation between the member countries and by the relations between the countries’ domestic society rather than by the allies’ strategic and security interests. The defence pacts promoted in the 1950s by the United States in the Pacific area, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf areas (like SEATO and CENTO) turned into a failure because of the lack of congruent relations between the societies of the member countries. Even the Warsaw Pact failed because of the failure of the communist governments in creating lively domestic societies with the same socio-economic system. When this failure became apparent to the governments, the failure of the international cooperation was also admitted.

NATO is the only remarkable exception to this destine of the most important contemporary military alliances. This can be explained by the fact that in the first forty years of the alliance, the NATO governments played on the favourable grass of similar domestic societies. Furthermore, they were successful in improving their strategic relations and also in strengthening social and economic relations across the member countries.

In this analysis, it is also maintained that during the last ten years NATO has been learning how to adapt its capabilities and programs to the changing European security culture. This learning and adaptation exercise is inspired by the will of the NATO’s governments to lead the security arrangement of the post-bipolar Europe.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, Europe was bound to develop a regional security partnership arrangement on the ground of the Helsinki Process and other experiences like the arms control process among the two superpowers and the European Union integration process. NATO has been inevitably engaged in the task of adapting itself to this security partnership building.

Another object of interest of this research (which is not put under analysis in this paper) is the study of non-European alliances and the preference of the alliance members for integrating the alliances into regional partnership arrangements. The American alliances with Japan and other Asian countries can be a case in Asia as long as the ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) process develops and/or changes into a wide regional security partnership arrangement.

The construction of regional agreements of security partnership can be the most important innovation in the security practices of the states in our times. A security partnership arrangement is the combination of existing agreements and new accords which can have different forms like formal treaties, gentlemen agreements, operative rules, international organisations, joint actions of states and international organisations, multilateral processes (like the CSCE/OSCE and the ARF process), and peace and stability pacts based on confidence-building measures.

The study of security partnership arrangements is close to the study of security communities and partially overlaps with it, but does not coincide with it because security partnership arrangements and security communities are different cases of security building. In Deutsch’s terms, a security community is "a group of people which has become integrated" [Deutsch et al., 1957: 5] and, therefore, constitutes a group of countries among which war is obsolete as instrument of conflict resolution. A security community is brought into existence by transaction and communication flows which binds a group of people together, enabling them to think of themselves as a community and producing the condition for the establishment of institutions of peaceful conflict resolution. Security partnership agreements, instead, are formed within groups of countries characterized by conflict division and small flows of transactions and communications but disposed to manage their conflict divisions by making steps towards the reduction of the risk of violent confrontation and allowing the instauration of increasing flows of communication and transactions among themselves.

The building of security partnership arrangements is also different from the building of military alliances. A military alliance is based on the traditional conception of the state security as the condition reached by pooling national military forces to dissuade potential aggressors by means of threatening the use of violence. The building of regional arrangements of security partnership, instead, is based above all on the conception of security developed in Europe during the Helsinki Process. According to this conception, a group of interrelated international and internal measures must be created to improve the security conditions and defend the geopolitical stability of the region. The dissuasion of the expansionist design of (potential) aggressor states and the avoidance of international violence in a region are believed to be better obtained when a security system is built by embracing all or almost all the states of the region and also extra-region powers rather than pooling national forces in opposite military alliances.

In formal terms, a security partnership arrangement is based on a set of accords including one or few fundamental agreements and a number of related operative agreements. In the fundamental agreements (like the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1990 Charter of Paris for A New Europe; the 1995 Barcelona Declaration on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership; and the 1994 Chairman’s Statement at the First ASEAN Regional Forum), shared principles of peaceful relations are proclaimed and issues of conflict, tension and instability are also made public. In the operative agreements, measures directed to manage both international and internal problems are arranged by the governments and international organisations of the region in order to prevent the risk of conflict that can break down the stability of the region. The fundamental agreements are the initial step of partnership building, but a regional security partnership really comes to life only when some operative agreements are put on the ground.

The measures that can strengthen the international conditions of security in a region include:

The measures that can strengthen the internal conditions of security in a region include:

Though the international organisations are the most important collective actors of the security partnership agreements, the military alliances (or a single military alliance) among the countries of the region can also have important functions in the regional arrangement of security. Also the major countries of the regions and some external powers are requested to give important contributions to the security arrangement in terms of resources and leadership. However, the international and internal measures of a security partnership system are not the exclusive responsibility of the great powers, military alliances and international organisations.

