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By Dov S. Zakheim
The Western European Union—its defense and foreign affairs ministers meet in Paris (inset)—has grown stronger since its inception in 1948. Now that Portugal and Spain have joined, the Union has taken on a decidedly more maritime flavor, as shown here by the Spanish frigate Asturias operating recently in the Red Sea.
Less than a decade ago, few people took notice of a stagnant little organization tucked away in two posh neighborhoods of Paris and London. Today, several international political analysts view the Western European Union (WEU) as at least the basis for European operations outside the NATO area. In the words of a seasoned British observer of military affairs, it “distinguished itself in coordinating forces,” in the 1991 Gulf War.1
The organization has thus progressed from historical artifact to role player, however modest, on the international stage. This evolution presents still more evidence that the end of the Cold War has prompted European allies of the United States to distance themselves, at least to some degree, from their previous NATO-based political moorings. And it may be no coincidence that WEU’s role as a coordinator of out-of-area operations has played out twice in the past four years in a maritime setting—the first being the Persian Gulf reflagging operations of 1987-88.
WEU is, in the main, a grouping of maritime powers, especially now, with the recent accession of Spain and Portugal to its ranks. Previous members were Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, France and Italy—the original six of the European Economic Community (EEC)—as well as the United Kingdom. As a maritime alliance, WEU might take on still greater importance, as Europe seeks to define its security relationship with both the United States and the rest of the world.
How WEU Began
The Western European Union essentially started as a political outgrowth of the 1948 Brussels Treaty Organization. Formed in the aftermath of the collapse of the European Defense Community in 1954, the WEU was originally intended to integrate West Germany into the western
defense structure. NATO soon absorbed that mission, adding West Germany to its ranks in 1955. WEU then sank into the recesses of European bureaucratic inactivity, providing comfortable jobs with tax-free salaries for those who churned out needless reports on European defense issues. The reports were uneven in quality and uniformly ignored by all except students preparing doctoral dissertations.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s WEU briefly looked as if it might become Great Britain’s primary vehicle for entering the Common Market. That function also fizzled, after French President Charles De Gaulle’s veto set back British membership for what proved to be a decade. Throughout the 1960s, Britain remained focused on the organization in its drive to join the EEC. In particular, its assembly offered a venue for British parliamentarians to meet with and try to influence their counterparts in the Six (since, by coincidence, the community’s membership extended only to the non-British members of WEU). In fact, the French, who remained adamantly opposed to Britain’s joining the EEC, became so infuriated with the intense lobbying taking place in the WEU that they boycotted the organization’s ministerial meetings in 1969 and 1970, returning only when the focus of British membership shifted to the EEC’s Council of Ministers.
WEU may also have provided some small impetus for the ultimately successful British application for entry into the EEC. But once the offer of admission was made, and was accepted by Britain’s parliament in 1973, WEU slowly receded. Only the French occasionally seized upon WEO as a vehicle for creating a European pillar within the At' lantic Alliance.
It was not surprising, then, that in the mid-1980s, the French—sensing a thaw in the Cold War and casting aboit1 for a new role for themselves in a changing Europe^
began again to market the WEU as a vehicle for strengthening the European contribution to western defense. The first such soundings actually came in 1984 from Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, whose Atlanticist credentials set him apart from previous Gaullist—and rather nnti-United States—proponents of WEU, such as Foreign Minister Michel Jobert. Nevertheless, the major impetus for reviving WEU came from Mitterrand’s partner in the cohabitation government, Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Despite their ideological differences, Chirac shared Mitterrand’s vision of France’s prominent role on the European continent. Chirac was the moving force behind the ^EU’s promulgation in October 1987 of a “Platform on Security Interests.” This document, formulated in the wake °f the Reykjavik summit, reiterated the importance of nuclear weapons to European defense—a position that was totally consistent with that of France, but possibly less with the nature of at least some of the U.S.-Soviet iscussions in the Icelandic capital.
