Security and Defence Policy in The European Union PDF

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Security and Defence
Policy in the European
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Second Edition
Jolyon Howorth
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Contents
List of Illustrative Material ix

Preface to the Second Edition x
List of Abbreviations xv
1 Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ 1

Security and Defence Policy: A Special Work in Progress 2
The Saint-Malo Revolution 7
Controversial Origins 14
Misleading Allegations 15
The Fundamental Drivers behind CSDP 21
Public Policy and Public Opinion 25
The Basic Structure of the Book 26
2 Decision-Making: The Political and Institutional Framework 33

The Pre-Saint-Malo Framework 35
The Post-Saint-Malo Institutions 40
The Post-Lisbon Institutions 49
Conclusion 67
3 The Instruments of Intervention: Generating Military and

Civilian Capacity 70
Transforming EU Military Capabilities 73
From Headline Goal 2010 to Pooling, Sharing and
Specialization? 83
The European Defence Agency 91
The Contentious Issue of Operational Headquarters 96
Civilian Crisis Management: The Continuation of Politics
by Other Means? 97
Conclusion 107
4 Selling it to Uncle Sam: CSDP and Transatlantic Relations 109

US Reactions to CSDP 110
European Approaches to the NATO–CSDP Realtionship 117
The CSDP–NATO Relationship: Zero or Positive Sum? 129
CSDP and NATO after Libya and Afghanistan 137
Conclusion 141
vii
viii Contents
5 The EU as an Overseas Crisis Management Actor 144

CSDP Military Operations 154
Non-Military Missions 168
Monitoring and Assistance Missions 174
Rule of Law Missions 177
Border Assistance Missions 180
Scholarly Analyses 182
Conclusion 187
6 Empirical Reality and Academic Theory 190

Applying Theory to CSDP 192
Substantive Theories 193
Methodological Approaches 205
Alternative Theoretical/Methodological Approaches 211
Conclusion 214
7 Conclusion: The Major Challenges Ahead 216

A Grand Strategy for CSDP 217
Forging an EU Strategic Culture 233
Concluding Thoughts: The Challenges Ahead 242
Bibliography 247
Index 291
List of Illustrative Material
Tables
3.1 World military expenditure, 2012 72

3.2 European armed forces, 2013 77
3.3 EU member states defence expenditure 86
5.1 Dates and host countries for CSDP missions 147
5.2 Peen Rodt’s evaluation of CSDP mission success rates 166
7.1 Biehl et al. on strategic cultures in Europe 240
Figures
1.1 Support for a common defence and security policy among

the European Union member states 27
3.1 European Defence Agency, 2014 93
Boxes
1.1 The Westphalian System 2

1.2 The Western European Union 4
1.3 The Saint-Malo Declaration 8
1.4 EU and NATO memberships, 1994–2013 13
2.1 Theoretical approaches to international relations 35
3.1 Berlin Plus 78
3.2 The 2008 Declaration on Strengthening Capabilities 83
5.1 CSDP missions 151
Maps
5.1 European Union: EEAS completed missions and

