International Politics, 2006, 43, (500509) r 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/06 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.

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Research Note

Squaring the Circle? Leadership and Legitimacy in European Security and Defence Cooperation
Bastian Giegericha and Eva Grossb
a International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1315 Arundel Street, London WC2R 3DX, UK. E-mail: giegerich@iiss.org b Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London W2A 2AA, UK. E-mail: e.m.gross@lse.ac.uk

This research note addresses the trade-offs between legitimacy and effectiveness in the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The contemporary security environment creates a dual deficiency where neither individual states nor the European Union (EU) can provide effective and legitimate solutions. Leadership is necessary but has to be balanced with the norms of consensus and equality, deeply engrained in EU foreign policy making. The increasing scope and ambition for ESDP in an enlarged EU with 25 members exacerbate this fundamental contradiction. We present a number of internal and external adaptation pressures that lead to this situation and link them to wider conceptual debates about security governance. Noting that the existing academic literature has not paid sufficient and systematic attention to the associated dilemmas, we then outline a comprehensive agenda for research that includes both empirical and conceptual matters worth exploring. International Politics (2006) 43, 500509. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800170 Keywords: EU; security; European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP); foreign policy; security governance; legitimacy; multilateralism

Introduction
As the European Union (EU) grapples with a fundamental political crisis that peaked with the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in the Dutch and French referenda of 2005, the problems of getting an ever larger political entity to act and transform at the same time have become more apparent. As a remedy, French interior minister, president of the conservative French party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy has thought aloud about a core of the six biggest EU members which would collectively propose major initiatives to the remaining states in the Union (Financial Times, 2005). Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schu ssel used the commencement of his countrys EU presidency in the first semester of 2006 to issue a stark warning against such a move (Financial Times, 2006). European leaders no matter on which side of the debate have strong feelings about

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questions of flexible integration. It is high time that the academic debate explores major issues related to this matter in the context of the enlarged EU. The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in particular brings out the tensions inherent in these conflicting positions in stark contrasts and, serves as the starting point for our deliberations. In the realm of security and defence national governments can no longer provide effective solutions on their own a dilemma that has been magnified in the post 9/11 security environment. While this is true across the board, it poses a particular challenge for the EU and its member states. Having integrated further than any other grouping in the world, member states are nonetheless reluctant to move beyond intergovernmental cooperation in the area of security and defence, despite the recognition of the necessity to cooperate. The ESDP, created partly in response to the lessons learned from the want for effective cooperation during the 1990s, has been widely criticized for a persistent lack of political will on the part of the member states. A particular instance where this lack of political will is manifest in is the inability to align the EUs capacity for action with assertive rhetoric on the part of its member states.1 Despite the fact that political rhetoric and the creation of unrealistic expectations easily obscure the very real advancements that have been made in the institutional construction and practical application of ESDP instruments, the fundamental question on the nature of the obstacles to cooperation and effective policy action remains. We argue that one of the major underlying problems lies in balancing simultaneous and conflicting demands for effectiveness and legitimacy in a changing international environment. The key question is, we suggest, whether and under which conditions ESDP can generate both? While this question is of mounting relevance in an increasingly demanding security environment coupled with an increasingly ambitious vision for the EUs foreign policy, it has to date not been given thorough scholarly attention.2 In the sections that follow, we further define these practical and conceptual problems and outline a possible research agenda to remedy the lack of understanding of the phenomenon and to provide an avenue for exploration of this issue. We focus on two interrelated conceptual issues surrounding legitimacy and security governance in a multilateral setting, and suggest that case studies focussing on ESDP stand to corroborate these conceptual problems empirically.

Why is This Relevant?