^E(J in the Gulf Tanker Crisis
C. E. CASTLE / INSET: COURTESY OF WEU
The WEU did not create a centralized command alone the lines of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic. Instead it fostered coordination at both the political and operational levels, although a disparity became apparent in the degree of operational coordination among various clusters of WEU members. The French, for example desphe being champions of WEU, actually went out of their way to deny the existence of a purported agreement on rotation of mine countermeasures forces. The Belgians and Dutch, on the other hand, defined their missions as “European” under WEU auspices, and put their mine countermeasures ships under British operational control This was the Belgian Navy’s first out-of-area operational deployment in its history, and the first for the Dutch Navy since it lost West Irian in 1962. y
True, the Europeans were never tested in battle, and international cooperation in clearing mines was hardly new— the Soviet Union and the United States, together with other states, cleared the Suez Canal of mines after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for example. Still, the fact that the WEU members acknowledged a degree of coordination, if not an actual operational agreement, provided the first concrete case of the organization’s impact beyond the mere pushing of papers. The operation demonstrated as well that WEU was a viable vehicle both for circumventing NATO’s self-imposed strictures on the out-of-area operations, and for avoiding the inevitable skittishness about operations that would have emanated from by NATO’s Scandinavian members, particularly Iceland and Denmark.
The degree of participation was impressive, as well The British contributed 11 ships, which escorted their own flagged merchantmen, cleared mines in the southern Gulf and managed Belgian and Dutch mine countermeasures
mineclearing activities in the Arabian Sea. The Italians employed their eight ships in a similar manner. Even the landlocked Luxembourgers, with no navy at all, made a monetary contribution, while the West Germans deployed ships to the Mediterranean for the first time in order to free units of other WEU members for Gulf operations.
Expanding WEU—and its Maritime Clout
Unlike so many other international organizations, WEU had not expanded in more than three decades since its inception. This lack of growth did not necessarily stem from the organization’s exclusiveness as much as it probably did from its irrelevance. By the late 1980s, however, the organization had indeed become more attractive as a potential force in the new Europe. Spain and Portugal’s application for entry in 1988, and Turkey’s stated desire to join as well, confirmed that fact.
In joining the WEU on 14 November 1988, the two Iberian powers, both NATO members, added new impetus to the group’s claim to reconcile the otherwise seemingly antithetical pulls of Atlanticism and Europeanism. Perhaps more significant, they strengthened the maritime dimension of the alliance and underscored its potential role as a vehicle for coordinating European operations outside the NATO area. Both Spain and Portugal have major colonial legacies that tie them both to Latin America and Africa. Indeed, the Spanish still retain enclaves in Africa— namely Ceuta and Mellila.
Portugal’s navy, while relatively small, nevertheless includes three submarines and some 14 frigates. The much larger Spanish navy includes eight submarines, several destroyers, and a carrier that operates AV-8B vertical short takeoff and landing aircraft. Far more than Portugal’s is Spain’s orientation toward North Africa, and its accession to WEU shifted the balance of the organization’s maritime power southward.
WEU and the Gulf War
Although initial European willingness to support the U.S. deployment to Kuwait was tepid, WEU established a crisis coordination center in Paris in early September 1990 and invited all WEU members to provide liaison officers there. Significant here is that French naval officers headed the center, and French Navy headquarters in Paris—which also happens to be a stone’s throw from the U.S. Embassy-—served as its home.
As in the previous Gulf crisis, WEU was not able to take full operational control of its member states’ forces, which operated under their own national commands. British, Dutch, and Portuguese naval forces operated outside the task force structure. Nevertheless, three naval task groups were established. One group—comprising one frigate each from France, Italy, and Spain—was assigned to protect U.S. logistic ships in the Gulf. A second task group—comprising two Belgian minehunters and a supply ship—provided antimine patrols off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. And a third group—comprising a
French and a Belgian frigate—took charge of enforcing the embargo in the Bab El Mandab Strait. In mid-February 1991, the WEU established a fourth naval task force— comprising two French and two Spanish frigates—to enforce the embarqo in the Red Sea and to protect the approaches to the Saudi port of Yanbu, which served as the main logistical base for French forces in the war.
At the same time that WEU increased its activity in the Gulf War, Germany and France jointly proposed to the European Community’s intergovernmental council that the WEU be accorded a major role in any moves toward European political union. France went even further: for the first time it accepted in principle that the WEU organization, hitherto divided between Paris and London, should be transferred to Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the European Community. Finally, and most important, the nine WEU states reached a near consensus on the proposal for the organization to act as a bridge between the “process of European integration and the Atlantic Alliance.” Thus, the Gulf crisis ostensibly demonstrated the need for a collective European defense and a structure that defined the concept far more broadly—in geographical as well as theoretical terms—than the Atlantic Alliance provided.