operations 148
5.2 European Union: EEAS ongoing missions and operations 149
5.3 ISIS–Europe missions map 150
ix
Preface to the Second Edition
The first edition of this book was written in summer 2006 and published
in spring 2007. The mid-2000s probably marked a high point in the
European Union’s (EU) efforts to forge a Common Security and Defence
Policy (CSDP). New institutions created in Brussels in the early years of
the twenty-first century and designed to facilitate decision-making in,
and implementation of, this new policy area were working well. Efforts
to generate appropriate military and civilian capacity for crisis manage-
ment missions were moving forward, albeit slowly. By 2007, the EU had
launched some 20 overseas missions. The EU’s High Representative for
foreign and security policy, Javier Solana, was a respected figure on the
international stage. The United States, having shed its initial ambiva-
lence about CSDP, was actively supportive. Requests were coming into
Brussels from a range of international actors for the EU to step in to
manage regional crises – far more requests than could physically be
accommodated. The swelling ranks of academics and policy analysts
poring over CSDP were, in general, convinced that something important
was happening. European analysts were buoyant in their assessment of
CSDP’s capacity to put the EU on the security map. Some even went so
far as to suggest that this was the most dynamic policy area in the field
of European integration, with the potential to contribute to the emer-
gence of a European identity. American analysts, once they (belatedly)
spotted CSDP’s existence, detected in it a form of balancing against the
USA. The EU, in this light, was perceived as – potentially – a major mili-
tary force.
In retrospect, it is clear that all analysts (including myself) were
investing in Europe’s defence and security project more expectations –
or fears – than was justified or reasonable. The project, after all, in the
mid-2000s, was barely six years old. It boasted a document called the
European Security Strategy (2003) which in fact fell far short of being a
strategy. The member states interpreted the project in very different
ways, but for much of the decade were focused on trying to ratify the
Constitutional Treaty and were not inclined in that context to ask tough
questions about where CSDP was going. Plans for an upgraded High
Representative were felt to offer promise of institutional dynamism,
even though all commentators were agreed that the impact of this new
post would depend crucially on the personality of the incumbent.
Moreover, Europe, along with much of the rest of the industrialized
world, was about to stumble into a major financial and political crisis –
which is still with us as I write these lines. In 2008, the global financial
x
Preface to the Second Edition xi
crisis erupted, focusing policy-makers’ attention massively on private

