How united is Europe? AS EVERYONE will tell you, the Cold War is over. This implies that the Western defence system must be transformed. The Gulf crisis has arrived at the right moment to stimulate this debate. Where does the new danger lie for the civilized world, where the universal democratic values find their embodiment?
Now that the Reds are not what they once were, the Third World, ravaged by a social and economic crisis, appears all the more dangerous. Everything is being done to depict the Third World as a mysterious and enigmatic region, located somewhere outside the boundaries. This picture is the result of racism, but also of a method of political thinking that tends to see every issue through the prism of a Manichean conflict between good and evil. We can bring forth new "Hitlers" CLAUDE GABRIEL E ASTERN EUROPE has been easily absorbed into this Manichean framework, which prepares the ground for war, due to the dangers of "Third Worldization" there. The West knows that if a viable economic system is not rapidly established in that region, there will be an increasing danger of social chaos, civil wars and racial and national clashes.
As a result two debates intertwine. First of all there is a debate about the type of armament required. Nuclear war between Washington and Moscow is no longer on the cards, and, as a consequence, military systems must be readjusted to face the mounting dangers in the Third World. Confronted with increasing instability -not to speak of social explosions — it is necessary to reinforce the capacity for rapid intervention. Arms, means of transports and suitably trained personnel are needed which can respond to a variety of situations. After today's oil war, tomorrow there can be a coffee or a coca war. The cocaine war in South America directed by the United States is one specific example. In the last few months imperialist troops have gone into action in Panama, Gabon, Liberia, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda, which may be a record.
The second debate is about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which, under US hegemony, has been at the centre of much of Western military doctrine for the past 40 years. One possibility is that NATO will change into a common security body in the face of chaos in the East of Europe. Another is that it could change into a new institution, 1990 expect many poor countries to essentially directed towards the Third World. All these issues are not only to do with military policy as such. Political and economic considerations also enter into the debate. In fact, behind the façade of unity on the defence of the democratic West there are tensions which reflect the relative decline of American power and the rise of Japan and Germany. Bush's policy on the Gulf should be seen in this light. At a moment when the whole Western defence doctrine has been thrown into question by the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe, American leadership of the West is looking increasingly like an anachronism, at least at the economic and political levels. It is the convergence of these two great changes in international politics that makes the issue of European defence so sensitive.
Industrial interests and military decisions
These questions can be approached from a number of angles. But one approach that leads nowhere is to view defence solely from the military angle. Huge industrial lobbies stand behind the generals and defence ministries. One aspect of the new debates on defence is the global industrial restructuring that also involves arms industries. This "branch" of industry obeys the same rules as industry as a whole. Indeed for many of the firms arms are only one part, if a substantial one, of their business. The subsidiary firms are inter-connected, and face the same financial, technological and commercial chal-
lenges. These restructurings are taking place both on a European and world scale, and the alliances obey laws which go beyond purely political criteria.
What are the new constraints?
• The production costs for the latest ultra-sophisticated armaments are truly vast. Research and all development account now for some 30% of these costs. The risk is considerable, and this provides an impulse towards alliances and marriages of convenience. The search for economies of scale leads beyond any national framework. Here, as in other industries, it is necessary to be among the top few world leaders to keep in the race.
The United States has tried to provide a systematic answer to this problem, both to reduce the risks of competition and maintain their relative hegemony. They have produced the notion of "families of arms" with the idea of establishing a division of labour between Americans and Europeans. This rationalization of the armaments' systems favours the monopolies and tends to guarantee long-term markets for US firms.
• The market is saturated. The fall in the oil price before the Gulf war limited the income of the producing countries, who were big purchasers of arms. At the same time, new competitors have appeared for a whole range of types of equipment, notably in some Third World states. The main market for European arms manufacturers is the South, and this makes the issue of the solvency of these states all the more urgent. The Iraqi debt resulting from arms purchases is a good example of the contradictions that can appear. In 1989, French arms exports fell by 40% due to the financial difficulties of the Third World. Belgium exported more than FB25bn worth of arms in 1981, a figure that had fallen to less than 10bn a decade later.
• The reduction in state budgets due to state debt has imposed a partial rationalization of the public arms market. In the US for example 1990 will be the fifth year in succession in which the budget has been cut in real terms. This will combine with a change in the type of arms produced -less cost, but also more precisely designed for the new-style conflicts.
All this leads to an increase in the tempo of the reorganization of the international arms industry. And this must be borne in mind because in some respects it cuts across efforts to establish a strictly European integrated defence system, given that military policy cannot be conducted inde-
WESTERN EUROPE
PLANTA pendently from industrial resources and technical and commercial alliances.
