French Security Policy in Transition: Dynamics of Continuity and Change
Abstract : Since 1989, French defense and security policy has been undercut by changes in the external environment and domestic pressures to deal with the challenge of economic modernization. The Soviet revolution of 1989, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the experience of coalition warfare during the Gulf War-all have challenged the assumptions and realities underlying the Gaullist synthesis. Above all, the French position on security independence has been put into question. The main hope has been for a European Alliance to supplant the American one over time in the face of a gradual process of change within Europe but change has not been gradual within Europe. The European Union is challenged by discontent within Western Europe. A new Central Europe has emerged that has yet to find its place in European or global politics. A new Russia is emergent in which nationalism is defining an assertive role for the Russians within Europe, but at the same time the economic weakness of Russia limits its ability to play such a role.
NATO's Future: Beyond Collective Defense
CONCLUSIONS: AN OUTLINE FOR A NEW TRANSATLANTIC BARGAIN Under the much different international circumstances of the mid-1980s, it was proposed that the NATO allies ensure NATO's future by striking "a new transatlantic bargain." The mare goal of the new bargain was to increase European responsibilities for alliance missions. Today, a new bargain may be required to clarify NATO's future role as well as to enhance the European role in the alliance. Striking a new bargain would require the United States and the allies to commit themselves anew to a collective approach to advancing their common security interests. The Governments of the United States, Canada, and the European members of NATO believe that continuation of the transatlantic alliance will serve their vital interests, but there is no consensus among or within NATO member states concerning the missions that the alliance should pursue in the period of history that follows the end of the Cold War. Consequently no consensus exists on how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--the structure created to implement the Treaty's goals--should be reformed to serve their interests in the future. This report assesses the current state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and suggests a package of political measures and institutional reforms that could be included in a "new transatlantic bargain" designed to revitalize the alliance and reform the organization. The report concludes that current members of the alliance would be well advised to strike a new transatlantic bargain among themselves before inviting additional countries to join the 'alliance. A reasonable goal might be to conclude the process of revitalizing NATO at a summit meeting of NATO leaders in the first half of 1997. To be relevant, any new bargain would have to: * Accommodate the eventual addition of new members * Keep the door open to a constructive relationship with Russia * Accommodate European aspirations to develop a European pillar in NATO * Involve France on a regularized basis * Keep the United States interested and involved. The new bargain could include several elements: * A new statement of European and North American purpose for and commitment to the alliance. Allied governments would declare that they are committed to cooperate politically and militarily to help ensure a more stable international environment for the post-Cold War world. Such a statement would emphasize that the governments of the alliance share the responsibilities and burdens for maintaining international peace even if not all allies will be involved in every peace support operation. * A restatement of NATO's mission. In the early post-Cold War era, it was frequently said that NATO would have to become "more political." Even though NATO has always been a political as well as a military alliance, it is clear that NATO's unique functional role is to promote and implement political/military cooperation among member and partner states. Collective defense remains at the core of U.S. and allied commitments to the alliance. But NATO's day-to-day functions are already shifting from collective defense activities to collective responsibility sharing across a broad range of security-support activities. Such activities are not artificially limited by any geographic boundaries, as they do not fall under NATO's Article 5 collective defense mandate. For non-Article 5 purposes, NATO's future mission seems likely to focus increasingly on: --Preserving habits of military cooperation. Even if NATO per se never formally ran a peace-support operation, the habits of cooperation developed through cooperation in NATO would remain absolutely essential to the ability of the United States and its European allies to conduct successful multilateral military operations in the future. --Promoting peace. Developing cooperative military relations with non-NATO countries can help promote international peace. …
In Search of a Post-Cold War Security Structure
Doing Hard Time in Psychic Prison In his immensely insightful book, Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan characterizes organizations as "psychic prisons" that may trap their members in favored--frequently illusionary--ways of thinking. The metaphor of the psychic prison is rooted in Plato's famous allegory of the cave, where Socrates addresses the relations among appearance, reality, and knowledge. Organizations, suggests Morgan, are psychic phenomena that ultimately are created and sustained by conscious and unconscious processes. People within the organization and those who simply must deal with it actually can become imprisoned or confined by the images, ideas, thoughts, and actions to which these thought processes give rise. (1) The United States is trapped in the psychic prison of the Cold War. Change, bewildering in its scope, intensity, and rapidity, is going on all about us. Yet we are stuck in neutral, seemingly mired in a past that is no more, waiting for the "invisible hand" of evolutionary drift to guide us to some sort of social, political, and economic equilibrium whose contours will be defined for us naturally rather than by us intentionally. A major culprit for such rearview-mirror thinking is the organizational framework--generally known as the "national security establishment"--set in place in 1947 and maintained essentially unchanged since. Harvard historian Ernest May has made the telling observation that policymakers often are influenced by erroneous beliefs about what history teaches or portends. The key members of the Truman administration (who brought us the notion of the Cold War, as well as the policies and organizational arrangements that went with it) appear to have thought about the issues before them, suggests May, in a frame of reference made up in large part of narrowly selected and poorly analyzed historical analogies, parallels, and presumed trends. (2) We can learn two important lessons from our Truman administration forebears. First, we tend invariably to "face" the future by looking backward. Looking back, of course, is not bad in and of itself; it is a seemingly sound way to impose understanding on the unknown. But it can become a self-deluding crutch for not thinking anew as circumstances change. Thus, a second lesson: thinking and organizing go hand in hand. At some point in time, we organize the way we think; thereafter, however, we tend to think the way we are organized. As inheritors of the Cold War mantle, we are thinking the way we have been conditioned to think by 45-year-old organizational structures. If we want to think differently--and we must if we are to cope with a world that is reconfiguring itself almost daily--then we must organize differently. Stumbling Blind Into the Future There are those among us who argue with great certitude that the United States, having emerged victorious from the Cold War, is the world's lone remaining superpower. It seems a fatuous boast, not only because our claim to victory seems to be based primarily on our having outlasted an exhausted foe, but even more so because there is no reason to believe that we can command the automatic deference from the rest of the world that one would expect of a true superpower. If we aspire to superpower status, we must lead; to lead, we must demonstrate vision. In the words of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus: The absence or ineffectiveness of leadership implies the absence of vision, a dreamless society, and this will result, at best, in the maintenance of the status quo, or, at worst, in the disintegration of our society because of lack of purpose and cohesion. (3) Vision requires three things: foresight, an ability to look into the future and see possibilities and relationships that others cannot or will not see; courage, the strength to stand by that vision in the face of censure and resistance; and above all, initiative--boldness even--the willingness to move forward when others shrink from the prospect, to position oneself ahead of events, to create a new reality. …