sector and sovereign debt. In 2010, the eurozone became the object of
the world’s attention as country after country struggled to avoid bank-
ruptcy. The same year, France and the UK signed a joint defence treaty
which many believed was designed to replace CSDP. In 2011, the ‘Arab
Spring’ demonstrated the quasi-irrelevance of the EU’s much-vaunted
‘neighbourhood policy’ in general and its security policy in particular.
The Libyan crisis was precisely the scenario for which CSDP had been
conceived, yet when push came to shove in March 2011, the EU simply
declared itself absent without leave. No CSDP mission was launched
between 2008 and 2012 (save a minor training mission), reflecting, to
some extent, ‘mission-fatigue’ on the part of EU member states, many of
whom were concurrently deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq or both. The
new EU High Representative, Catherine Ashton, reversing her predeces-
sor’s priorities, cared little for and gave no impetus to CSDP. Some
analysts already declared the entire European security project dead.
Consequently, when I sat down to begin writing this second edition in
the summer of 2011, I was genuinely at a loss as to what to say. It was far
from clear exactly what was happening; indeed whether CSDP even had
a future. The status of the European integration project itself seemed
predicated on the (still today very uncertain) outcome of the eurozone
crisis. Across the Maghreb and into Egypt, the EU’s relevance to the
tumultuous events of that year seemed difficult to discern. The French
Chief of the General Staff opined that CSDP had ‘gone into hibernation’
and that it would be some time before it woke up again. The United
States, planning its strategic ‘tilt to Asia’, was imploring the EU to stand
up and become a serious security actor in its own neighbourhood.
Outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates berated the European allies
for their lack of investment (and apparent lack of interest) in security and
defence issues. In Syria, in Mali, and across the Sahel, insurgencies were
destabilizing significant areas of the EU’s hinterland, while the
Europeans looked on helplessly. In the Caucasus and the Caspian basin,
recently designated as targets for an ‘Eastern Partnership’, geopolitical
developments were taking shape without any apparent reference to the
European Union and its much touted principles and values, let alone its
security posturing. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s plans for a ‘Eurasian
Union’ seemed destined to undermine the EU’s activities to the East. In
the Middle East, where Barack Obama appeared to have abandoned all
hope of influencing Israeli politics, the EU was reduced to impotent
silence. Even in the Balkans, where CSDP had won its early spurs, there
appeared to be deadlock in Bosnia-Herzegovina, no clear way forward in
Kosovo, and a growing standoff with Serbia. Further afield, among the
emerging powers – China, Brazil, India and South Africa – there was a
sense that the early twenty-first century promise of the EU as a global
actor had already begun to fade. It was very difficult to imagine how
xii Preface to the Second Edition
CSDP would spring back to life. Accordingly, I set aside this project and
began research for another book – on Iraq.
However, as 2012 turned into 2013, it seemed appropriate to revisit
CSDP. Suddenly much appeared to be happening. The EU’s Defence
Ministers had started a process known as the ‘Ghent Framework’, under
which they were making efforts to categorize defence equipment with a
view to maximizing ‘pooling and sharing’. The European Defence
Agency, under its dynamic new Chief Executive, had identified 11 key
procurement priorities which had proven to be sorely lacking in Libya
and other operations. An initiative taken by the Foreign Ministers of
Poland, Sweden, Italy and Spain, in summer 2012, was mobilizing the
best strategic thinkers across the EU to devise a European Global
Strategy, which was published in May 2013. A similar high-level initia-
tive based in Brussels led to the June 2013 publication of a massive set of
recommendations for a ‘European White Paper on Security and Defence’.
In France, the April 2013 Livre Blanc on national defence and security
policy stated unambiguously that France’s policy ‘cannot be conceived
outside the framework of the Atlantic Alliance and our commitment to
the European Union’. Within a six month period (July 2012 to January
2013) no fewer than five new CSDP missions were launched, all of them
in Africa. This seemed to underscore the EU’s new determination to
contribute to the stabilization of its volatile southern neighbourhood.
Groups of proximate and like-minded EU member states, organized in
‘clusters’ (the ‘Weimar Five’, the ‘Visegrads’, the ‘Nordics’, the ‘Benelux’,
the ‘Iberians’) were beginning to cooperate on defence planning and
procurement. Europe’s cognoscenti were already beginning to anticipate
the departure of the first ‘upgraded’ High Representative, Catherine
Ashton, and to invest hopes in her replacement. Above all, the entire
community of scholars, analysts and policy-makers involved in CSDP
was looking forward to the much-vaunted European Council meeting on
security and defence scheduled for December 2013. CSDP might not yet
have awoken fully from its hibernation, but it was certainly stirring
again. It was time to get back to the keyboard. This second edition is the
result. But the reader should know that it is a very different book from
the 2007 edition. I have retained only about one third of the material
from that edition, partly because so much has happened since the
summer of 2006 which needs comment, and partly because I am not as
convinced as I was in 2006 that CSDP is the dynamic policy area so many
of us at the time felt it to be. The questions surrounding it in the summer
of 2013 are many and significant. I hope to have dealt with these objec-
tively and fairly. In researching this new edition over the past seven years,
I have come across some two hundred substantial books and over 1,500
journal articles and book chapters on the topic. PhDs are also appearing
in growing numbers and I have acted either as examiner or as assessor for
over two dozen of them. I have tried to benefit from this amazing
Preface to the Second Edition xiii
outpouring of scholarship in the chapters that follow. The authors whose

