EU–NATO Cooperation: New Perspectives on Security Force Assistance
By Arianna Biancardi
2022 has been a key year for NATO-EU cooperation. Both organisations published major political documents, the EU Strategic Compass and the NATO Strategic Concept,[i] in which both actors committed to strengthen their cooperation as a result of the current increasingly disruptive situation in Ukrainian territory. The origins of NATO-EU cooperation go back to 2003 with the establishment of the “Berlin Plus” agreements—a package of cooperation agreements that cover a large spectrum of topics including crisis management operation, sharing and reinforcement of assets and capabilities and established communication units—and were then reinforced with the recent Warsaw Joint Declaration (2016).
Today, the EU and NATO have developed close cooperation in different areas, such as military mobility and strategic communication, the latter through the NATO-EU security information agreement, which covers the exchange of classified information at the tactical level. In the field of the defence capacity building (DCB) and security force assistance (SFA) activities—generally aimed at improving the Alliance’s effectiveness in promoting stability and reconstruction efforts for conflict and post-conflict scenarios as well as the promotion of rule of law and democracy—the current situation has obliged the EU to improve its interconnection with NATO. According to military experts, SFA is more important than ever to prepare for future multinational operations. To strengthen their roles in the international arena, NATO and the EU must focus on developing a common view and action in the field of the defence capacity building. Thus, the two organisations, building on their experience through collaborations on crisis management, capability development, and maritime security operations, should build an operational framework to enforce their joint interventions, avoiding overlaps, lack of communication, and other assistance issues.
History of the EU-NATO framework of cooperation
Immediately after the Cold War, the international and global scenario was completely transformed and required effective measures to respond to the situation; these circumstances led the EU and NATO to adopt a comprehensive approach, by increasing the range of operations and intensifying respective interactions. This was made possible through an enlargement of their spheres of competence: the European Union transformed its military organisations, and NATO took on tasks not strictly related to collective defence. As a result, crisis management operation has been the trait d’union between the new competences of these two entities. The beginnings of the EU-NATO partnership originate in the last decade of the 20th century: the two organisations have been cooperating on a range of security and defence issues since then, including crisis management, capability development, and political consultations. After decades of sporadic interaction, the European Union and NATO made their cooperation institutional in 2003, by signing the “Berlin Plus” agreements. Since then, the European Union has had access to assets and capabilities to carry out crisis management within the Berlin Plus framework. Furthermore, within the framework, the European Union can access the exchange of classified intelligence under reciprocal security protection rules. In 2016,[ii] the EU and NATO enforced their relationship with a new joint declaration that defined seven areas of cooperation including defence capabilities and the maritime domain. In 2018,[iii] another declaration was signed to encourage progress in four more areas of cooperation.
In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, both NATO and the EU published their own major political documents—respectively, the Strategic Concept and the Strategic Compass. Both documents emphasised the necessity to increase the collaboration between the organisations to face the disruptive situation occurring in Ukrainian territory. The conflict in Ukraine has reinforced the idea that the EU’s defence and security cannot be achieved and implemented independently from NATO.
Current practices in the NATO-EU relationship
Despite appearances, the Berlin Plus agreement is not completely binding, and the fields of cooperation are limited to specific topics. As a result, the agreement does not reflect the current interactions between NATO and the European Union either at the operational level or the strategic level. In fact, only two missions have been conducted under the Berlin Plus Framework.
An additional difficulty that needs to be addressed is the management of the two organisations when they are present in the same territories but with different types of missions. An example can be seen in Iraq, with NATO Mission Iraq (NMI) and the European Union Advisory Mission in Iraq (EUAM Iraq). While the two missions have a similar mandate, they report to two different ministries within member states: the European Union’s to the Ministry of Interior and NATO’s to the Ministry of Defence. However, they are not separate from each other: both work in the field of security sector reform (SSR) and cannot be considered as distinct entities. Since they are not separate entities from each other, they need to coordinate operations. Lastly, there can be overlaps concerning the activities related to cross-cutting topics that are dealt with by the European Union and NATO.
An important piece of the current framework that constitutes EU-NATO relations concerns the ways in which members of the two organisations interact with each other. Therefore, further analyses must be carried out to analyse the links between them[iv]: interactions between the different organisations may occur in different ways and may not always be supported within an institutional framework though may influence each other. According to some studies,[v] EU and NATO staff engage in informal practices at all levels and fields of operation that are maintained even when political signals are absent and cooperation is blocked, especially developing staff-to-staff cooperation.
Security sector reform, defence capacity-building and security force assistance
The notion of security sector reform is used both in the European Union and NATO publications. European Union documents define security sector reform as “the process of transforming a country’s security system so that it gradually provides and the State with more effective and accountable security in a manner consistent with respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law and principles of good governance.”[vi] Meanwhile, the main document that defines NATO’s concept of security sector reform is in Allied Joint Publication 3.4.5 “Early Stages of Security Sector Reform”. As laid out in this document, security sector reform is “a sensitive political process as it strives to reform the existing institutions in conflict-affected countries so they can enforce the law and provide security and justice for their citizens.’’[vii] Doctrinally, both organisations have identified common sectors that are classified as security sector reform (SSR) and defence capacity building (DCB). An important distinction to be made, however, is that the doctrines of the two organisations are classified under different umbrellas: according to NATO, security sector reform is an activity that is conceptually under the definition of defence capacity building, while for the European Union, security sector reform includes activities that can be attributed to defence capacity building.
