The EU and NATO after Libya and Afghanistan: The Future of Euro-U.S. Security Cooperation

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By Francisco Santos User:Xuaxo (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Jolyon Howorth

Abstract—The total absence of the European Union, as a bloc, during the Libyan crisis of spring 2011 has led analysts to pose tough questions about the future of Europe as a collective security actor. The progress made toward the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) since 2003 was to some extent a reflection of the extraordinary nature of this relative pooling of sovereignty in the security field. But increasingly the major CDP players, the UK and France, appear to be acting alone, while Germany remains ambivalent as to whether it wishes to engage in a common security policy. As the economic crisis bites ever deeper into EU defense budgets, the prospects for Europe to emerge as a coherent autonomous security actor appear to be receding. This article examines the options for CSDP, particularly with respect to its complex, ongoing relationship with NATO.

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From an “Atlantic Security Community”  to . . . what?

After 1945, Europe’s security identity (and to a large extent its identity tout court) was imported from the outside. The Western half of the old continent became part of the “Atlantic security community,” [1] while the Eastern part was absorbed into the Soviet bloc. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became the security blanket for most West European member states, allowing their citizens, for the best part of a half century, to free-ride on the United States’ commitment to their collective defense.[2] All this came to an end in late 1989. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, each major European country experienced its own national identity crisis which required them to reassess their Atlantic security moorings stemming from the Cold War era—both in terms of their relations with the newly triumphant United States as well as in terms of their association with the accelerating project of the European Union. The first manifestation of this phenomenon came with the launch of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in February 1990. The fact that, at the time, nobody had a clear idea of what the “Security” component of CFSP was intended to convey was neither here nor there. CFSP announced Europe’s ambition to become a consequential player on the global stage.[3]For a fleeting moment at the end of the Cold War, some believed in the advent of a “new world order” [4] or even in the “end of history.” [5] The talk was of “peace dividends” and the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy. But it was not to last. For Europeans, the Gulf War of 1991 was a brutal wake-up call, shattering the easy illusions about peace and forcing them all, in new and unfamiliar ways, to re- think their cozy Cold War security options. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s forced them even more urgently to ask tough questions about their prospects as security actors.[6] The Clinton administration made it abundantly clear that the United States expected Europeans to take much greater responsibility for their own regional security and even to contribute more globally in support of U.S. grand strategy.[7] The U.S. umbilical cord was being severed—the security blanket was being removed—yet Europeans were— and felt—by no means secure. They had neither the politico-institutional mechanisms nor anything approaching the necessary military capacity to tackle regional crisis management challenges such as those posed by the Balkans.

The December 1998 Franco-British summit in Saint-Malo marked the first serious attempt to remedy this situation. The Saint-Malo Declaration[8] launched what became the European Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). The key concept— autonomy—asserted the EU’s ambition to operate militarily without relying on the United States. The Declaration upped the ante by adding the “Defense” component to an acronym whose Security component had still not been adequately thought through. The Declaration struck at the heart of the European security conundrum by positing the need for appropriate institutional structures to be established within the EU. It insisted that the EU should acquire “the capacity for autonomous action backed up by credible military forces” supported by “a strong and competitive European defense industry and technology,” and it justified this ambition by invoking an EU contribution to “the vitality of a modernized Atlantic Alliance.” Political, institutional, and military autonomy sounded suspiciously like the assertion of a European security capacity worthy of the name. But the CSDP project, rather like the Euro project launched a few years earlier, was in fact tantamount to birthing a European defense policy on a whisper and a prayer.

Europeans lacked a common security and defense identity, but the architects of the CSDP project hoped this would not matter. The urgent business was to get the project up and running, in the hope that, somewhere along the line, the details would fall into place. There was confidence that through the creation of the political institutions of CSDP, European states would progressively coordinate their security and defense policy. This would be supported by the promotion of a European defense industrial base, which would allow them to avoid dependency on U.S. military equipment supply. Additionally, through a new process of capacity building, Europeans planned progressively to emerge as competent military actors. These steps were to make the Europeans capable of playing that autonomous role which the Americans had been calling for them to assume and which they had themselves repeatedly claimed to be their purpose.

The EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy story to date has been told many times and in many ways.[9] I do not intend to repeat it here. The EU has experimented with up to thirty overseas missions, some of them quite robust, but none of them overly ambitious or seriously challenging.[10] Scholars have assessed the extent to which the CSDP story has begun to produce a convergence of “security culture” among the EU’s different member states.[11] In short, the EU has made significant progress with CSDP, refining the institu- tional architecture, working to generate capacity, and striving to reach political consensus, or at least political understanding. The problem is that these endeavors do not go anywhere near far enough. This was brought into stark focus by the absence of a unified strategy in the 2011 intervention in Libya.

Libya as a Paradigm Shift: CSDP as Effectiveness or as Irrelevance

Libya was a major turning point in the CSDP story. Exactly twenty years after the Balkans erupted—when Europe proved, like Frances Cornford’s Young Apollo, to be “magnificently unprepared,” the EU confronted a new crisis in Libya.[12] In the early days of the crisis, European statesmen reacted just as they had twenty years earlier: with overwhelmingly national responses. Italy, Greece and Malta initially refused to endorse sanctions against Libya as their historic trade partner Muammar Gaddafi not only sat upon billions of their investments (and vice versa), but had also helped suppress the migrant flow from North Africa. Lack of capacity to control immigration, a perennially contentious issue in the EU, soon became even more so. Disagreements between Italy, France, and other member states eventually led to the reestablishment of border controls between certain member states—the first ever reversal of a major EU policy.[13] In the most serious crisis on the EU’s borders since the birth of CSDP, the Union proved totally incapable of action. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Libya was precisely the type of regional crisis management challenge the CSDP had been designed to address. It was a medium-scale mission in the immediate neighborhood and militarily not too challenging. Furthermore, it was a mission involving military and civilian components (the “comprehensive approach” which is at the heart of the EU’s security identity), a mission the United States did not, at least initially, want to be involved in, and one which key EU states, on the other hand, were pressing very hard to take on. Check all the boxes for the ideal CSDP mission; yet CSDP as a potential agent or actor in the crisis was nowhere to be seen. A clear majority of EU member states did not want to touch Libya with a barge pole, let alone a fighter plane. They were strongly supported by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, who went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the crisis from being fully discussed at the European Council meeting of March 11, 2011.[14] If a clear majority of EU member states (including major ones such as Germany and Poland) do not consider Libya a fit subject for discussion as a possible CSDP mission, then what exactly is CSDP for? CSDP seemed to have declared itself to be irrelevant and to have handed back the responsibility for greater-European security to NATO.

To date, those responsible for operationalizing CSDP have insisted on the importance of “autonomy” as a motivating dynamic and an organizational principle. In order not to be stifled at birth by their powerful transatlantic cousins, or micromanaged by NATO, the Europeans-as-international-actors, it was asserted, needed to find their own way in the world, to carve their own path toward actor-ness. In the initial stages of CSDP, this approach made perfect sense. Yet the quest for autonomy has delivered neither the necessary political will nor the appropriate material capacity. It is time to re-think the relationship between CSDP and NATO, which, in practice, has led to sub- optimal performance on the part of both, to dysfunctional practices at institutional and operational levels, to crossed political wires, and to a waste of resources and effort.[15] As long as this continues, neither NATO nor CSDP is likely to achieve its true objectives or potential. CSDP will remain stuck at a conceptual, institutional and operational impasse until it has clarified its relationship with NATO.

Three distinct developments in current U.S. global policy frame the necessary recalibration of CSDP. The first is exemplified in NATO’s Libyan mission Operation Unified Protector, which introduced the concept of the United States “leading from behind.” [16] This was technically a misnomer. The NATO mission benefited from massive U.S. military inputs. But the Obama administration’s insistence that Europeans should at least be perceived to be “taking the lead” in Libya represented a paradigm shift in both political and symbolic ways. The United States signaled that, henceforth, it was prepared to transfer responsibility in the European theater to the Europeans. We are still a long way from the full operationalization of such a shift, but there is no doubt which way the balance must swing. Leadership in the European area must change hands. As long as the United States either insists upon or de facto assumes leadership in Europe, the Europeans will simply continue to free-ride.