WEU’s March to the Sea
Even 1992 will not witness the complete economic integration of the European Community’s 12 member states, much less of those states outside it. On security matters, the divisions within Western Europe remain deeper still- While some European states emphasize nonalignment with major blocs (Finland and Austria, for example), others have long histories of strict neutrality (Sweden and Switzerland) and still others shorter, but equally determined neutralist policies (Ireland). The European Community already counts Ireland among its members. Austria and Sweden have both announced their intentions to join. Coordinating defense policy among such a varied group of nations, particularly in the face of uncertainty in the Soviet Union will not be a simple task. The road to European Community defense integration remains long and thorny.
WEU was long viewed as an effective expression of realistic European defense cooperation. In the words of a leading European journalist and scholar, however, “WEU has been everybody’s favorite institution in theory, but not in practice.”3 This observation antedated the Gulf War, however, as well as the submission of the Franco-German proposals to the intergovernmental council. The WEU has now demonstrated its competence in at least partly coordinating international military activities on two separata occasions—in both cases the coordinated forces were naval forces.
Noteworthy is the fact that the maritime missions coordinated by WEU were not identical in the two Gull operations. The first involved mine warfare; the second initially involved a naval .blockade. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the WEU member states continued minecleaf' ing operations, with even the Germans sending thr6^
Revolution Evolution
“The Russian Revolution of 1991 has codified the fundamental change in the nature of Europe’s balance of power. While the Soviet Union continues to evolve, it is nevertheless clear that the West will be confronting a very different series of potential threats from those that animated its defenses for more than four decades. The focus of Western Europe is likely to stray even further away from the now anachronistic central front to the flanks of the continent and beyond.
Even the emergence of Russia from the ashes of the Soviet Union underscores this new development: the long-standing Russian thrust for warm-water access is unlikely to remain dormant for long, and the erstwhile Soviet Navy may yet find that its role, unlike that of the Red Army, requires considerably less redefinition.
As the Soviet Union transforms itself into a federation, or even a confederation, the call for new European security structures, already widespread since the Warsaw Pact began to crumble in 1989, no doubt will become increasingly shrill. How such structures might be organized and how effective they might be is, however, quite another matter.
The European Community, for example, was for several months conspicuously unable to
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AP / WIDE WORLD
The August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union left more questions unanswered than resolved. Not only must the West now rethink its security goals and whether the Soviet Navy is really less of a threat, it must recognize Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a force to be reckoned with and nurtured. Yeltsin is now a senior partner in the new hierarchy.
bring the Yugoslav civil war under any sort of control. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, often mentioned as the forum for developing a new European collective security regime, has been virtually invisible throughout the Yugoslav crisis. I any event, collective security has never succeeded in Europe and has been challenged conceptually by many scholars as an idealistic but ineffective means of providing for regional stability.
Throughout all the changes that take place, and subsequent to them, Western Europe will continue to retain two primary security goals, particularly as long as the Soviet Union, or Russia as its successor, remains a nuclear superpower with large conventional forces:
VFirst, Europe will need to provide for its own stability and security, defending against threats wherever they might arise. ►Second, the continent will want continued U.S. involvement in this effort, even as it redefines the manner in which it seeks to defend its interests.
NATO will certainly contribute to both goals, though its focus for some time to come could well be blurred by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, by looking beyond NATO's borders, WEU’s new policy and operational thrusts have presupposed, at least to some extent, the momentous events taking place inside the Soviet Union. The further pursuit of those thrusts can only make WEU more relevant to the evolving, yet very real, requirements for the defense of Western European interests through the remainder of this century and beyond.
D. Zakheim
Jbmesweepers and some remote-controlled reconnaissance DOats in April 1991.