In essence, the core problem deficiency: ineffective national supranational solution on the satisfactory intergovernmental in matters of security and defence is a dual solutions on the one hand and a non-existent other. This in itself might be sustainable if a solution could be defined. The current set-up
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within ESDP relies on consensus and unanimity to provide this solution. Our argument is that escalating external and internal adaptation pressures make it increasingly unlikely that ESDP can be an effective policy instrument if everything has to happen in unison to the extent that consensus and unanimity has been conducive to swift and effective action to begin with, of course. As actorness becomes more difficult, ESDP effectiveness in turn is likely to suffer as a result.3 This is due to a number of external and internal pressures. While none of these are necessarily novel, their aggregation in a changing security environment along with internal changes within the EU is. Together with rising aspirations for ESDP they magnify the problem at hand. External and Internal Pressures Contemporary threats and risks to European security make cooperation ever more important and ever more difficult. Given the proliferation of relevant actors, the de-territorialized nature of most threats and the connectedness between them, individual governments are stretched beyond their means. While this speaks for increased cooperation, the current international environment also makes it likely that responses to external conditions diversify as well, in turn making cooperation increasingly difficult. Indeed, the unifying influence of terrorism or proliferation both normatively and militarily seems considerably weaker than that of the Soviet Army on the other side of the border. Some analysts have asserted that the end of the Cold War and 9/11 in particular have led to a crisis if not demise of the transatlantic security community (Cox, 2005), but it is as well by no means clear that this did not have a detrimental effect on European cohesion as well: disagreements over and the fallout from the war in Iraq starkly illustrated what happens when European leaders do not agree. Second, security and defence policy is an issue area that is usually seen as the last bastion of national sovereignty. As it is ultimately about the external use of armed force, this is understandable. But, putting concerns about sovereignty aside, successful crisis management needs fast, coherent, and often secret deliberations. The bigger the group that is involved, the more difficult it becomes to achieve this. On the internal, EU, side there are three factors that exacerbate the problem. First, the Constitutional Treaty is dead in the water, at least for the medium term. This means that the envisioned clauses on increased flexibility in security and defence policy and CFSP more generally, will not be implemented. Second, the 2004 enlargement has magnified the differences in the security and defence capabilities of EU member states. With the exception of Poland, all new members are small states with very limited capacity to make a useful contribution to the EUs overall capability. The group of those who can is getting smaller in relation to the overall number of EU member states. Finally,
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the development of ESDP up to date offers various examples in which smallgroup leadership mostly in the form of an Anglo-French-German directoire was instrumental in moving the EU as a whole along and instil some substance into the debates. Resulting from this is the charge that ESDP risks becoming (or remaining, given that the debate on core and periphery within the EU, including CFSP, has been ongoing in various guises over the years4) the playing field of the great powers (defined in a European context). As will be explored below this also raises issues over taxation and representation: in other words, the extent to which countries with disproportionally small defence contributions can or do expect to have a say in how these capabilities should be used. At the internal/external nexus, lastly, lies a growing concern with the external dimension of the EU as a policy actor, the growing role and ambition of EU foreign policy, including a security and defence dimension. The European Security Strategy (ESS), even if it arguably constitutes more of a statement on the EUs global role and aspirations rather than a specific recipe for action, defines and as such widens the scope of the EUs potential global responsibilities and aspirations, including (military) crisis management (EU, 2003). The problem of leadership and legitimacy, therefore, stands to be exacerbated in this framework.

Legitimacy and Security Governance the Conceptual Issues