work I have misrepresented should know that it is not their fault.
I have a number of additional acknowledgements to make since the first
edition of this book. As that edition was going to press, I was fortunate
enough to benefit from a year’s leave of absence from Yale in order to work
on my part of a major grant awarded under the EU’s Framework Six
programme. The InTune project, co-directed by Maurizio Cotta and
Pierangelo Isernia, allowed me to spend a year in Paris, where I was hosted
by the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI). My research
was part of an InTune group project investigating ‘Identity, Scope of
Governance and Representation’ led by Claudio Radaelli. During that
year, I conducted interviews with around 80 defence officials in Brussels
and the main national capitals, including all 27 ambassadors to the
Political and Security Committee. My concentration was on decision-
making in CSDP. My thanks are due to all my InTune colleagues, as they
are to Thierry de Montbrial, Florent Baran, Etienne de Durand and
Dominique David at IFRI. From January to June 2010, I was again on
leave from Yale, this time as a Visiting Research Professor at the Kolleg
Forschergruppe (KFG) of the Freie Universität Berlin. My hosts, Thomas
Risse and Tanja Börzel, could not have been more accommodating and the
intellectual environment surrounding the weekly jour fixe research semi-
nars opened my eyes to the mysteries of diffusion as exercised by the EU.
My colleagues and students at Yale have been a source of constant and
unparalleled stimulation and I am proud to have been associated, since
2002, with the work of the Political Science Department, the Macmillan
Center for International and Area Studies, the Jackson Institute for
Global Affairs and the programme on Ethics, Politics and Economics.
Special thanks go to my colleagues Ian Shapiro, David Cameron, Bruce
Russett, Stathis Kalyvas, Frances Rosenbluth, James Levinsohn, Nicolas
Sambanis, Steven Wilkinson and Susan Hyde. Bath University was
gracious enough in 2010 to make me an Emeritus Professor of European
Politics and I only wish life would allow me to spend more time in what
is without doubt Britain’s loveliest city. Thanks in Bath are due to Roger
Eatwell, Susan Milner, Richard Whitman, David Galbreath and Adrian
Hyde-Price for putting up with my sporadic incursions into 1 West
North. Since 2009, I have taught an annual summer module on
Transatlantic Relations in the Masters programme at Luiss Guido-Carli
University in Rome and have thus been able to add a new dimension to
my understanding of European politics, as well as to live repeatedly in the
world’s second loveliest city. Thanks there are due to Sergio Fabbrini,
Giovanni Orsina and Marc Lazar.
I have also been fortunate enough to be involved with the work of a
number of key EU institutes and agencies. At the Institute for Security
Studies of the European Union, many thanks for both involving me and for
great hospitality to Nicole Gnesotto, Alvaro de Vasconcelos and Antonio
xiv Preface to the Second Edition
Missiroli. Javier Solana, both before and after his ‘retirement’, has been a
fount of wisdom. At the European Defence Agency, I must thank Claude
France Arnould for her welcome, her friendship (and illuminating conver-
sations over meals in Paris and Brussels), Graham Muir for his forbearance
and Eric Plateau for his efficiency. At the Institute for Strategic Research of
the French Ecole de Guerre, where I have served as a member of the
Scientific Advisory Board, my thanks go to Frédéric Charillon and to
Frédéric Ramel for their regular invitations, to General Jean-Paul Perruche
for friendship, stimulation (and gastronomy), and General Maurice de
Langlois for his collegiality and professional enlightenment. Many thanks
also to Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont for making me at home at Egmont,
the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations. At the European
Policy Centre, I have been privileged to work alongside Rosa Balfour and
Janis Emmanouilidis, and at ELIAMEP I should thank Loukas Tsoukalis
for offering me repeated opportunities to sound off my crazy ideas on
wonderful Greek islands. Robin Niblett, at Chatham House, has been kind
enough to involve me in several of that august institute’s European endeav-
ours. Anand Menon has been at the same time friend, critic, sparring part-
ner and inspiration, seemingly for ever. Special thanks for opening my eyes
to this and that aspect of CSDP are also due to Frédéric Bozo, Frédéric
Mérand and Geoffrey Edwards. Many other American and European
friends and/or colleagues have sharpened my thinking about European
security: Franco Algieri, Robert Art, Christopher Chivvis, Charles Cogan,
Robert Cooper, James Dobbins, André Dumoulin, Simon Duke, Gerda
Faulkner, Roy Ginsberg, Giovanni Grevi, Eva Gross, Ulrike Guérot, Jean-
Yves Haine, François Heisbourg, Christopher Hill, Stanley Hoffmann,
Robert Hunter, Josef Janning, Mathias Jopp, Karl-Heinz Kamp, Karl
Kaiser, Daniel Keohane, Brigid Laffan, Stephen Larrabee, Elena Lazarou,
David Leakey, Christoph Meyer, Christian Mölling, Kalypso Nicolaidis,
Hanna Ojanen, Quentin Peel, Barry Posen, Patrick de Rousiers, Richard
Samuels, Simon Serfaty, Jamie Shea, Helen Sjursen, Michael Smith,
Michael E. Smith, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Mario Telo, Nathalie Tocci,
Stephen Walt, Stephanie Weiss, Wolfgang Wessels, Nick Witney, Richard
Wright, Rob de Wyk.
Once again, I must express the inestimable debt of gratitude I owe to
Vivien Schmidt, not only for educating me on a daily basis in the finer
points of European affairs (including the mysteries of discursive institu-
tionalism and throughput), for reading and commenting wisely on drafts
of this book, but above all for sharing with me a life divided almost
equally between Boston, the loveliest city in the United States, and Paris,
the loveliest city on earth.
Paris JOLYON HOWORTH