A security partnership system includes at the same time:

The construction of the European security system which started with the 1972 convention of the Helsinki conference on security and cooperation is the first case of regional security partnership building in the history of international politics. The peculiarity of the European international politics in the bipolar and post-bipolar diplomacy, the EC/EU integration process and the CSCE/OSCE model of regional security are invoked as the reasons for the creation of the European security. The peculiarity of Europe and European politics in the present world is invoked also to sustain the theory of the uniqueness and un-reproductiveness of the European security partnership model. However, some conditions point to the opposite. Among these conditions, there is the concern for security issues associated with the political and economic interdependence that develops in other regions of the world like, for example, the Asia-Pacific, the Gulf, the Mediterranean and, less contemptuously, North America and South America. Another condition is the fundamental agreement among two groups of countries, namely the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership countries, which have started a negotiation process of security partnership building.

The construction of a regional security partnership in Europe was sanctioned in 1975 by the fundamental agreement named as the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), signed by 35 governments. This accord was redefined by the 1990 CSCE Charter of Paris which also opened the decisive phase of the making of operative agreements of security building in Europe. Since that year, a series of treaties and programmes has been produced to put in place a panoply of international and internal measures of security. This series includes the creation of the OSCE’s machinery of offices and mechanisms, the NATO’s initiatives and programmes towards the former Soviet states and the Eastern and Central European states, the EU’s common defence policy, and the TACIS, PHARE and similar programmes directed to assist the rehabilitation of the post-Soviet states and societies, along with the many initiatives and programmes for the Balkans in the 1990s.

It is true that the traditional security model of dissuasion of the potential aggressor by means of threatening the use of all-out military means has not been abandoned. Direct deterrence is the intact instrument of the collective defence of the NATO alliance under the United States leadership. However, it has also been agreed that the regional security partnership model is the preferred model of security for moral, cultural, economic and social reasons.

In the 1990s, the Atlantic Alliance has moved towards the security partnership model negotiated in the long Helsinki process which contemplates security as being a cooperative, comprehensive and gradual process. In this decade, NATO has adopted many decisions to make its traditional strategy compatible with the new conditions of international security in Europe taking into account the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia.

It is also true that the United States’ attitude towards the security partnership model can be understood only in the frame of the American foreign policy which is inspired by the United States goal and interest of keeping the leadership of the world politics. In particular, the preference for American-led actions with the legitimisation of the United Nations or of an ad hoc multilateral coalition must be taken into account when security arrangements are under consideration as it has been the case in Europe. At the same time, it is true that in post-cold war Europe Washington has decided to refresh and update its Atlantic and European security policy. This change is directed to three areas: (1) the NATO’s policy towards the building of the Common European security and defence policy (CESDP); (2) the enlargement of NATO and the NATO’s relations with the former enemies; (3) the new strategic concept and tasks of the Alliance regarding the development of the NATO’s capabilities of crisis management.

Today, defence is the real object of the action of the EU governments and institutions. Since the Amsterdam Treaty of European Union entered into force in May 1999, decisions have been made to create common organs in Brussels to carry out the project of creating a rapid intervention force of 60.000 soldiers within a wider European structure of crisis management including military and civilian capabilities. The Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP) is not an explicit first step towards the formation of a European army. It can be definied, instead, as a point of convergence of different aspirations of the EU governments and also as a mean point between the accord of the EU governments and the preference of the United States government.

