Zhao Huaipu is Professor of the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University 30-09-2024

The European Union’s foreign and security policy has come into being and developed in the process of European integration. It’s influenced by both internal and external factors. After the international financial crisis in 2008, the return of major country competition coupled with the EU’s internal challenges has pushed the EU to adjust and reform its foreign and security policy. A Global Strategy for EU Foreign and Security Policy, released in 2016, advocates “European strategic autonomy” and reshapes the EU foreign and security policy at the level of concepts, capacity building and operation. In recent years, along with the geopolitical shift in EU power, its foreign and security policy has shown new features such as the orientation to major country competition and the strengthening of EU-US and EU-NATO cooperation.

Strategic Autonomy Reshapes EU Foreign and Security Policy

The nature of European integration is European countries’ joint efforts for self-reliance through the implementation of economic and political integration, its ultimate goal being the unification of Europe. However, during the Cold War, European integration was difficult to develop in an independent manner due to its security dependence on the United States.

The US demanded that Western Europe submit to the leadership of the US on security and defense policy and act under the framework of the NATO alliance in order to meet the needs of its own security strategy. Although Western European countries and the European Community recognize the status of the US and NATO, they have not given up the pursuit of geopolitical goals and self-interest. On the one hand, they hoped to ensure that the will of Europe could be reflected in NATO affairs through the pluralistic links and coordination mechanism with the US under the framework of the transatlantic alliance.

On the other hand, they tried to promote the process of economic and political integration in Europe in order to reduce dependence on the US, and thus restore Europe’s international status. So European integration has geopolitical attributes from the outset while strategic autonomy is embedded and gradually developed in the integration.

During the Cold War, member states of the European Community made many attempts to carry out foreign affairs and defense cooperation, and in 1970 established a system for foreign policy coordination among member states, but it was difficult to make progress in defense cooperation.

 The main reason is that Britain, France and Germany have their own strategic considerations in the European defense and the relationship between Europe and the United States: Britain relied on the “special relationship between Britain and the United States,” hoping to build a Western system through the United States to ensure their own market superiority and the ability to project maritime power globally; France believed that NATO is the transmission belt of the US hegemony, and firmly pursue strategic autonomy, hoping to establish a pan-Europe security architecture exclusive of the US; West Germany joined NATO to become the US “new favorites”, so was deeply bound to the NATO military command structure and combat readiness resources.

In short, the irreconcilable national interests and policy differences limit European defense cooperation, coupled with the rather strong dependence on the United States and NATO, it was difficult for the European Community to form an independent foreign and security policy.

The conclusion of the Cold War and the development of European integration provided the necessary conditions for the EU to construct a foreign and security policy.The Maastricht Treaty, signed in early 1992, formalized the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). At the same time, the EU believed that in order to play an important role in the world, it had to establish some form of security and defense policy, and even to have a military force.

In 1999, the EU established the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), and proposed to develop a military force under the framework of the ESDP. At the end of the year 2000, the EU took over the functions of the Western European Union (WEU), and made the latter its “defense force”.

The Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force in December 2009, formalized the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), providing the EU with the legitimacy and capacity to form and develop strategic autonomy and a strategic culture. At the same time, the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) mechanism was introduced so as to enable the EU to project power and influence in normative areas and coercion.

The establishment and development of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has challenged the dominance of the United States and NATO in the transatlantic alliance. Although the United States agrees that the European Union should strengthen its own defence capabilities within the framework of NATO, it has made clear its “three nos” policy, namely, European Union’s no separation from, no replacement of and no discrimination against NATO, with the aim of maintaining NATO’s core position in European security.

After the 2008 international financial crisis, the world’s geopolitical landscape changes accelerated. The European strategic community started the discussion on the renewal of the EU’s foreign and security strategy and the voice for the EU to realize the “strategic awakening” was growing.

 In 2016, the EU officially released “Global Strategy for EU Foreign and Security Policy”, which puts the EU’s own security at the top of the list of new security strategy objectives, emphasizes the realization of security strategy objectives by enhancing its own hard power, and at the same time emphasizes the strengthening of the US-European transatlantic alliance, with a particular focus on NATO.

For the first time, the file introduces the concept of “strategic autonomy,” which it defines as “the ability to set one’s own priorities and make one’s own decisions on foreign policy and security issues” and the institutional, political and material resources needed to implement them in cooperation with third parties or on one’s own if needed.