The second U.S. development was Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ June 2011 valedictory speech in Brussels, effectively warning the Europeans of a “dim and dismal future” for NATO if the imbalances in the Alliance continued.[17] He cautioned darkly that the new generation of American politicians, who had not come of age during the Cold War, would cease to feel that the U.S. investment in European security via NATO was worthwhile. The third development was the January 2012 Strategic Guidance paper announcing the U.S. “tilt” to Asia.[18] All three developments reflect strategic priorities in Washington as well as the financial and economic constraints limiting U.S. activity abroad.[19] With Libya, U.S. and NATO pressure on Europeans to step-up their game became intense.

CSDP Developments

Following a period of apparent somnolence between 2009 and 2011, CSDP has begun once again to show signs of life. It boasts the “Ghent Framework,”[20] eleven major initiatives developed by the European Defense Agency (EDA),[21] and the planned European Council on Defense in December 2013. Additionally, there are the European Commission’s Defense Industry and Markets Task Force, the proposals from the “Future of Europe” group[22], the European Global Strategy initiative,[23] “clusters” of regionally based member states cooperating on “pooling and sharing,” much talk of a European White Paper on security and defense,[24] and three new CSDP missions launched in 2012.

All of this is encouraging, but it is missing the real question: Where is CSDP actually heading? The EU must face up to the need to find the right balance between hard and soft power, between civilian and military approaches to conflict resolution and crisis management. This poses the question: What sort of role should military instruments play in the toolbox of EU power resources? The answer to that question can only become apparent with the resolution of the concurrent issue of the on-going and future relations between CSDP and NATO. Meanwhile, NATO itself, in the wake of the debacle in Afghanistan, faces existential questions.

Moving the CSDP-NATO Relationship Forward: The Available Options

1. NATO

There are only two post-Afghanistan options for NATO. One, the long-time American preference, is for NATO to become a “global alliance.” In 1993, Richard Lugar, a primary exponent of this option, coined the expression “out of area or out of business.” [25] But he was referring to a different type of alliance. Because the bipolar constraints of the Cold War dictated tight solidarity between all alliance members, the original NATO truly was an alliance as traditionally understood.[26] Yet now, post- 1989, in the absence of any existential threat, regional crises, particularly at great distances from Europe, impact NATO member states in very different ways. In a multipolar world, states are freer to pursue their own interests. Consequently, there is little likelihood of unanimity. The alliance has become a mechanism for generating coalitions of the willing. Although NATO’s Prague summit in 2002 declared that distinctions between in-area and out-area operations were no longer valid, there is henceforth very little prospect of European forces signing up to support U.S. global strategy. Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. agenda for a Global Alliance never found favor with Europeans and has probably been administered the coup de grâce by the experience of Afghanistan, which, however strong the official spin may be, is almost certain to be judged by history as a military and political failure. NATO’s Chicago summit in May of 2012 formally kept all strategic options on the table, but on-going questions about the real nature and purpose of the Alliance are unlikely to be resolved any time soon. NATO needs a radical re-think.

Assuming, as seems reasonable, that NATO will elect not to “go out of business,” the most likely future for the Alliance is therefore a European future. The Alliance will most likely be re-designated as a mechanism for guaranteeing regional stability in the European area and its neighborhood. That stability, unlike during the Cold War, will not be secured through a balance of nuclear forces or through existential deterrence, but through the development of a serious capacity for regional crisis management. Collective security will complement collective defense. This will require a new and constructive relationship between NATO and CSDP. And that is what the majority of Europeans want from NATO.[27] It is now also the clear preference of France, the only EU member to have previously abstained from full involvement in NATO. France’s 2009 return to NATO’s integrated command structure was decided in France’s own national interest. Although it was, at the time, opposed by the French Socialists, now that they are in government the page has been turned on that debate. The Report issued by former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine on November 14, 2012 makes it clear that France, henceforth, will devote major energies to what Védrine calls “Europeanizing the Alliance.” [28]

2. CSDP

There are three distinct options for the recalibration of the CSDP-NATO relationship. The first is for CSDP to cease to exist, to abandon its fifteen-year project, and for the appropriate EU member states to free-ride, for their security and even their existence, on the United States, via NATO. This is an unseemly prospect for a union which constantly repeats that it intends to be a subject rather than an object of history. Nor would it be an option which would be welcomed by the United States, given the triple framework outlined above.