For the past three decades, the common security and defence policy has been on the agenda of the European Union. The European governments started talks on security policy during the 1970s in the frame of the EPC (European Political Cooperation). In 1986, however, in the first reform treaty, i.e. the Single European Act (SEA), it was only the economic aspects of security that were contemplated as an object of European cooperation. It was only in 1992 that cooperation on defence was formally introduced by the Treaty of European Union signed in Maastricht. At the time, Europe was not divided in two military alliances and the need of a new European security system was widely recognized. On the occasion of the 1990-1991 Gulf War and Desert Storm Operation, the inter-Atlantic diplomacy had passed through another round of the long time confrontation among the allies on the issue of the out-of-area operations. At the time the problem of how to respond to the blowing violent conflicts of the Yugoslav nationalities was also already on the first rows of the European and Atlantic agendas. These three events (the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the Gulf War and the collapse of Yugoslavia) influenced the EU and US governments’ decisions on the EU aspirations to a common defence and also the American aspirations to maintain NATO as the corner stone of the European security system. However, the boiling process of the building of the EU’s defence policy lasted until 1999, the time of the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty and the appointment of the former NATO’s Secretary General, Xavier de Solana, to the position of High Representative of the CFSP and supervisor of the negotiation and implementation of the decisions on the building of the CESDP. These decisions have been formally taken in the course of all the bi-annual meetings of the European Council which have been held since the May 1999 Amsterdam Treaty ratification. All these decisions have reaffirmed

The problem of bringing CESDP into existence and the related problem of creating smooth and efficient CESDP-NATO relations are not analysed in this paper. These problems include the harmonisation of the national defence policies and strategies; the problem of harmonising different group memberships because some EU countries are in NATO and others are out of NATO and WEU (a would-be alliance that is facing trouble but some governments consider as a viable instrument of the CESDP); the problem of finding the material and financial resources of the CESDP; the problem of defining the weight of different groups of countries in the CESDP decision-making process.

Notwithstanding these problems, visible results have been reached during the last two years. Some parts of the CESDP machinery have also been put in place as confirmed by the November 2000 Capabilities Commitment Conference. In this conference, the EU governments have identified the areas in which efforts must be made in upgrading existing assets, investment, development and coordination so as gradually to acquire or enhance the capabilities required for autonomous EU action. However, in the same conference, it has been reaffirmed that, in the CESDP building process, all unnecessary duplication(s) of the existing NATO capabilities and mechanisms must be avoided.

At the moment, no problem of unnecessary duplication exists in the civilian capabilities of crisis management. Though in this field the CESDP is developing slowly, even the United States recognize that this is a specific field of action for the Europeans. It is recognized that a specific task of the incoming CESDP is the creation of police forces and other instruments and arrangements for the re-establishment of the collapsed judicial and penal system, the civil administration as well as the civil protection system of the post-crisis societies and societies in transition.

In conclusion, the EU countries have reached the agreement, among themselves and with the United States, to contribute to the regional security arrangement of Europe with international and internal measures of security in the area of crisis management. It is also constitutive part of the CESDP – to be implemented gradually through a step-by-step formulation in the coming years – a double structure of relations, one between EU and NATO and another one between EU and the non-EU, non-NATO countries of Europe. It is maintained that EU will contribute to the architecture of the European security partnership arrangement by means of this double structure of relations.

Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the United States and NATO governments decided how to deal with former enemies. The decision involved the dialogue with former enemies on security issues, turning a past hostile relationship into a friendly relationship. To this end, a dialogue forum called NACC (North Atlantic Cooperation Council) was convened in 1992. In the following years, this early decision was adapted to meet the different problems of the different groups of countries in which the former Soviet and Central-Eastern Europe countries divided in the new circumstances of the post-cold war Europe. In 1994, the Partnership for Peace (PfP) was offered to the former Warsaw Pact’s members which agreed to take part in NATO’s programmes tailored to their individual requirements. These programmes include different activities such as military exercises and civil emergency operations. In 1997, NACC was closed and substituted with the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), a forum of political dialogue among 44 NATO Allies and Partners. In addition, two bilateral dialogue frameworks have been created: the NATO Joint Permanent Council with Russia and the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Last, the NATO’s enlargement policy has brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the group of NATO’s member countries but the door has been kept open to other countries wishing to become NATO members.

With this network of dialogue structures, the post-cold war NATO is aiming to build a new collective defence strategy without a "declared enemy" on the European soil. At the same time, the NATO’s policy towards the new security partnership arrangement includes the goal of keeping the Alliance’s leadership on the security architecture of Europe. This goal includes the formulation of "the new enemies" strategy (i.e. the strategy against the rogue states), and "the new tasks and capabilities" objective for the management of international and internal crises. The formers are located mainly outside Europe (with the past exception of Milosevic’s Serbia). The latters are located on the fringes (i.e. the Balkans) and near surroundings of Europe (the Mediterranean, Middle East and the Gulf, and Central Asia). All these actions, however, are better defined as the third area of NATO’s new security policy.