“Strategic autonomy” has clarified the EU’s international positioning and strategic orientation, and provided guidelines for its foreign and security policy. Compared with the dependence on the United States in foreign and security policy during the Cold War, the EU’s foreign strategic thinking and response mode has changed significantly under the context of strategic autonomy, showing that the EU wants to take a more proactive stance in international major country competition.

President of the European Commission von der Leyen said she would lead a “geopolitical committee”, and actively use the EU’s various diplomatic and economic means to deal with regional and global challenges, so that Europe shall become a major country competition “player” rather than “plaything”. Recognizing that even within the transatlantic alliance, a lack of capacity to act independently could seriously undermine the EU’s own interests, the EU has emphasized that it “should at least strengthen its defence capabilities, even if it is not a security organization”.

The Global Strategy for EU Foreign and Security Policy’s focus on capacity building on “defense” rather than “security” also reflects the EU’s new understanding of the division of work between itself and NATO in the area of security: NATO provides collective security backed by strategic deterrence and aimed at addressing traditional security threats, while the EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) uses crisis management and control as a tool and aims at addressing “hybrid threats”, which are intertwined with internal and external security.

New Changes in the EU-NATO Relationship

During the Cold War, NATO provided security for the political stability and economic recovery of Western Europe, while the European Community (EC) consolidated the foundation of NATO by promoting political reconciliation and economic integration in Europe. So the relationship between the two is interdependent, i.e., the two institutions are respectively empowering the Western European countries in their respective areas of function.

 However, this interdependence is not symmetrical because NATO actually dominates European security affairs, while the EC plays the role of NATO’s “enabler”. At the same time, the US viewed the EC more as a complement to the transatlantic alliance relationship, so the EU to NATO was neither asymmetrical nor independent. After the Cold War, the transatlantic alliance and EU-NATO relations were under pressure to adjust. On the one hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced Europe’s security dependence on the United States and NATO.

On the other hand, the rising of EU showed centrifugal tendencies from the US dominance in the transatlantic alliance. In this situation, the US had to deal with its relationship with the EU more seriously. In 1990, the US and Europe jointly issued the Transatlantic Statement, deciding to establish a mechanism for political dialog and consultation, including regular summit meetings. In 1995, the two sides signed the New Transatlantic Agenda and the Joint EU-US Action Plan, which endowed the US-European political dialogue with more policy content.

However, the reshaping of US-European relations has made it difficult to eliminate competition. The US has pushed for the transformation of NATO, trying to make it a strategic tool for the US to preserve its hegemony after the Cold War, while the EU is committed to advancing defense integration in order to reduce security dependence on the US and limit US influence in Europe.

 However, due to the unpredictability of the direction of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the uncertainty of European situations caused by frequent Balkans ethnic and religious conflicts, there are still common interests for Europe and the United States in the consolidation of the Cold War “victory” and to deal with nontraditional security challenges, and therefore in the early post-Cold War times they reached compromised arrangements around competition for dominance of security affairs in Europe.

The US agreed that the EU should strengthen its own defense capability within the framework of NATO, while the EU also realized that European security still could not be separated from the US and NATO after the Balkan conflict. After the 9/11 incident in 2001, the US foreign and security policy shifted to unilateralism and “pre-emptive action”, which led to the intensification of policy differences between Europe and America.

But at the same time, both Europe and the United States are concerned about the “triple threat” of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the so-called “failed state”, both attach importance to the military transformation of the EU and NATO, policy preferences to “extraterritorial” operations. These commonalities have helped the two sides to continue to maintain cooperation. In short, after the Cold War, cooperation and competition between Europe and the United States are intertwined while they sought to strike a balance between competition and cooperation.

With the restructuring and remodeling of the relations between Europe and the United States, the EU and NATO have gradually formed a framework for cooperation and coordination in order to develop a “strategic partnership” between themselves. With the release of the EU-NATO Declaration on European Security and Defense Policy in 2002 and the exchange of letters between the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Mr. Solana, and NATO Secretary General, Mr. Robertson, in 2003, the EU and NATO have reached the Berlin Plus Agreement, which establishes a “strategic partnership” in the field of crisis management.

Specifically, the EU committed itself to subordinate its military operations to NATO planning, while NATO refrained from intervening in EU-led peacekeeping operations and allowed the EU to use NATO military resources in such activities. While the EU’s gradual development of cooperative operations with NATO as an entity of defense and military forces has had some significance in correcting the asymmetry of EU-NATO relations, its limitations remain evident.