Several considerations weigh on the debate on European defence. First of all there are the economic and financial stakes involved in a vital industrial branch. In this branch, as in others, two major tendencies combine, and sometimes come into conflict. The first is that firms want to be able to freely establish alliances and international cooperation. For "European" defence firms, Europe is not, in fact, necessarily the main consideration. They are going to fight to defend their part of the world market, even if this means linking up with an American or Japanese partner.
Political will plays economic role
The second tendency is to look to the European political institutions, above all the EC, to assist in the competition with the US. In France for example, where a significant proportion of production is pertormed by nationalized enterprises, "political will" plays a significant role. It is also a reason why the French are the most enthusiastic partisans of "European" defence, which would provide them with a new form of protectionism.
Given that state orders are the crucial thing for arms sales, and that exports are inseparable from the course of diplomacy, arms subsidiaries are particularly sensitive to political-strategic issues. Le Monde on September 29, 1990, points out that "British and French arms exporters are fearful of being pushed out by the Americans" who may saturate the Saudi market in the course of the Gulf expedition. The troop withdrawals from Europe will also mean that there will be an abundant supply of American and Soviet secondhand material at knockdown prices. Egypt and Morocco are already said to have been flooded with M60 tanks!
However, this does not give the governments total freedom as regards strictly industrial decisions. Technological and commercial imperatives affect the political sphere owing to the size of investments required, so that often the wishes of goverments can have little impact on the choice of commercial alliances or on the possibilities for defending a "national" defence sector. The case of the French Rafal fighter aircraft is an example of such constraints. The notion that a new type of aircraft can be produced on a purely French scale but in agreement with the American competition, as in the good old days with the Mirages, is a delusion. The world market has moved on.
Restructuring and international cooperation
What is no longer possible at a national level is hardly more feasible on the European scale. Even so, it has to be accepted that in the arms sector politics enters in more than elsewhere even as far as restructuring and international cooperation are concerned.
In the course of a press conference on the conflict with Iraq, French President François Mitterrand declared: "We have already known for a long time that no European defence system exists properly speaking, since it is this we have been working on...On the other hand, this doesn't mean that Europe is so divided, since the members of the Western European Union, including the observers, work together and I have not heard divergent voices there. Thus, there is progress, but it is still true that European defence comes behind the existing alliances for the moment?"
At this level decisions are not purely industrial. "European construction" is a long-term strategy. It obeys the demands of world restructuring - opening up of markets and globalization of production — but it is also determined by the specific policies of Europe, which, even if it is overall more productive than the United States, teels itself threatened by Japanese pertormance levels. European integration is thus being promoted by some big industrial and financial sectors — in opposition to others - and by the governments.
The aim now is economic and monetary union (EMU) with a common currency, 1. Le Monde, June 26, 1990. 19 2. Le Monde, August 23, 1990.
WESTERN EUROPE the ecu (European Currency Unit). Historically, fusions of this kind have been preceded by political fusion. The very recent absorption of East Germany by the Federal Republic shows that it remains normal for monetary fusion to be backed up by a single political power. This is why Mitterrand and others are pushing for moves towards political union to run parallel with EMU.
But this project faces a mass of obstacles. Everyone understands that it is going to be extremely difficult to set up ex-nihilo a European state enjoying a portion of the legitimacy now possessed by the existing national states. How can such a state be "manufactured""? What would be its powers and objectives? And finally, what are the common global commercial, diplomatic and military interests of "Europcan" capitalism?
The establishment of a European defence doctrine in this context is a means rather than an end. It involves a certain number of industrial and strategic decisions which tend to favour political integration. This is thus a very risky opcration, although a number of factors speak in its favour.
### Common arms market created
• In February 1990, an agreement was struck between nine European countries to establish a common arms market. This accord offered arms firms the opportunity to tender for contracts from the signatory countries.
• On June 29, 1989, the defence ministers ratified a common arms project ("Euclid"), a sort of lesser version of the Eureka European military programme. A first instalment of 845 million French francs was handed out, to the profit of the firms concerned.
The definition of independent Europcan defence is thus tied up with technological and industrial independence from the United States in the sphere of the new gencration of weapons- . European governments are looking for openings for coopcrative ventures that can enhance European military cohesion. At the start of the 1970s, Aérospatiale of France and MBB from Germany cooperated to produce anti-tank and ground-to-air missiles. British Acrospace, MBB and Acritalia cooperated on the Tornado aircraft. In October 1989 the French Thomson group and British Aerospace proposed to their governments a jointly conceived project for missile production (the Eurodynamics Consortium). November 1989, France's Matra bought 20% of BGT, the leading German air-air missiles manufacturers. Aérospatiale and MBB reaffirmed their cooperation at the start of 1990 to launch a Franco-German helicopter project. The estimated costs of the project is 20 6.8bn francs. This partnership is to be enlarged to include Italian, Dutch and - significantly — eventually American firms.
