EU security: the real facts, please

World View: During his current visit to the Middle East to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders Brian Cowen told RTÉ that the European Union, which Ireland is now representing, is a global player with a world role. It has economic, political and security interests in the region to protect, which will be affected by continuing insecurity there.

His visit is a good example of the EU's more active involvement in international politics and diplomacy. As its highly capable foreign and security representative, Javier Solana, put it last week in Dublin, its "external action has undergone a sea-change" since Ireland last held the presidency eight years ago. "For many years we were reactive to developments around us. We responded, but often our response was too little or too late".

Recently the EU has been more proactive - in Macedonia, Bosnia, southern Serbia and the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Solana went on to describe the EU's new security strategy adopted last month in Brussels, which will guide its external action.

Entitled A Secure Europe in a Better World, it is a short and crisply written document, just as was Solana's speech in Dublin Castle (both may be found on the Government's excellent EU presidency website, www.eu2004.ie). It is, as Deaglán de Bréadún pointed out in these pages, short on specifics, in the sense of what precisely the EU will do in particular situations.

But it admirably spells out the global challenges such as military conflicts, poverty, competition for natural resources and growing energy dependence; key threats such as terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, state failure and organised crime; strategic objectives, including building security in the European neighbourhood; and policy implications for Europe as the EU assumes a more hegemonic role in the continent's affairs, including the need for more active "preventive engagement" to avoid more serious problems in the future, and a "strategic culture that fosters early, rapid, and when necessary, robust intervention".

De Bréadún went on to say it is "well-endowed with motherhood and apple pie", which is also true, but rather misses the point of what such a document is trying to achieve. Are its commitments to an "effective multilateral system, the development of a stronger international society, well-functioning international institutions and a rule-based international order" just to be taken for granted?

What about the following passage: "The fundamental framework for international relations is the United Nations Charter. The United Nations Security Council has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to fulfil its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority."

This text reflects the strong political input to the EU negotiations on the text by Ireland and other neutral or non-aligned EU member-states, which was accepted by those in NATO. So it may be motherhood and apple pie, but at least it's ours.

The values and interests expressed closely reflect those shaping Irish and European opinion over the last year after the war in Iraq, in sharp contrast to the thrust of US policy.

The document says a union of 25 states with over 450 million people producing a quarter of the world's gross national product inevitably makes the EU a global player: "It should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security and in building a better world".

Three options have faced the EU as it adapts to a more continental role in a more uncertain world. It could decide to remain a civilian power without security or military capabilities, which effectively would subordinate it indefinitely to the US. It could become an equal partner with the US, having overlapping but distinct values and interests and capable of delivering on them by its own original mix of soft and hard policy instruments.

Or it could become a rival global power to the US, of necessity adopting unified and centralised budgetary and military mechanisms which go far beyond what is currently on the agenda.

The EU has clearly opted decisively for the second of these choices over the last few years. It has strengthened foreign policy co-ordination, security structures and military co-operation in order to be more effective, but all on the basis of continuing national control and complementing existing alliance commitments.

The aim is to have a more balanced and equal relationship with the US; acting together they "can be a formidable force for good in the world", according to the security strategy.

This is not the same thing as becoming a rival superpower or superstate. That would require a qualitatively different level of sovereignty pooling, federalisation and budgetary power than is presently contemplated by any of the major figures in the EU debates.

And yet it is regularly assumed to be the case by the sovereigntist and hard neutralist wings of Eurosceptic opinion in Ireland and elsewhere.

This is not "militarisation" of the EU, but political and security adaptation of it to a greater world role using a mix of civic, developmental and military means for crisis management and preventive intervention. The expressed objectives are very different from a superpower's. Indeed they are phrased explicitly in contrast to those of the Bush administration and designed to express alternative values.

US diplomats visiting Dublin say it is wrong to draw conclusions about US policy from the occasional remarks of Pentagon advisers. They deny the US is pursuing a divide-and-rule policy towards an enlarged Europe. They want to see a more united and enlarged EU as an equal partner with the US, since anything they do together is inevitably successful.

There is plenty of room for disagreement as to how far this is true - and how far such a transatlantic partnership would necessarily take the form of a hard cop/soft cop approach in which the US acts, the EU pays and the UN mops up. But this debate should be conducted with real facts, not imaginary ones.