*n many ways, the German postwar role underscored foe,ac*vantages that WEU and its maritime missions af- to Europe’s quest for a common security identity that the>U ^ a*so comPat’ble with Western operations. For ter,^errnans’ any operations outside their territorial wa- parS.rePresented a major departure. The United States in r ’eular criticized them for taking too strict a view of
their constitutional limitations upon overseas deployments But very real political concerns were behind the German reluctance to operate in the Gulf during the war. Thus the dispatch of minesweepers even after the Gulf War represented a further German departure from its traditional postwar Eurocentric security focus. WEU indirectly provided the Germans with an institutional framework that afforded them a more flexible policy. And the maritime mission like all peacetime maritime operations, offered the Ger-
mans the prospect of conducting operations outside national boundaries, with the flexibility to increase, decrease, or withdraw their forces as they saw fit. The German case can go for the rest of Western Europe.
Coping with threats that are both more widely dispersed and more amorphous than those of World War II requires forces in Western Europe that are, above all, more deployable and flexible. They must be able to operate in theaters where friendly bases might not be available; they must function in a variety of remote climates and terrains. They must incorporate, therefore, not only maritime forces, but lighter ground forces and the lift to carry them.
In the latter two respects, as with maritime forces, WEU is increasingly becoming a vehicle to implement the change in Europe’s force posture. Thus, in June 1991, the WEU Assembly’s Technological and Aerospace subcommittee recommended the creation of an all-European airlift command, the equivalent of the United States Military Airlift Command, in order to pool and enhance the limited lift assets of WEU’s member nations. At about the same time, British Secretary of State for Defence Tom King-—calling WEU “a framework for organizing collective European military action outside the NATO area”— voiced his support for the concept of a European Reaction Force.4 This force, akin to NATO’s new rapid reaction corps, would have its own peacetime planning and exercise arrangements, responding to WEU Ministers.
It is, of course, difficult to predict whether either of the proposals for new WEU military structures will come to fruition. Proposals by WEU parliamentary committees in particular have been religiously ignored in the past. But King’s statement cannot be easily dismissed. Indeed, it might serve as a model for a similar WEU effort to create a standing European Naval Force, along the lines of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic. Such a force has demonstrated over two decades that it is possible to operate a permanent international naval force in peacetime, and that the existence of such a force fosters standardization of tactics and capabilities, systems, and supply: all goals of WEU as well.5 A standing European Naval Force could in fact be an outgrowth of the four WEU naval task groups that continue to operate in the Gulf theater.
The United States traditionally has been cool to the concept of WEU, or any other purely European organization, in any way usurping NATO’s role in the defense of Western Europe. This coolness took on clear overtones of hostility in a letter sent by Under Secretary of State Reginald Bartholomew to key European allies in response to the Franco-German initiative to the European Community intergovernmental council during the Gulf War. The Franco- German references to common foreign and security policy and emphasis on a European identity that might also be reflected in a European pillar within NATO appear to have rankled U.S. policy makers. In fact, the United States has been paying lip service to the notion of a twin European pillar since the days of President John F. Kennedy. It seems, however, that such a pillar was tolerable only as long as its existence was unlikely.
In the changing European climate, however, the notion of a separate European centripetal force within NATO is not so easily dismissed. King, for example, met this concern head-on. He reiterated that the only way to strengthen the transatlantic linkage was precisely by having “Europeans finally to fulfill their long-standing pledges to strengthen the ‘European Pillar’ and take on a greater proportion of our own defense.” He then went on to reassure the United States that WEU’s forces and activities, including the European Reactions Force, would be “separable” not “separate.” Budgetary limitations, he asserted, prevent Europe from maintaining two sets of forces.
In practice, the United States confronts a dilemma. Its concern that NATO’s structure and functions be preserved in a changing Europe forces it to accept NATO’s limitations on out-of-area activities. At the same time—as its sometimes acrid interchanges with some of its European allies have clearly indicated—the United States seeks allied cooperation in operations with common European- American objectives outside Europe. There is no European vehicle other than WEU that can meet what otherwise might be conflicting U.S. objectives. Moreover, with the United States cutting back on its maritime posture, 3 strongly coordinated, if not integrated, WEU military structure can compensate for declining U.S. presence in the Mediterranean, where four of the five largest WEU meni' ber fleets continuously operate (Spain, the United King' dom, France, and Italy). WEU’s membership structure.