The same month the governments of France, Germany and Britain signed an agreement on the manufacture of a defense radar. The cost of getting the project off the ground was 1bn francs. In March of the same year, France proposed to Spain joint construction of conventional submarines. In May some of the same companies, Matra, Aérospatiale and MBB came together over the Roland missile project. Another consortium has been formed between Thomson, Aérospatiale and Selenia (Italy) for the construction of a family of anti-aircraft armaments. Offers to join in were made to Spanish and British firms.
Finally, European cooperation on satellite construction and development has its military dimension. The European Ariane space firm links in with a number of military markets.
Besides the production agreements, a number of big European trusts are being formed which will play an essential role in the eventual development of an independent European defence system. An example of this was the takeover of the British Plessey firm by Germany's Daimler, at a time when the latter enterprise was amalgamating with MBB Messerschmidt. The new DM-MBB group is involved with some 20 lines of military production in cooperation both with other European firms and American and Canadian firms The new group is worth 7bn D-Marks in the military sector, of which 60% are orders from the German defence ministry. 6
At a national level, concentration is also taking place. This is the case, for example, with the amalgamation of Aeritalia and Selenia in Italy, which has given birth to the world's seventh largest acronautical firms, employing 26,000 people. The same thing can be seen with the formation in France of the Industrial Group for Land Armaments (GIAT) which brings together state enterprises within a regulatory framework that permits them to make forcign alliances.
Despite this gencral tendency to the formation of a vast European militaryindustrial lobby, a certain number of obstacles remain in the way of a strictly European defence system.
• Industrial coopcration is not exclusively inter-European. This was shown for example in June 1989 when the British chose the American SRAM air-to-ground missile rather than French. This was also the case when Daimler decided on a vast plan of cooperation with the Japanese Mitsubishi notably for aeronautics, and there are many other examples?
• The notion of "weapons' families" has favoured a high degree of interdependence between the Europeans and Americans. American industry maintains considerable weight, insofar as, for historical reasons, the Japanese and Germans
International Viewpoint #194 • November 12, 1990 cannot get fully involved in the competition. The American strength also sets limits for France, for example in air transport or surveillance (dependence on the AWACS radar aircraft).
• British industry, which plays a leading role in the European military network, is deeply involved in joint work with the Americans. At the same time the French have given special emphasis to collaboration with the Germans, creating a dislocation in any European military grand design.
The two countries with nuclear arms, France and Britain, have been pursuing completely different policies in this field, with Paris defending the principle of a nuclear force independent of NATO control. An integrated European military force could only be created by sorting this question out. The French have for some years now been proposing a common European "deterrent"8 . But this raises the question of where Germany would fit in. German constitution obstacle to intervention
• The German constitution forbids the fedcral army from deploying troops outside the NATO framework. At a time when attention is being shifted to the Third World, this acts as an additional obstacle, as has been underlined by the Gulf crisis. German chancellor Helmut Kohl is probably not too unhappy that he cannot send troops to the Gulf, but he has nonetheless already announced that the German constitution must be changed so that Germany can play the global military role that corresponds to its economic strength.
• NATO and the Atlantic Alliance continue to exist, although their future is being discussed. The US is using the delay to hold up the European defence project. The Europeans are in any case themselves facing the difficult dilemma of whether they can do without American forces in Europe. They are asking themselves whether it is really time to "definitively turn the NATO page, when tomorrow anarchy and disorder can be at our doors, in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean?"9 The future of NATO is one of the issues at stake in the European disarmament negotiations - the CFE process for conventional armed forces and START for strategic arms.
The Europeans want to keep two irons in the fire — their own integration project 3. The Pentagon budget remains two and a half times as great as the military budget of the EC states. 4. Le Monde, February 22, 1990. 5. Libération, September 18, 1990. 6. See Memento Defense-désarmament, 1990, GRIP, Brussels. 7. Financial Times, March 28, 1990. 8. See also the French Prime Minister Michel Rocard in Le Monde, October 23, 1990. 9. See the interview with NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wömer in Libération, October 17, 1990. Gorbachev himself has talked of the "Lebanonization" of the USSR.
and cooperation with the Americans — for more than purely diplomatic reasons. We have seen how, in the negotiations over German unification, the issue of NATO membership for a united state was the corner stone of the bargaining with the Kremlin. The hand-wringings of some European leaders is a good illustration of their restricted room for manoeuvre, despite the relative weakening of the Americans. Thus the Belgian foreign minister Marc Eyskens explained on November 23, 1989: "I am a partisan of a European pillar in NATO. I am a EuroAtlanticist. Detente and the establishment of a heartfelt peace could easily lead to a sort of American-Soviet condominium if Europe dilutes itself."