 Although the “Berlin Plus Agreement” has made arrangements for the principles and procedures of EU-NATO cooperation in crisis management, the EU’s authority to mobilize NATO resources has not been truly implemented. Due to the asymmetry of US and European military power, NATO plays a superior partner role in EU-NATO relations, and there is no equal inter-organizational relationship between the EU and NATO.

The Ukraine incident in 2014 marked an important turning point in EU foreign and security policy and EU-NATO relations. It prompted the EU to accelerate the introduction of a new foreign and security strategy, while NATO resumed its military defense and deterrence against Russia.

In February, 2022, the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis further stimulated and facilitated the development of EU-NATO relations. In March of the same year, the EU launched A Strategic Compass for Security and Defence, which identifies specific actions to be taken by the EU over the next five to ten years, including the establishment of an EU Rapid Deployment Capability up to 5,000 troops, regular live-fire exercises on land and at sea, and enhanced cooperation with multilateral organizations such as NATO and the United Nations, among others.

The crisis in Ukraine has also reactivated NATO, and the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, which was launched in June of the same year, pointed out that Russia poses “the greatest and most direct threat to the West” and proposed that NATO has three core tasks in the next 10 years: deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. EU-NATO relations have been further strengthened as NATO has become a necessity for European security. Against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, EU-NATO relations have taken on some new features.

First, the strategic perceptions of the EU and NATO have clearly converged. The Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation in 2023, while recognizing that the crisis in Ukraine poses “the most serious threat to Euro-Atlantic security” in decades, falsely states that China’s “hard-line” policies constitute “a challenge to be addressed” by both organizations, and declared that “both sides will build on their long-standing cooperation to take it to a new level and further strengthen, broaden and deepen it”. The nature of the EU-NATO relationship has become clearer as the strategic perceptions of the two sides have come closer to each other.

The NATO Strategic Concept 2022 emphasizes the complementary significance of the EU defence process for NATO and the mutually reinforcing partnership between the EU and NATO, while the EU Strategic Compass and the Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation further reaffirm that NATO is irreplaceable and the EU is complementary.

Second, coordination between the EU and NATO has increased significantly, with a commitment to “mutual reinforcement” to promote the overall enhancement of their defense capabilities. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, the EU and NATO have frequently participated in each other’s high-level meetings to ensure consistency and synergy in their defense planning and capability development.

Both sides have launched new defense models focusing on enhancing rapid deployment capabilities, with NATO proposing a high readiness force of 300,000 soldiers and the EU announcing a 5,000-strong rapid reaction force. In addition, the EU decided to start “accession” negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, while NATO accepted Finland and Sweden “into the pact”. That the EU and NATO both enlarged membership and expanded territory will help strengthen the “European pillar” within NATO, and also will make NATO easier to mobilize and coordinate defense forces in the entire European region.

Third, the EU and NATO are relating more and more issues to security, expanding the scope of their cooperation from defense capacity-building to critical infrastructure, emerging and disruptive technologies, space, climate change, foreign intervention and information manipulation, among other areas. The most evident trend is that the EU and NATO jointly put infrastructure construction into security topic as one of the efforts to increase the resilience of the transatlantic economy.

In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the EU and NATO have identified securing transportation infrastructure, timely investment in dual-use infrastructure development, and addressing legal and regulatory barriers to cross-border military operations as key areas of cooperation. In addition, the two sides are also increasingly reinforcing the research and development, application and standardization of emerging and disruptive technologies, with strong implications for China.

Finally, the EU has partly aligned itself with the “Global NATO” strategic vision and NATO’s “Asia-Pacific Pivot,” and there are signs of Asia-Pacific coordination and global cooperation between the EU and NATO. The United States, to serve its competition with China, has tried to push NATO to shift to the Asia-Pacific, with the intention of linking the two continental plates of Europe and the Asia-Pacific. The EU has launched the European version of the “Indo-Pacific” strategy and intends to strengthen coordination with the US and NATO.

 Both the EU and NATO’s economic resilience agendas require their member states to seek so-called “de-risked” supply chain cooperation. At the same time, in the name of defending international law and the “liberal international order”, the EU has made its voice heard on China’s surrounding security issues in much the same way as the US and NATO, and has stepped up its “soft” confrontation with China on international security norms and values. Although the EU as a whole takes a cautious approach toward military cooperation with the United States and NATO in relation to China, but it will expand the scope of the implementation of “coordinated maritime presence” mechanism to the “Indo-Pacific”, objectively helping to respond to the United States and NATO needs.