While the European Union gives its own generic definition of DCB and SSR that encompasses several aspects of their different natures, NATO better differentiates between the activities of an operational nature included within DCB: for example, under security sector reform, the activity of security force assistance is identified. Although both organisations start from a similar definition of DCB, from a doctrinal aspect the European Union has better developed the civil advisory aspects, while NATO has better developed the military cooperation aspects.
According to the EU framework, DCB includes mentoring, monitoring, advising, and training. According to the AJP. 3.16 doctrine on SFA, this can be summarised using the acronym GOTEAM (Generate, Organize, Train, Enable, Advise, Mentoring). However, the activities provided by the European Union on the spectrum of SSR, even more so in DCB, correspond to the activities NATO carries out that are institutionally and doctrinally SFA activities. Considering then that there are European Union and NATO missions in the same areas that aim to achieve similar (and sometimes shared) objectives, the risk of overlapping functions is elevated, particularly if at different levels (strategic, tactical, operational) concrete and tangible forms of collaboration are not provided.
Thus, if we analyse the state of things at the operational level, there is a need to develop methods for working together that can lead to fruitful cooperation that is not simply reduced to informal meetings for updating and briefing but organised and structured. One example of collaboration at the operational level that has provided great results is cooperation in maritime security[viii]: maritime cooperation has always been a key security element for the European Union as well as NATO, thus the necessity to create permanent structured cooperation for the issue emerged. After the renewed interest by both organisations through joint declarations, in the EUNAVFOR MED missions Operation Sophia (ENFM)—currently Operation Irini and NATO Operation Sea Guardian in the Central Mediterranean—a cooperation mechanism was created: on a rotational basis, the two organisations chair the Shared Awareness and Deconfliction Mechanism in the Mediterranean (SHADE MED). An important fact in this example of collaboration is that there are areas of collaboration between the European Union and NATO activities (e.g., training) that are already part of the DCB doctrine.
Conclusion
In the last year, following the events of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, cooperation between the European Union and NATO has again come to the fore: in both organisations’ strategic documents, both NATO and the EU aim to strengthen the partnership to deal with the new global scenario. However, the current tools that are available to the EU and NATO may soon be obsolete in view of their emerging needs. The lack of a regulatory framework between the two is further reflected in the organisations’ presence on the ground, which needs to be coordinated, both to improve contributions to security sector reform and to avoid any waste of resources. Furthermore, as noted above, the two organisations share a similar doctrine and best practices in the areas of SSR and DCB and identify common activities that can be traced back to what NATO identifies as SFA that, if shared, can reduce the issues highlighted above. In any case, examples of collaboration between the two organisations at the operational level show how effective and functional cooperation can be achieved, even including activities that relate to SFA. Today more than ever, it is important to revitalise EU-NATO DCB-assistance cooperation through a mechanism such as a permanent board that would not only synergize activities in the operational sphere but also expose to the public the willingness to cooperate in that area by giving a strong political signal.
About the Author
Arianna Biancardi is a student at the University of Turin, where she is attending the final year of Law School. She focuses on military, international law, international humanitarian law, and international relations. She is currently an intern at the NATO Security Force Assistance Centre of Excellence (SFACoE), where she is presently completing an internship in the branch of concept development and experimentation.
*The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the NATO Security Force Assistance Centre of Excellence (SFACoE).
Notes
[i] NATO, “STRATEGIC CONCEPT Adopted by Heads of State and Government at the NATO Summit in Madrid,” June 2022, https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/290622-strategic-concept.pdf.
[ii] European Council, “JOINT DECLARATION by the PRESIDENT of the EUROPEAN COUNCIL, the PRESIDENT of the EUROPEAN COMMISSION, and the SECRETARY GENERAL of the NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION,” 8 July 2016, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/21481/nato-eu-declaration-8-july-en-final.pdf.
[iii] NATO, “JOINT DECLARATION on EU-NATO COOPERATION by the PRESIDENT of the EUROPEAN COUNCIL, the PRESIDENT of the EUROPEAN COMMISSION, and the SECRETARY GENERAL of the NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION,” 10 July 2018, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_156626.htm.
[iv] Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters, “Positioning Member States in EU-NATO Security Cooperation: Towards a Typology,” European Security May (2022): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2022.2076558.
[v] Nina Græger, “European Security as Practice: EU–NATO Communities of Practice in the Making?” European Security 25, no. 4 (2016): 478–501, https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2016.1236021.
[vi] Council of the European Union, “COUNCIL CONCLUSIONS ON
EU-WIDE STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT
SECURITY SECTOR REFORM (SSR),” Brussels, 14 November 2016, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/24227/ssr-st13998en16.pdf.
[vii] NATO Standardization Office, “NATO Standard AJP: 4.3.1, Allied Joint Doctrine for the Military Contribution to Peace Support,” Edition A, Version 1, December 2014, 0442., https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/624153/doctrine_nato_peace_support_ajp_3_4_1.pdf.
[viii] European Union External Action, “Factsheet: EU-NATO Cooperation on Maritime Security,” accessed 10 November 2022, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/factsheet_-_eu-nato_maritime_cooperation.pdf.
Image: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_132756.htm