Assuming, therefore, that CSDP (like NATO) continues to exist, the two security entities must stop seeing one another as rivals in a beauty contest or as contenders for a functional or spatial division of labor. The sterile quarrels over duplication in general and Operational Headquarters (OHQ) in particular must be transcended. In a world of shrinking resources, everybody recognizes that European forces and capacity, whether deployed via NATO or via CSDP, are all drawn from the same pool.

The second option for CSDP is to continue to attempt to carve out a workable relationship with NATO as a separate and autonomous entity. That option presents a number of challenges. Why would another twenty years produce markedly better results for CSDP than the last twenty? As long as the two organizations remain, or are kept distinct, there will be a huge tendency to revert to an uneven and inequitable division of labor—with NATO doing the heavy-lifting and CSDP serving as a mere back-up organization for minor missions. But that again will prove unsatisfactory both to the United States and to the European Union. As long as the two organizations remain separate in their membership and objectives, sparring and generally dysfunctional behavior will afflict both. There have, in recent years, been strong arguments in favor of the EU developing its own OHQ, separate from NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), because that was the logic of autonomy.[29] It is easy to grasp the problem in leaving the EU dependent, through lack of an OHQ, on U.S. goodwill in the event of a mission the United States might not support, although it is hard to see what that mission might be. But in a period of general and massive economic retrenchment, is this type of duplication viable? The EU should aim to become more and more capable of doing high-level operational planning through SHAPE.

The third CSDP-NATO option is for CSDP to merge with NATO and take over NATO functions. This also presents a number of major challenges and is predicated on two key assumptions. The first is that the United States is serious about encouraging the Europeans progressively to become consequential players, essentially responsible for taking on the leadership of stability and security in the greater EU area. In the triple context outlined above, the odds seem in favor of this being the case. Why would the United States continue to want the burden and expense of carrying the security of the Europeans (who are more numerous and wealthier than they) in an era of austerity and retrenchment and when the world of 1947–49 has moved on several times? The U.S. “decline” has been seriously exaggerated, but even Washington now has to make real choices and focus its attention on strategic priorities.

In the short- and medium-terms, it is reasonable to expect that, despite Gates’ warnings and the uncertain fate of the U.S. defense budget, the United States will be prepared to continue to underpin NATO for a transitional period. Washington remains committed to the transatlantic relationship, which constitutes a vital interest for U.S. foreign and security policy. But there are two caveats. First, it will do so increasingly reluctantly, especially if the Europeans persist in shirking their historical and strategic responsibilities. Second, the United States will not do so forever. There is a real time limit on the 1949 arrangements—the “O” in NATO.[30] However, if the Europeans are seen to be taking control of their own destiny and neighborhood, then there are reasons to believe that the United States will be willing to share and eventually even to transfer responsibilities to the Europeans, who will progressively become the major stakeholder(s) in the “Alliance.” This is a major assumption.

The second assumption is perhaps even more difficult to make. It is that the EU (collectively) will agree to shoulder the responsibilities of regional security and stabilization and to provide the resources that shift will require. If the EU intends to become a global player, it has no alternative than to become a global military (and civilian-military) power. The generation of a credible CSDP, however, can only happen if the EU, in the wake of developments at the economic and financial level (the Eurozone), agrees to move forward in significant pooling of sovereignty. If it does not, then it is probable that the EU will never succeed in forging a common security and defense policy.

The biggest challenge remains that of capacity generation. The dynamics of pooling and sharing should be concentrated in the EU.[31] It makes no sense to have two separate processes, one operating within NATO and another within the EU. There is very little chance that mere coordination of national means would suffice to meet European requirements.[32] Shared sovereignty is only meaningful if accompanied by policy convergence and shared security and strategic objectives—in other words, a process of political integration. Pooling and sharing have political, economic, industrial, and operational implications. The EU is a global political project, whereas NATO deals “merely” with security. The EU is also the framework within which Europe generates common interests. Logically, therefore, it is the place where these interests can best be harmonized at the level of the defense industrial base. This European procurement process should be conducted in tight liaison with NATO, but the EU framework will remain indispensable. The role of the EDA should be central and the Allied Command Transformation (ACT) should morph into an agency which ensures liaison with the U.S. defense industrial base. There are two key reasons why, to date, EU capacity-generation has not had the desired effect. First, as long as the United States gives the impression that it will “cover” Europe, the motivation for Europeans to stump up for defense is removed. Second, Europeans have not yet gone anywhere near as far as they will eventually have to go in the direction of pooling/sharing, rationalization, and specialization.