List of Abbreviations
AMIS African Mission in Sudan

AMISOM African Mission on Somalia
AMM Aceh Monitoring Mission
AQIM Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations
AU African Union
AVF all-volunteer force
BAM Border Assistance Mission
BG battle-group
BiH Bosnia-Herzegovina
C4I command, control, communications, computers and
intelligence
CAR Central African Republic
CBRN chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN)
CCM Civilian Crisis Management
CDS Centre for Defence Studies (King’s College, University of
London)
CEDC Central European Defence Cooperation
CEPS Centre for European Policy Studies
CESDP Common European Security and Defence Policy
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CHG 2008 Civilian Headline Goal 2008
CHG 2010 Civilian Headline Goal 2010
CHODs Chiefs of the Defence Staff
CIVCOM Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management
CJTF Combined Joint Task Forces
CMCO Civil–Military Coordination
CMI Crisis Management Initiative
CMPC Civil–Military Planning Cell
CMPD Crisis Management Planning Department
COPS Comité de Politique et de Sécurité (French acronym for
the Political and Security Committee)
COPPS Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support
COREPER Committee of Permanent Representatives
CPCC Civilian Planning and Conduct Capability
CPCO Centre de Planification et de Conduite des Opérations
(French PJHQ)
CRT Civilian Response Team
CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
xv
xvi List of Abbreviations
CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy

CSIS Center for Strategic and International Studies
(Washington, DC)
CWG Council Secretariat Working Group
DDR Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration
DoD Department of Defense
DRC Democratic Republic of Congo
DSACEUR Deputy Supreme Allied Commander (NATO)
EACC European Airlift Coordination Centre
EATC European Air Transport Command
EBAO effects based approach to operations
EC European Commission
ECFR European Council on Foreign Relations
EDA European Defence Agency
EDC European Defence Community
EEAS European External Action Service
EGS European Global Strategy
ENEC European Network Enabling Capability
EP European Parliament
EPC European Political Cooperation
ESDI European Security and Defence Identity
ESDP European Security and Defence Policy
ESS European Security Strategy
EU European Union
EUAVSEC European Union Aviation Security Mission (South
Sudan)
EUCAP European Union Capacity Building Mission
EUFOR European Union Force
EUFOR RDC European Union Force in Congo
EU-ISS European Union Institute for Security Studies (Paris)
EUJUST European Union Rule of Law Mission
EULEX European Union Rule of Law Mission
EUMC European Union Military Committee
EUMM European Union Monitoring Mission
EUMS European Union Military Staff
EUNAVFOR European Union Naval Force
EUPAT European Union Police Advisory Team
EUPM European Union Police Mission (in FYROM and BiH)
EUPOL European Union Police Mission
EUSEC European Union mission for security dector reform (RD
Congo)
EUSR European Union Special Representative
EUTM European Union Training Mission (in Somalia and Mali)
FAC Foreign Affairs Council
FYROM Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
List of Abbreviations xvii
GAC General Affairs Council