The Americans meanwhile are looking for a new role for NATO that will prevent it from becoming irrelevant. In his speech in Berlin on December 12, 1989, American Secretary of State James Baker
ARMS reminded us that it was necessary "to remember that American security - from the political, military, and economic points of view — remains tied to the security of Europe" so that the elaboration of "common Western approaches" must continue, in the face of all kinds of dangers.
Despite this, the debate continues to rage to the point where the leader writer for Le Monde diplomatique, Claude Julien felt able to describe the American military role with the phrase "the gendarme is finished"10
At the centre of the controversy is the problem of the West European Union (WEU), which has until now been little more than a talking shop, and above all of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).
The CSCE came into being in Helsinki in 1975. Every European country except Albania is involved, along with the US and Canada. Some Europeans see the SCE as a point of support for a security framework under the sole control of the European states — a project that would tie in with Mitterrand's scheme for a European Confederation. Thus the aforementioned Marc Eyskens has proposed to provide the CSCE with a "security council" reserved for Europeans". Last September, the Council of Europe proposed the setting up of an Assembly bringing together the European countries involved in CSCE.
All this is not to Washington's taste. The US wants to retain NATO as the crucial defence framework and keep it the preserve of the "West". This, in fact, was what finally came out of a meeting of the foreign ministers of the 35 European countries, the US, Canada and the USSR in the United States in September. The
WESTERN EUROPE scheme launched there was for a body drawing together all the existing alliances, with its headquarters perhaps in Prague. Until then NATO would remain the basic Western defence structure.
So, "new Atlanticism" or not? Manfred Wörner, the NATO secretary general replied: "The CSCE can be very useful for preventing crises - or resolving them in a peaceful manner. But could it replace NATO? With 34 very different states, each disposing of a right of veto, what would CSCE do if a real conflict exploded?12"
In reality it is no longer American economic power that is the obstacle to the working out of an independent European defence system. It is the lack of cohesion in Europcan diplomatic and commercial interests which allows the Americans to keep relative hegemony. Over the Gulf crisis for example there have been significant differences between the policies of the leading EC states.
### West European Union marginalized
The WEU for its part, which brings together nine states — the EC states except for Denmark, Greece and Ireland — has hardly played any role. In the Gulf affair it did not meet until August 23, that is two weeks after the American decision to intervene, and even then restricted itself to statements of principle. Only the French made use of the occasion to try to give the impression that a new step had been taken towards European unity. Even so, it could be a useful stepping stone for the partisans of swift political integration. The WEU has the advantage of to some extent overlapping with the EC'3. On the other hand it is not yet adapted to the demand for adherence to the EC of neutral countries such as Austria.
Some real steps have been taken, nonetheless. Thus the Franco-German brigade is a first attempt at integration. It is under the control of a Franco-German cooperation group which is the executive body of the Franco-German Defence and Security Council. This is a very limited experiment, but the Germans are proposing to repeat it with other European countries. There is thus already a military dimension to the complex and difficult process of integration in a situation where no federal state exists.
The existence of this military dimension must be taken into account in the perspectives of the European workers' movement. The traditional parties — the Social Democrats and recycled ex-Stalinists — are virtually certain to come out in support of European military integration. Their unconditional support for national and European industrial interests will lead them directly to this new surrender.
However what is involved is not simply some reconversion to peaceful ends of the old defence systems of the cold war era. On the contrary, what is to be created is a new integrated system that can supply new imperialist appetites and which would be capable of acting in the Third World as much as in Europe in case of social disturbances. The armed forces will continue to change taking into account the new European dimension. The "missions"
they will have to fulfill in the new world situation push in the direction of increased professionalization. Conscription will tend to lose importance for the state. A high level of training for military personnel that can meet the needs of increasingly sophisticated weapons is no guarantee of respectability or "democratization" of the social body that is the army. It is significant that at the very moment when voices are beginning to be heard questioning the secretive and undemocratic procedures involved in European construction, the governments are establishing an increasingly integrated European military framework, and one increasingly linked to an interational industrial lobby, which more and more escapes the influence of the society. 14
Thus, European anti-militarism must learn to take the continent wide dimension into account. It also needs to find the means for joint action. Real antimilitarism in Europe can only exist if it takes into account the overall European framework.
This is yet another argument against notions of self-sufficient national struggles and organizations and in favour of a new internationalism. Civil disobedience, the refusal to pay for all the dirty wars that are happening or are coming, solidarity with the Third World under attack, the untiring struggle against social militarization, are all essential themes around which a new European anti-militarist movement can be created. * 10. Le Monde diplomatique, October, 1990. 11. Nouvelles Atlantiques, March 2, 1990. 12. Libération, October 17, 1990. 13. See the Boesman report adopted by the Institutional Commission of the European Parliament, March 2, 1989. 14. It has recently come to light that a secret "antisubversion" operation, named "Operation Sword", was mounted in Italy in the 1960s in connection with 21 NATO