Starting the Conversation

The intensification of CSDP-NATO cooperation will be a slow but continuous process, based on the proposition that, eventually, there can only be one system and one agency for European security and defense. The details remain to be worked out. There is no blueprint for this type of transformation. But the objective is clear: Europeans have to assume overwhelming responsibility for their own security and defense. This cannot happen as long as there remain two competing organizations for that purpose. A controversial article in a leading U.S. newspaper recently argued along these same lines. The author, Sarwar Kashmeri, an expert on NATO and a Senior Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security at the Atlantic Council of the United States, made a number of radical proposals in order to generate debate: [33]

• “That as part of the U.S. defense budget trimming exercise under way, Congress should insist that within 3-5 years the responsibility for the defense of Europe and its periphery be transferred to the EU.”

• “America should turn over the leadership of NATO to the EU by replacing Americans with Europeans in key NATO positions throughout the Alliance.”

• “Allied Command Operations/SHAPE should be merged into CSDP and serve as the EU’s planning, command, and control staff.”

• “The North Atlantic Council (NAC) [. . .] is no longer fit for purpose. It should be recast to include one representative each from the EU, U.S., Canada and non-EU members of NATO such as Turkey.”

• “NATO’s third entity, the Allied Command Transformation or ACT [. . .] largely duplicates the functions of the EU’s European Defense [sic] Agency and should be merged with it.”One does not have to agree with these proposals to recognize that they offer both dramatic food for thought and exotic fruit for discussion. The transatlantic security conversation is about to begin.

Conclusions

If the EU is ever to develop a security identity, it will require several key developments. First, much greater pooling of sovereignty, both in terms of money and in terms of defense budgets, than has hitherto been the case. This is most likely to happen in the wake of the discussions on the future of the Eurozone. Absent any existential threat to the entire Union, security identity will have to come about through enhanced European investment in the stability of the greater European area. There is no paucity of potential crises in the periphery of the EU, from the Arctic to the Baltic and on to the Black Sea, from the Caucasus to the Bosporus and all the way to Gibraltar. Furthermore, there is very little chance that the United States will continue to assume primary responsibility and leadership for the management of these regions. It cannot afford to, and it is shifting its strategic gaze to Asia. Operational leadership must therefore be increasingly assumed by the Europeans. This will require restraint on the part of Washington and seriousness of purpose from Europeans. CSDP must acquire operational autonomy through and within NATO and the Americans must learn to take a genuine back-seat. Progressively, the balance within the Alliance must shift to one in which the Europeans do the majority of the heavy-lifting in their own back-yard, with Americans acting largely as force enablers. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) should become a European flag officer. The European caucus within NATO, far from being taboo, must become the cornerstone of the Alliance. Europeans must stop believing that NATO cannot work without U.S. leadership. This scenario depends critically, however, on U.S. willingness to transfer—and EU willingness to assume—regional leadership by the Europeans. If that willingness is absent in either case, then the entire experiment with European security and defense, whether through CSDP, a “Europeanized” NATO, or any other configuration, will fail.

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About the Author

Jolyon Howorth is Jean Monnet Professor of European Politics ad personam and Emeritus Professor of European Studies at the University of Bath (UK). He has been a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale since 2002. He has published extensively in the field of European politics and history, especially security and defense policy and transatlantic relations, including fourteen books and over two hundred and fifty journal articles and book chapters. 

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Endnotes

1. Karl Deutsch, Political community and the North Atlantic area : international organization in the light of historical experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

2. Thomas Risse Kappen, “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community, ”in Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

3.  John Peterson & Helen Sjursen (eds.), A Common Foreign Policy for Europe? Competing Visions of the CFSP (London: Routledge 1998).