GAERC General Affairs and External Relations Committee
GAM Free Aceh Movement (Indonesia)
GFAP General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and
Herzegovina
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GOI Government of Indonesia
GOS Government of Sudan
GPS global positioning system
GWOT global war on terrorism
HG 2010 Headline Goal 2010
HGTF Headline Goal Task Force
HHG Helsinki Headline Goal
HQ Headquarters
HR-CFSP High Representative for the Common Foreign and
Security Policy
HR-VP High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy and Vice-President of the Commission
IAI Istituto Affari Internazionale
ICG International Crisis Group
ICISS International Commission on Intervention and State
Security
IDP internally displaced person
IED improvised explosive devices
IERI Institut Européen des Relations Internationales
IfS Instrument for Stability
IISS International Institute for Strategic Studies (London)
IMF International Monetary Fund
INF Intermediate Nuclear Forces
IPTF International Police Task Force
IPT Integrated Police Unit (DRC)
IR International Relations
IRSEM Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l’Ecole Militaire
JEM Justice and Equality Movement (Sudan)
KFOR Kosovo Force (NATO force in Kosovo)
KLA Kosovo Liberation Army
LOT liaison and observation team
MFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MILREPs Military Representatives (delegating for CHODs on
EUMC)
MINURCAT United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic
and Chad
MOD Ministry of Defence
MONUC UN Mission in Congo
MoS Ministry of Security
xviii List of Abbreviations
MPRA Maritime Patrol and Reconnaisance Aircraft

MUSIS Multiple Space-Based Imaging System
MSF Médecins Sans Frontières (‘Doctors Without
Borders’)
NAC North Atlantic Council (NATO political command)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NDC NATO Defence College
NORDEFCO Nordic Defence Cooperation
NRF NATO Response Force
OCHA Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
OHQ Operational Headquarters (EU)
OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
PESCO permanent structured cooperation
PfP Partnership for Peace
PGM precision-guided munition
PJHQ Permanent Joint Headquarters
PLO Palestinian Liberation Organization
PNA Palestinian National Authority
PoCo Political Committee
PSC Political and Security Committee (see COPS)
PSOE Socialist Party (Spain)
Quai Quai d’Orsay (French MFA)
QDR Quadrennial Defense Review (US)
QMV Qualified Majority Voting
R2P responsibility to protect
RCP Rafah Crossing Point
Relex Directorate General for External Relations (European
Commission)
RPAS remotely piloted aircraft systems
RS Republika Srpska (Serbian part of BiH)
SBS State Border Service
SDS Serbian Democratic Party
SFOR Stabilization Force (NATO force in BiH)
SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (NATO
Central Planning HQ)
SIPA State Investigation and Protection Agency
SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
SLM/A Sudan Liberation Movement/Army
SNAF Somali National Armed Forces
SSR Security Sector Reform
TCE Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe
TEU Treaty on European Union
UAV unmanned aerial vehicle
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
List of Abbreviations xix
UNMIK United Nations Interim Administration Mission in

Kosovo
UNSC United Nations Security Council
USA United States of America
WEU Western European Union
WFP World Food Programme
WMD weapons of mass destruction
WTO World Trade Organization
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Chapter 1
Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in

Progress’
The notion of a ‘work in progress’ is particularly appropriate for Europe’s

efforts to emerge as a security actor. The phrase was used by James Joyce
as the working title of his novel, serialized over 20 years and eventually
published in 1939 as Finnegan’s Wake. In it, he insisted on the interplay
between the conscious and the unconscious in his unprecedented attempt
to break with literary tradition and to create an entirely new literary para-
digm, appropriate for the twentieth century. Unconsciously, or semi-
consciously, Europeans are moving towards a new security paradigm.
They have not yet achieved full consciousness of where they are trying to
go or what they are seeking to achieve. They have been conscious since the
immediate aftermath of the Second World War that the guarantee of their
collective security hangs in an uncomfortable balance between depen-
dence and autonomy, between the hand of fate and freedom of manoeu-
vre. Between 1949 and 1989, dependence and fate held Europe’s security
hostage to the imponderables of the American nuclear umbrella in a
standoff with the Soviet Union based on ‘mutual assured destruction’.
‘Defence’ was an existential zero-sum game. There was little space for
autonomy or freedom of manoeuvre. At the same time, unconsciously,
Europeans have sought, in a variety of ways, to create a new practice in
international relations, to break with a murderous past which dictated the
course of war and peace in depressingly stark realist terms ever since
Thucydides first noted that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must’. Europeans have long sought, often only semi-
consciously or experimentally, to transcend the zero-sum logic of
‘defence’ and to embrace ‘security’ as a positive-sum game (I cannot feel
secure so long as my neighbour feels insecure). Charles de Gaulle, the very
incarnation of France’s resistance against the German occupation,
embraced Franco-German reconciliation as the surest way of breaking the
vicious circle of war and revenge. This was an unparalleled act of states-
manship. The entire story of European integration is one of inchoate and
experimental efforts to transcend the Westphalian iron-law of sovereignty
(see Box 1.1). For the first time in human history, a number of sovereign
states elected to gamble on the semi-conscious proposition that the whole
would prove to be preferable to the sum of the parts. The EU is still fully
engaged in that original ‘work in progress’.
1
2 Security and Defence Policy in the European Union
Box 1.1 The Westphalian System
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years War, and posits
four basic principles:
1. the principle of the sovereignty of nation-states and the associated