Is Consensus Dead? The Problem of Security Governance The mixture of internal and external pressures points towards a situation where the consensus norm on which cooperation in ESDP is built, along with the unanimity norm is under pressure. However, the direction this pressure is coming from is not the one that institutionalism predicted (Smith, 2004; 1998). Intergovernmental cooperation in security and defence is not about to evolve into supranational integration despite increasing levels of institutionalization. Rather, the signals point the other way: we are moving away from government to governance. Fragmentation is usually interpreted to be one of the characteristics of governance, including the governance of security. This implies that a broader range of actors is involved in policy-making through a wider spectrum of institutional settings characterized by varying degrees of formalization (Krahmann, 2003; Webber and Croft, 2004). Consensus and unanimity provide legitimacy at the cost of reduced effectiveness. Heavy symbolism is involved in ESDP for two reasons. The first is the core of sovereignty argument already mentioned. The other is that unanimity suggests equality among EU member states. In security and defence, however, equality is a luxury that becomes increasingly difficult to support. To
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paraphrase a former US Senator, there are indeed EU member states that cannot fight their way out of a wet paper bag. However, there are others whose abilities are among the most advanced in the world. If the paper bag fighters decide what the others can and cannot do, one side of the argument goes, ESDP will always fall short of its aspirations. Input into policy decisions, accordingly, ought to be a function of a countrys contribution, either in terms of expertise, troops or money (Everts, 2000). Consensus without Legitimacy? Unanimity and equality provide legitimacy in the sense of input legitimacy. In crude terms, this means that the members of a polity participate in the decisionmaking. Transparency and democratic accountability in this reading are considered of value. Obviously, in Western democracies this participation is delegated to elected representatives. However, effectiveness can also be understood as legitimacy. This would be the idea that government should not only be by the people but also for the people. Hence, effectiveness can be interpreted to be output legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999): the ability of a policy to deliver increased levels of a certain public good such as security. This notion of output legitimacy differs from that of public support for ESDP and that of legitimacy as a democratic good (Wagner, 2005). Instead, it conceptualises legitimacy as a by-product of effectiveness: while the public is in general benevolent to the ESDP projects (with caveats, obviously, as hard choices such as the increase in defence budgets in order to strengthen ESDP do not receive much support), output legitimacy means that ESDP has to be an effective crisis management tool. Without tangible outputs, and reliable rules of engagement meaning, where is ESDP employed, what are its limits, and what is ESDP supposed to encompass output legitimacy cannot be guaranteed. We suggest to conceptualize output legitimacy in a broader framework: that of the value added of ESDP as a tool of European integration, and a European approach of crisis management. In contrast, input legitimacy can be judged to be of superior importance because the effectiveness on which output legitimacy rests could in principle also be achieved by despotic regimes, and goes against the normative core of the EU. Output legitimacy potentially undermines the very essence of political rule as understood among EU member states. From this perspective, unanimity and equality wins the day once the use of armed force for reasons other than self-defence is contemplated. We assert that the external and internal developments sketched previously present EU member governments with the following dilemma: in ESDP the balance between input and output legitimacy or legitimacy in the classical sense and effectiveness needs to be renegotiated. The key question is whether EU member states can have both at the same time or not. While it is often
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automatically assumed that one has to be at the expense of the other, this may not necessarily be the case in practice. Might transparency, for instance, not be sufficient in solving the problem as long as member states are informed of key deliberations, and consensus for action derived from negotiation by a directoire of whatever form actively sought, be enough to ensure legitimacy while maintaining effectiveness? And is, if not initiating action then at least taking a position on certain policy issues and crises, not also expected of individual member states (this applies both to the big three Germany, Britain and France as well as member states with a particularly close interest in the policy problem at hand)? After all, an effective European crisis management instrument ought to be in the interest of all member states. While, as we have maintained before, this is a topic that has not yet received the necessary scholarly attention, too often the debate is reduced to arguments for and against a directoire without a deeper analysis of the trade-offs involved, or the conceptual/theoretical issues at hand. And, of course, it is worth exploring to what extent decision-making in ESDP can be termed democratically legitimate at present, both in terms of its formal and informal decision-making structures as well as the actors involved. This, then, constitutes the starting point for a research agenda that considers more closely the problem of small group decision-making when it comes to European security and defence.

