France, Germany, and European Security: “Building Castles in the Sky”?

Abstract

From the very beginning of the idea of a European Union, the vision of a United Europe has been accompanied in Germany and France by that of a fully fledged entity, as a “pole” or as a “third force” in world politics. Over the last six decades, both countries have continuously contributed to the conceptional and institutional framing of this vision. However, for more than three decades European integration remained limited to the economic sphere. With the end of the Cold War, which prepared the ground for German unification, the security and defense dimension gathered slow but permanent pace, however, without a clear conceptional basis. Today, this development faces fundamental decisions about the basic nature of the project. These decisions are first and foremost associated with the new shape of the world and not with the enlarged Germany. Should the EU grow into a real self-sufficient military power with a worldwide outreach as part of the world organized in accordance to geopolitical principles? Or should the EU remain basically a civilian power with a limited outreach based on a multilaterally structured world in which the (limited) military potential of the EU remains closely connected with the US in NATO’s framework?

The various institutional developments largely growing from the Treaty of Lisbon (2007), and principles articulated in three core European strategy documents, European Security Strategy (European European Council (2003), A Secure Europe in a Better World. European Security Strategy, Retrieved from https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-15895-2003-INIT/en/pdf), the Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy (European European Council (2008), Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy—Providing Security in a Changing World. Retrieved from https://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/reports/104630.pdf), and the European Union Global Strategy (European External Action Service, 2016) convey the impression that the EU is not only a global actor, but on the way to become a fully fledged geopolitical actor able to counterbalance the other global players Russia, China, and even the US. If the EU would take this vision seriously, challenging and tough decisions about the future of EU’s decision-making process, the size and structure of EU’s until now scattered and limited military capacity and the role of the member states lie ahead.

At this point, an important distinction has to be made. On one hand, there is the European level with its strategic documents and the membership level. On the other hand, final decisions are taken by the nation states. In this regard, France and Germany are the decisive players in Europe. They command an important “milieu shaping capacity.” However, both have specific and different ideas about the strategic rationale behind the military, the nature of world politics and, their own national role within it. These differences are, to a great extent, based on historical experience, concepts, and ideas. The contrasting approaches were already evident during the Cold War and have become reinforced since the early 1990s.

From early 1990s onwards, France has promoted the idea of a geopolitical world structure with a powerful European (military) pole apart from NATO and the US and, as far as possible, under French national lead. In contrast, Germany is still showing a strong reluctance in the use of military force and clings to the civilian power approach as well as to the widespread skepticism toward geopolitical thinking. For the time being, there is no evidence that these Franco-German differences will be overcome in the foreseeable future. Against the background of these structural differences, the divergent discourses on both sides of the Rhine regarding Europe’s role as an active geopolitical player on the international stage will amount to nothing more than building “castles in the sky.”