fundamental right of political self-determination;
2. the principle of (legal) equality between nation-states;
3. the principle of internationally binding treaties between states;
4. the principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of
other states.
For these reasons, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is crucial in the history
of international relations. It formed the basis for the modern international
system of sovereign nation-states. It marked the beginning of an interna-
tional community of law between states of equal legal standing, guaran-
teeing each other their independence and the right of their peoples to
political self-determination.
For over 40 years (1957–99), the European Union remained an essen-

tially ‘civilian’ actor. By this expression, scholars have indicated the
Union’s focus on the core policy areas of trade and economics, its exis-
tence as an institutions-driven project rooted in international law, and its
total absence from the arena of military ambition or coercive diplomacy
(Whitman 1998; Manners 2005; Telo 2007). These features lay at the
heart of the original EU work in progress. To the extent to which the
member states attempted, from the 1970s onwards, to coordinate their
foreign policy preferences and maximize their coherence, this was essen-
tially done through the relatively informal channels of European
Political Cooperation (EPC – Nuttall 1992) in which consensus-seeking
and lowest common denominator decision-making were the order of the
day. EPC, it should be stressed, took place entirely outside the formal
institutions of the EU and never ventured into the world of security and
defence. The latter, throughout the Cold War, was considered to be the
exclusive domain of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
On this, there was simply no discussion.
Security and Defence Policy: A Special Work in Progress
The security and defence dimension of European integration has recently

