NATO and the EU Confronting a Turbulent Security Environment

Abstract

In the face of the continuing challenges to international security, the focus for the 16th meeting of the EASSG was deliberately placed on crisis management. It is rather obvious that discrepancies exist in Europe and within the Euro-Atlantic community over the ways and means to manage the current crises that affect stability and peace in most of the regions of the world. Terrorism is as widespread and prolific as it has ever been, but the difference is that today it relies on state-of-the-art technologies of communication, intelligence, and weaponry. Globalization is not limited to economic, social, and cultural questions; the tools of terror are globalized just as effectively as the products of progress. Terrorism has proliferated on this fertile ground and has become quicker in its actions, more effective, and more global and lethal in its results. The events of September 11 were a striking example of the new dimension of terrorism. But terrorism is not the only form or source of crisis. More classical threats, dangers, and risks can erupt into unpredictable situations, which even the best-prepared plans may fail to foresee. Organized crime, looting of national resources by national or international interests, nationalism, ethnic exceptionalism, religious extremism, and failed economies and states often result in open crises that first affect the civilian population and then disrupt, for years or even decades, fragile or obsolescent internal and international balances. The rich and developed North, along with its Asian and Oceanian partners, is often called upon to solve or straighten out such problematic situations. Doubtless, these states would prefer to act preventively before being compelled to intervene with their forces in a very uncertain, expensive, and time-consuming manner. Current or recent examples are provided by Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia and Sierra Leone, Cambodia and East Timor, the Philippines and Colombia, Georgia and Moldova, and the Middle East, to name only a few. Nation-states do not share the same political and economic interests and do not react in the same ways to a given situation. International institutions and organizations are intended to take over and act in cases where states can no longer find common ground. An important issue, therefore, is the legal basis of any given intervention. To be brief, all these questions brought our group to the conclusion that we needed to map the different avenues of crisis management at the disposal of the EU and of NATO.