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’Christoph Bertram, “Western Europe’s Strategic Role: Towards a EuroDean Pit
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’An excellent discussion of the origins and role of Standing Naval Force Atlantic appears ,n John B. Hattendorf and CDR Stan Weeks, USN “NATO^ PoHcZ on the Beat, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (September 1988) p. 66.
Dov S. Zakheim, a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense is Chief Executive Officer of SPC International, Arlington, Virginia Adiunrt Scholar of the Heritage Foundation, and a Senior Associate of the Cen ter for Strategic and International Studies.
which is narrower than that of the European Community, allows Western Europe to progress, at a slow but steady pace, toward cooperation, coordination and integration of both security policy and operations. And all this comes without the encumbrances of—or inclinations—toward neutrality that some of the current and prospective EC members bring with them.
WEU could complement the United States not only geographically and politically, but militarily as well. Clearly, if the U.S. Navy was unable to correct its deficiencies in mine warfare during the years of plenty that were the 1980s, it is certainly unlikely to do so in the decade of dearth that the 1990s promise to be. Similarly, the U.S. Navy is expected to cut back on its surface escort force, again in response to budgetary constraints. Here, too, the Gulf War proved instructive, as the WEU allies provided surface escorts to complement the operations and missions of their U.S. counterparts.
WEU also can provide a complement to the U.S. submarine fleet. It is no secret that the U.S. Navy anticipates launching a program for a new, smaller submarine, that can be produced at lower cost, and therefore in greater numbers, than Seawolf. Proponents of non-nuclear submarines hope that the Seawolf follow-on will be diesel-electric or some other air-independent, but non-nuclear, propulsion. Those hopes are likely to be in vain. As a result, provision of submarines for shallow-water and other specialized operations may again be the responsibility of the European allies: and the bulk of the European non-nuclear submarine force resides in the navies of the WEU states.
For the present, WEU has not advanced beyond coordinating some of its members’ maritime activities in the Persian Gulf. In so doing, it has afforded them both po- itical and operational flexibility—the latter inhering in ^y naval operations. It has also underscored the case made y naval advocates in most of its member states that the changing international environment demands new priority be accorded to maritime forces, even within shrink- lng domestic budgets. It was, after all, less than a decade ag0 that Britain contemplated major cuts in its surface
fleet—cuts that only the South Atlantic War forestalled. The turnabout in British planning appears to have been codified in the Government’s White Paper, Options for Change, which recognized that the Royal Navy’s role in the South Atlantic could well be repeated again elsewhere outside Europe. Other states in Europe have come to the same recognition.
The WEU is likely to have other missions. It has lone pressed for standardization of European armaments. It seeks rationalization of logistics and training. The organization may also play a role in verifying the effective ness of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty once that document is ratified. It might also be a forum for coordinating European views on the modernization of French and British nuclear deterrents, in line with its strong nuclear emphasis in its Platform on Security Interests Nevertheless, in light of its role in the Gulf War follow mg upon its previous efforts in the same theater' WEU’s greatest promise may well be in its ability to develop an integrated European military response to crises, particularly outside the NATO area. It thereby could bring Europe closer to the vision that inspired the 1948 Brussels Treaty, whose legacy it continues to preserve
Shortly after the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59) struck a mine in the northern Persian Gulf on 18 February 1991, the Canadian helicopter destroyer HMCS Athabaskan (DDH- 282) proceeded to her vicinity from the central Gulf to render assistance. Specifically the Athabaskan escorted the civilian salvage tug Smit New York to the Princeton's location where that vessel took over towing the cruiser from the USS Beaufort (ATS-2), a naval salvage’vessel The Athabaskan then provided escort services for the civilian tug and the stricken cruiser to Bahrain—a long, slow journey.
Upon completion of the operation, the Princeton included the following note of thanks in her daily operations summary, which was dispatched to the Desert Storm ::
"...we owe a debt of gratitude for the superb professionalism of those who extracted us from the minefield and delivered us to safe haven...to HMCS Athabaskan for leading the way from the Northern Arabian Gulf to Bahrain and even more so for the 17 cases of beer you sent over by helo today... 1
"Thanks also to everyone who helped bolster our morale with congratulatory messages Next time send beer like AthabaskanW"
Lieutenant D. P. Langlais, Canadian Navy