The foundation of the “strategic partnership” between the EU and NATO lies in the division of labor based on function. The initial stage of cooperation between the two sides is mainly reflected in the field of crisis management and response to non-traditional security threats, with relatively limited scope and depth of cooperation. The intensification of competition among major powers, especially the prolongation of the Ukraine crisis, has injected new variables into the EU-NATO relations, and the cooperation between the two sides has shown some new development in the trend toward “alliance”, which does not mean that the EU and NATO will formally move towards an alliance. To a certain extent, it represents the transition toward a level higher than the “strategic partnership”. Although this does not mean that the EU and NATO will formally move toward an alliance, to some extent it represents a new development that goes beyond the “strategic partnership”.

Constraints on the Development of EU-NATO Relations

With the intensified changes unprecedented in the past century, the world has entered a period of chaos, overlap and accelerated transition in terms of development dynamics, direction and leading role, which has led to a high degree of uncertainty and instability.

In this turbulent and changing world, all strategic forces in the international system have begun to break away from their original patterns and paths, and to adjust their positions, clarify their goals and implement flexible and diversified policies and maneuvers in accordance with the ever-increasing demands of strategic competition.

The European Union is undergoing profound changes in the face of multiple challenges, and is trying to find its position and seek strategic interests in the world of change and chaos. The superimposition of changes in the world and in Europe will inevitably change the originally stable structure of the transatlantic alliance and the EU-NATO relationship with its competitive side to increase. Specifically, the development of EU-NATO relations will be constrained by the following factors.

First, the structural conflicts between the EU and the US have become the greatest obstacle. European strategic autonomy is naturally motivated by the pursuit of independence from the US and free of US control. Whereas the Biden administration has exercised “Trump Doctrine without Trump”, a kind of “old wine in new bottles” of the America first and protection of its hegemony.

Although the EU is willing to strengthen cooperation with the Biden administration, but this does not mean giving up strategic autonomy. It is noteworthy that Trump may make a comeback after the 2024 US presidential election, which makes the EU deeply concerned and more determined to pursue strategic autonomy. As the essence of the EU-NATO relations is EU-US relations, its development will undoubtedly be constrained by the structural conflicts between the two.

Second, it is difficult to eliminate the competition side of the relations between EU defense system and NATO. The development of European defense integration after the Cold War has not substantially changed the military power gap between the EU and NATO, but it has actually highlighted the identity of the EU as a security player and its pursuit of strategic autonomy, as well as enhanced the EU’s military power. The EU gradually gains ability to operate in the field of defense.

It does not want to serve as NATO’s “pillar of Europe” forever, but to become a security player parallel to NATO with independent military capabilities. Faced with EU’s tendency to develop military capabilities, enhance mobile forces, improve command structures and extend its function to collective defence, NATO chooses to reciprocate to strengthen its abilities, which will further intensify the homogeneous competition between the two in the field of defense.

Third, there are internal constraints from EU foreign and security policy on European strategic autonomy. The realization of European strategic autonomy depends on the EU leadership and member states’ close cooperation. In recent years, however, the role of the Franco-German axis as an important source of EU leadership has declined.

 France, with its limited strength and complex domestic politics, faces many difficulties in leading Europe’s strategic autonomy; the internal constraints of Germany’s coalition government are also not conducive to its leadership role in the EU.

What is more challenging is that France and Germany do not share the same perception of European strategic autonomy and the relationship between the EU and NATO. In addition, EU member states disagree on ways and means to strengthen the EU’s strategic autonomy capabilities, including defense capabilities. Fundamentally, the internal constraints of European strategic autonomy stem from the sovereignty sensitivity and national interests diversity of EU member states in foreign affairs and defense issues.

In spite of the increased willingness to cooperate, the heterogeneous contradictions that have existed among countries for a long time cannot be completely eliminated, which not only hinders the process of the EU’s foreign and security policy, but also restricts the development of the EU-NATO relations.

Finally, the international landscape reshaping and the complexity of relations among major countries will also constrain the development of EU-NATO relations. In the framework of the transatlantic alliance, the EU and the US strategic consensus and policy coordination to deal with China and Russia are significantly strengthened, but this does not mean that the two agree with each other on all issues.

Complementary economy, interdependence in international politics and needs for cooperation in global governance constitute the resilience of China-EU relations, which also determines that the EU’s tolerance towards China is much higher than that of the United States. Based on the reality that European countries and Russia are neighbors unmovable, the EU realizes the need to develop some kind of predictable and constructive relationship with Russia, which is also different from the US policy of sheer suppressing and containing toward Russia. In short, the differences of interests between Europe and the United States will continue to influence and constrain the development of EU-NATO relations..