Ten years down the road from here, contemporary historians may be able to look back and say that the Libya crisis was an historic landmark in the evolution of European foreign policy and security strategy.
The historians will argue that three things came together: first, Britain, France and other European allies confirmed their commitment to the international community’s pledge to protect civilians against internal and external state aggression. With the Libyan dictator threatening his own population, they asked for a vote in the United Nations Security Council to be mandated to protect the Libyan populace.
Second, America relinquished its unquestioned leadership role in transatlantic military affairs by opting-out of the Libya operation at a very early stage. The Libya intervention was the first case in a long time where the United States did not insist on being in the driver’s seat.
Third, Germany abstained in the UN Security Council vote and so found itself strangely out-of-step with the rest of the Western world. As a result, the strategic link between Germany and her core allies France and Britain that is so vital to the future of European foreign and security policy was – at least temporarily – interrupted.
Each of these developments is of strategic relevance. Berlin will need to review and redefine the German position on the EU’s security strategy and the German contribution to the military dimension of EU foreign policy. Europe as a whole will have to learn to conduct operations more and more without the back-up of U.S. military leadership, and it will have to find the resources to do so. The lesson of Europe’s Bosnia debacle of the mid-1990s still rankles, and the post-Cold War period was largely shaped by the continued willingness of the U.S. to accept the lead role in defining and implementing a European security strategy. Libya marks a retreat from this practice.
Looked at altogether, we may be confronted with a true first-order change in international politics. Now is the time for strategic thinkers in Brussels, Berlin, London and Paris to rise to the challenge of the Libyan crisis and its consequences. In many ways, the post-Lisbon treaty EU has become a stronger international actor – but it continues to lack a credible military dimension. The ‘age of austerity’ which is having such an impact on all EU and NATO member states’ defence budgets will not change this for the better. Against this background, the crisis over Libya may prove to be a defining challenge: Germany in particular will have to accept the fact that the EU is dependent on a German push towards more, not less, European integration in defence and security affairs. Paradoxical though it may seem at first glance, Libya could yet provide the political push for this to happen.
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Wolfgang Ischinger is Chairman of the Munich Security Conference and Vice-President of stiftung neue verantwortung (snv).
Timo Noetzel is a member of the management board of stiftung neue verantwortung (snv), a Berlin-based crosssector think tank for applied public policy research.
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