Mapping a Research Agenda

In the following section, we outline a comprehensive research agenda to be explored in the near future. Key points of conceptual and empirical explorations evolve around several themes: the processes of policy-making in ESDP; who is taking the lead, why and how; and the potential consequences of this leadership for the broader process of European integration. Empirical crisis case studies should look at how issues of leadership were resolved, including the processes of bargaining and side-payments. Then, there are the debates and conflicts over legitimacy, both in ESDP case studies as well as conceptual literature. Leadership style and agendas, and the question of transparency in policy making are also important issues that ought to be explored in the context of ESDP. More specifically, we suggest structuring a conceptual and empirical exploration along the following issue areas and research questions that result from them: (1) The role of directorates in the creation of ESDP as well as the planning and initiation of missions. Are directorates a threat to legitimacy and effectiveness? Or are they a prerequisite for effectiveness? To answer these questions, we need a much better understanding of the functions small-group leadership fulfils for the actors involved and the larger framework, here the EU, as a whole. Directorates can come in various guises and it seems
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reasonable to assume that form and function are somehow related. For example, a directorate that fulfils the function of ideational leadership and generator of conceptual innovation may exists as an informal and flexible grouping whereas a directorate that forms the core of crisis decision-making, may not. So far, much of the academic discussion on the pros and cons of directorates remains abstract. It is very rare to find work that actually examines the costs and benefits of small-group leadership in the EU, let alone ESDP, by means of a case study. We are confident that the development of ESDP to date provides several examples related to ESDP missions and major conceptual advancements that we now can begin to progress to this next stage. (2) The role of accountability and parliamentary input into ESDP: how can parliamentary oversight be organized and strengthened? Is there, perhaps, a robust trend towards post-parliamentary governance?5 Traditionally, the policy area of security and defence is characterized by comparatively low levels of parliamentary oversight and tends to be executive driven. The intergovernmental ESDP seems to amplify this dynamic. This has important implications for democratic legitimacy as work on the use of armed force in international frameworks suggests (Born and Ha nggi, 2005). At the same time, governance might imply that we have to adapt our analytical lenses and look at informal mechanisms, which enable parliaments to perform their functions, of course, also with a view to what extent this might adversely affect the democratic process. Still, it stands to reason that the multi-level system of European governance could find its equivalent in a multi-level system of parliamentary supervision. It seems promising to us to improve our understanding of how national parliaments, the European Parliament and interparliamentary assemblies interact and influence ESDP. (3) The role of epistemic communities and external sources of expertise: what is their role as it concerns decision-making in ESDP? Are these external sources adding transparency because of increasing participation or is decision-making actually becoming more opaque as a result of the involvement of actors such as external experts? What does their involvement mean for the EUs alleged democratic deficit that is also implied in the preceding section? It is crucial to assess how the participation of such, often transnational, actors influences decision-making and with what consequences. Epistemic communities should be treated as part of the emerging system of governance. ESDP, again, provides examples in which a community of experts and practitioners has been directly involved in the formulation of key documents such as the ESS. Aside from the already mentioned legitimacy issues, the extend of the impact of their contributions needs to be investigated, thereby making this matter a crucial component of the larger issues involved in ESDP leadership and legitimacy. (4) There also needs to be a theoretical underpinning of such a study. It has been notoriously difficult for IR scholars to get a conceptual handle on the EU,
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including EU foreign policy: while arguments that IR and European Studies could engage in a fruitful conceptual dialogue have been made (Warleigh, 2006), the EU is usually considered as a unique entity (Wallace, 1994) and therefore as sui generis. This applies particularly to EU foreign policy, as even intergovernmental decision-making rules of Pillar II activities where CFSP and ESDP are located are impacted by other actors (such as the Commission) as well as Europeanization processes on the part of the member states (Olsen, 2002; Wong, 2005). It seems to us to be worth to not only incorporate ESDP in these conceptual debates, but to focus on matters of security and defence/ESDP exclusively in order to further explore the notions of input and output legitimacy. From there, scholars could move on to reflect on where this fits in with the broader conceptual literature of international and European security. ESDP seems to us to be the most dynamic area of European foreign policy at the moment. Hence, it is a good arena to contribute to the eclectic theory-building that leading scholars in the field of European foreign policy have called for (White 2004). (5) Lastly, empirical case studies on the lessons learnt from past ESDP missions ought to illustrate to what extent the ESDP has been and can expected to continue to be an effective actor in international politics and to provide a view on the future trajectory of institutional development and empirical application. This includes not only the range of ESDP missions both in terms of their civil/military nature and empirical case studies of their geographical reach and broader issues of transatlantic/great power relations but also touches on the limits of ESDP: how far does the EUs role stretch geographically, where in terms of transatlantic tensions are the lines drawn, and what determines the institutional choice between NATO and ESDP? Is there evidence of a conflict avoidance strategy where ESDP missions are only suggested where there is no expectation of disagreement, or have individual member states successfully pushed the envelope on the nature, reach and scope on ESDP? And, to what extent if any has this damaged legitimacy and effectiveness? This last section and its focus on empirical material drawn from actual ESDP missions would also usefully underline findings from the first four issue areas that we have pointed out. It is time to undertake such a comprehensive project sufficient critical mass has built in terms of ESDP missions and debates around the theoretical and empirical implications of both to invite a more coherent and comprehensive treatment in an academic context. Notes
1 According to Christopher Hill, this has resulted in the Capabilities-Expectations Gap (CEG), which remains a problem for the credibility of the EU as a foreign policy actor (Hill, 1993, 1998).
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508 For ESDP, this may be even more accurate, a suggestion that the experience of the EU throughout the 1990s corroborates (Howorth, 2005). Although there has been some exploration of democratic accountability, legitimacy, and the problem of cores and peripheries in an academic and policy context even as it applies to the EU foreign and security policy (Pijpers, 2000; Wagner, 2005), the output has been sporadic and not necessarily focussed on security and defence. These issues have also been touched upon as part of the broader framework of integration and governance (Scharpf, 2005), either with a view on a specific policy area or democratic deficit, but have not made legitimacy nor effectiveness the starting point for exploration. Lastly, a crisis in democratic representation among member states has been suggested as one reason why the EU cant act in international politics, but this has not been attributed to democracy itself which is thought of as a potential asset rather than a liability in foreign policy making on account of the values of legitimacy and transparency (Zielonka, 1998). The conceptual problem of what, if any, sort of actor the EU represents in world politics has been explored with some results in the literature on EU foreign relations (Allen, 1998; Hill and Smith, 2005), but the term is used here to denote the capacity to act in ESDP, both in the decision-making and assembling of missions and institutional process, the influence of internal and external forces on this actorness, and the way ESDP is perceived by the outside world. See, for instance, Pijpers (ed.), On Cores and Coalitions in the European Union: The Position of Some Smaller Member States. Clingendael Institute, 2000; Dietrichs and Jopp (2003). Flexible Modes of Governance: Making CFSP and ESDP Work. International Spectator 3/2003: 1530. Post-parliamentarism questions that parliaments as mechanisms of political decision-making have much of a role to play in an increasingly globalized world, specifically not in the context of European integration. The main reasoning behind this position is that parliaments are based on territorial representation created for the nation state and are, hence, unable to take decisions for highly complex societies that are linked through a growing network of supranational and subnational ties (see: Andersen and Burns, 1996).

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