In the late 1990s NATO’s vocabulary, the change of the Alliance in the third area is represented as the change needed to meet the security challenges of the 21st century. In cold-war Europe, NATO's defence planning was concerned with maintaining the capabilities needed to defend the member countries against the possible aggression of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In post cold war Europe, in addition to the traditional goal of defence against deliberate aggression to the allied countries, internal conflicts in countries on Europe's fringes and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in rogue states in the areas surrounding Europe are the primary concern of NATO’s policy-makers. To meet these concerns, two programmes were launched: (1) the definition of the new strategic concept and (2) the defence capabilities initiative (DCI).

Since the early days of its history, the Atlantic Alliance has been equipped with a strategic concept for the defence of the North Atlantic area. The concept has been continuously adapted to the changing circumstances of the Atlatinc strategic environment. The debate on the Alliance’s strategic concept became heated only in the 1990s because of the complexity and fluidity of the circumstances. The 1991 publication of the new strategic concept has been finally updated in 1999 by the Washington Atlantic Council. This version of the concept reaffirms the importance of the conventional and nuclear capabilities of the Alliance and introduces other important elements in the Alliance approach to security such as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) and the preparation for conflict prevention and crisis management.

The Defence Capabilities Initiative has been launched to put the new strategic concept on the ground, that is to improve the Alliance military capabilities to hold simultaneously the tasks of collective defence, conflict prevention (and dissuasion) and crisis management in and outside Europe. In NATO’s words, the Initiative will improve the Alliance military and strategic capabilities in five areas:

The change of the strategic concept of the Alliance including the task of prevention of internal conflicts and crisis management is NATO’s most critical area of change in the 1990s with regard also to the making of the European security partnership. With this change, the Alliance wants to be prepared to act as a structure of stability in the European region engaging itself in the conduct of (1) international measures of conflict and crisis prevention, management and solution, and (2) internal measures of crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.

It must be underlined that in internal measures of crisis management the overlapping with the CESDP’s primary goal is evident. This overlapping is explained with the fact that NATO’s compliance with the fundamental and operative European partnership agreements depends upon the Alliance leader’s security interests and perception of security threat and with the United States’s global strategy. This condition can only be softened by introducing the option of de-coupling the European security arrangement and the use of NATO forces and capabilities, at least as an option available with the consent of the United States’ government. At the moment, this kind of agreement has been defined by the United States and the WEU governments with the decision on the CJTFs (Combined Joint Task Forces). However difficult it is to put it into practice, the CJTFs decision has been reaffirmed in several NATO documents. At the same time, many EU governments’ official documents (like the European Council’s Final Declarations) have recurrently affirmed the will to build an autonomous CESDP. In principle, all these decisions – though in contrast among themselves - are consistent with the construction of a regional security arrangement made by a plurality of actors.

The security culture of the post-cold war Europe - which has been formed adding the experience of the 1960s and 1970s bipolar arms control policy and Helsinki Process [Adler and Barnett, 1998; Krause, 1999] to the traditional traits and practice of international security - prompts the European governments to adopt a variety of instruments, measures and agreements which are rather different from the traditional security instruments, measures and agreements.

For this reason, it is maintained that in Europe the traditional alliance policy is under change and is giving place to the new policy of regional security partnership. Accordingly, the Atlantic Alliance and the CESDP are committed to adapting themselves to the new circumstances. NATO, in particular, has to make compatible the collective defence of the member countries with the conditions of the regional security partnership agreements.

In this regard, the NATO’s decision of enlarging the membership and creating special multilateral relations (EAPC and PfP) and bilateral relations (presently with Russia and Ukraine) has important effects on the Alliance itself. NATO’s decision-making process will be inevitably affected in formal and informal terms. On the one hand, a wider Euro-Atlantic community is in the making. On the other hand, a Europeanization of the Alliance is taking place thanks to the enlargement of the Alliance membership and the other NATO’s special relations with individual countries. To meet the self-ascribed challenge of keeping the leadership of the Alliance and developing the European security partnership, the United States government has to enhance its leadership capabilities and adopt new mechanisms of consensus building in the Alliance structure.

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