4.  George H.W. Bush & Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage, 1999).

5.  Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Vintage, 1992).

6.  Josip Glaurdic, The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Break up of Yugoslavia (NewHaven: Yale UniversityPress,2011).

7.  David C. Gombert & F. Stephen Larrabee, America and Europe: A Partnership for a New Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

8.  http://www.atlanticcommunity.org/Saint-Malo%20Declaration%20Text.html

9.  Jolyon Howorth, Security and Defence Policy in the EuropeanUnion (London: Palgrave,2007—new edition forthcoming 2013).

10.  ISIS Europe currently lists 30—http://www.csdpmap.eu/mission-chart

11.  Christoph Meyer, The Quest for a European Strategic Culture: changing norms on security and defense in the European Union
    (London: Palgrave, 2006).

12.  Adrian Johnson & Same Mueen (eds.), Short War, Long Shadow: The Political and Military Legacies of the 2011 Libya
    Campaign (London: RUSI, 2012).

13.  Hugo Brady, “Schengen’s ‘Black Swan’ Moment,” E-Sharp, December 2011.

14.  Jolyon Howorth, “The ‘new faces’ of Lisbon: assessing the performance of Catherine Ashton and Herman van Rompuy
    on the global stage,” European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 16/3, 2011.

15.  Jolyon Howorth, “ESDP and NATO: institutional complexities and political realities,” Politique Etrangère, 2009/4.

16.  Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist: how the Arab Spring re-made Obama’s foreign policy,” New Yorker, May 2, 2011.

17.  Robert Gates, “The Security and Defense Agenda: The Future of NATO,” Speech by Secretary of Defense Robert M.
    Gates, June 10 2011: http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1581

18.  [Department of Defense], Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership. Priorities for 21st Century Defense, January 2012: http://www.
    defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf

19.  Michael Mandelbaum, The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era (New York: Public
    Affairs, 2010).

20.  Sven Biscop & Jo Coelmont, Pooling and Sharing: From Slow March to Quick March, Egmont Security Policy Brief, No. 23,
    May 2011: http://www.egmontinstitute.be/papers/11/sec-gov/SPB23-BiscopCoelmont.pdf

21.  See the EDA’s analytical publication, European Defense Matters: http://www.eda.europa.eu/info-hub/publications

22.  Final Report of the Future of Europe group, 17 September 212: http://www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/westerwelle_
    report_sept12.pdf

23.  http://www.euglobalstrategy.eu/

24.  Olivierde France & Nick Witney, Stratégies nationales de sécurité et de défense: pour une approche européenne, Paris, ECFR, 2012.

25.  Jenny Medcalf, Going Global or Going Nowhere: NATO’s Role in Contemporary International Security (London:PeterLang,2008).

26.  Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

27.  EU-ISS(ed.),What do Europeans Want from NATO?Report#8,November2010:http://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/
    detail/article/what-do-europeans-want-from-nato/

28.  Hubert Védrine, Report for the President of the French Republic on the Consequences of France’s Return to NATO’s Integrated
    Military Command, on the Future of Transatlantic Relations, and the Outlook for the Europe of Defense, 14 November 2012: http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/global-issues/defence-security/french-defence/international-organization-in/nato/ france-and-nato/article/hubert-vedrine-report-submitted-to

29.  Alessia Biava, “Vers un Quartier Général Européen,” Paris, CEREM, 2009.

30.  Sarwar Kashmeri, NATO 2.0: Reboot or Delete? (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2011).

31.  Christian Mölling, “Pooling and Sharing in the EU and NATO: European Defense Needs Political Commitment rather
    than Technocratic Solutions,” SWP Comments, No. 18, June 2012: http://www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/contents/
    products/comments/2012C18_mlg.pdf

32.  General Jean-Paul Perruche (2011), “Now or Never: The Way to a Credible European Defense,” Paris Papers, No. 2,
    IRSEM, Paris: http://www.irsem.defense.gouv.fr/spip.php?article75

33.  Sarwar Kashmeri, “It is High Time for Congress to Focus on the “O” in NATO,” The Huffington Post, December 6, 2012.

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