イギリスの戦略文化とヨーロッパ安全保障防衛政策

ブレア政権における政策の変化と継承の視角から

抄録

The argument that the European Union (EU) has its own strategic culture has been given increasing attention among academics. As the result of the development of European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), the EU deployed more than twenty missions throughout the world prior to 2010. These deployments have been stimulating the debate on the “European way” of using military forces in the event of crises. An angle closely related is how ESDP has been influenced by the strategic culture of each of the member states. Given that the member states are not willing to give up their sovereignty for the sake of integration, it is necessary to investigate the policy preference of the member states and the strategic cultures behind them.
The aim of this article is to shed a new light on the Blair government's policy toward the European Union's security and defence policy by using the concept of strategic culture. Owing to Blair's pro-EU overtures, New Labour's foreign policy and its policy on the EU have been widely debated. Some have even claimed that his policy “U-turn” led to the change in UK's strategic culture. However, considering the characteristics of the military forces in the UK and the historical preference in the field of European security cooperation, this article argues that the strategic culture of the UK has been rather stable under the New Labour government.
While New Labour's ethical foreign policy and Blair's conviction on the need for the international community to deploy military forces in the event of humanitarian crises contrast with those of the Conservative government's policy, it is necessary to make clear that they are based on weak domestic obstacles for deploying forces and heavy emphasis on expeditionary forces, which have been historically retained. At the same time, the insistence that NATO should have a right of first refusal could be regarded as a manifestation of another policy continuity. Whereas ESDP would not have been promoted if Conservatives had retained power after the 1997 election, the Blair government's policy change was a European turn rather than a U-turn in that Atlanticism was not in any sense discarded. Therefore, there is more continuity than change in the policy of the Blair governments on the ESDP.
The Blair government's pro-EU policy is not so much the fundamental change of policy preference as a change of tactics in using the EU as a useful arena for expanding national interests. By way of Europeanizing crisis management and promoting other member states to initiate military reform a la UK's Strategic Defence Review, the Blair government tried to use the EU as a means to sort out its military problem. As a result, the EU started to insist member states had a strategic culture of intervention for humanitarian crises.