emerged alongside and within the broader EU story as a somewhat sepa-
rate work in progress, once again mixing the conscious and the uncon-
scious. Its main chapters have been written since the fall of the Berlin
Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ 3
Wall, but its earliest manifestations predate 1989. In one of the first
published studies of what eventually became CSDP, I noted that: ‘the
story of European integration began with defence’ (Howorth 2000: 1).
This story chronicles the European Union’s constantly frustrated
attempts to forge a coordinated defence capacity, beginning with the
negotiation of the Franco-British Treaty of Dunkirk (1947), via tentative
plans for a Western Union (1947–8), through the Brussels Treaty (1948),
the European Defence Community (EDC 1950–4), the Fouchet Plan
(1962), the relaunch of the Western European Union (WEU 1973). All
these early efforts were couched within the stark context of the Cold War
and constituted largely hypothetical – and ultimately unworkable – alter-
natives to outright dependence on the USA (Howorth and Menon 1997;
Duke 2000; Andréani et al. 2001; Cogan 2001; Quinlan 2001; Duke
2002; Hunter 2002; Salmon and Shepherd 2003; Bonnén 2003;
Dumoulin et al. 2003; Mérand 2008).
That Europe should have sought to maximize its own inherent secu-
rity and defence capabilities seems logical enough. Why then did all the
above attempts fail? At this point, suffice it to say that the most signifi-
cant factor which stymied these early efforts was the contradiction
between the respective positions of France and the UK. For 50 years
(1947–97), Britain and France effectively stalemated any prospect of seri-
ous European cooperation on security issues by their contradictory inter-
pretations of the likely impact in Washington of the advent of serious
European military muscle. Elsewhere, I have called this the Euro-Atlantic
Security Dilemma (Howorth 2005b). London tended to fear that if
Europe demonstrated genuine ability to take care of itself militarily, the
US would revert to isolationism. The British fears were exacerbated by a
belief in London that the Europeans on their own would never be able to
forge a credible autonomous defence (Croft et al. 2001). Paris, on the
other hand, expressed confidence that the US would take even more seri-
ously allies who took themselves seriously. Both approaches were based
on speculation and on normative aspirations rather than on hard strate-
gic analysis. Yet as long as France and Britain, Europe’s only two serious
military powers, remained at loggerheads over the resolution of the
Euro-Atlantic Security Dilemma, impasse reigned. At the height of the
Cold War, the security and defence dimension of the work in progress
failed even to get off the ground.
However, the 1980s began to see the emergence of a trans-European
self-awareness – positing an alternative to the harsh dichotomies of the
superpower nuclear stand-off. Change came, crucially, from the UK.
Even a man as solidly anchored in the Atlanticist tradition as the then
British foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, reacted negatively to
American unilateral sabre-rattling during the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces (INF) crisis of 1980–4 (Nuti 2008), and raised eyebrows within
the international relations community by proposing the establishment of
Box 1.2 The Western European Union
The Western European Union arose from the Treaty of Brussels in 1948 as
a body designed to coordinate the defence policies of the five signatory
countries (UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). It was effec-
tively superseded by NATO in 1949 as a significant defence organization,
but was relaunched when Germany and Italy joined NATO in 1955 as an
oversight organization to monitor compliance (especially German) with
the terms of the Treaty. It became an organization grouping members of
the EU which were also NATO members, but remained relatively dormant
until it was ‘re-activated’ in the 1980s (Deighton 1997). Most of its activ-
ities were effectively phased out in 1999 and transferred to the EU. It
passed into history in June 2011.
a distinctive European pillar within the Atlantic Alliance (Howe

1984–5). Three years later, at The Hague, the recently ‘revitalized’
Western European Union (WEU – see Box 1.2) stated in a landmark
policy document that European integration would never be complete
until it had been ‘extended to the fields of security and defence’ (WEU
1988). Meanwhile, Europe’s peoples had begun manifesting a desire to
move beyond the Cold War (Thompson 1982) and to bring about
transcontinental reconciliation from below (Kaldor 1991). These pre-
1989 manifestations of European awakening all delivered the same
basic message: Europe was beginning to assert its intention to assume
greater control over its own security fate (Howorth 1986/7). Actors may
not have been conscious of the precise outlines of the final destination,
but they were increasingly certain that they wished to make the trip. In
the years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the work in progress finally
began to emerge.
From the very outset, the challenge proved to be huge. The Berlin Wall
fell on 9 November 1989. The prospect of German unification and its
potential implications instantly constituted another huge conscious/
unconscious element in the EU’s overall work in progress. Within
months, the Union was announcing a new project: a Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) (Holland 1997; Regelsberger et al. 1997;
Sjursen and Peterson 1998). This was the price demanded of France by
Germany for acquiescing in the parallel – largely French-driven – project
for a single currency and a European Central Bank. What it implied was
that, whereas previously France had dominated European politics and
Germany had called the economic and monetary shots, henceforth there
was to be greater joint European leadership over both policy areas. For a
brief moment, some believed in the advent of a consensual ‘new world
order’ (Bush and Scowcroft 1998), or even in the ‘end of history’
(Fukuyama 1992). The talk was of peace dividends and the worldwide
triumph of liberal democracy. Such sentiments sat well with the new
paradigm in international relations which the European integration story
had always sought to epitomize: multilateralism and the rule of law. But
the ideal of the new world order was not to last. Within nine months of
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, provok-
ing the first major interstate military confrontation since the end of the
Vietnam War. In late 1990, a coalition force of some 550,000 troops
from 30 countries mustered in Saudi Arabia to drive the Iraqi President
out of Kuwait.
The 1991 Gulf War confronted EU member states with a triple chal-
lenge. First, since the CFSP was barely even in gestation, there was simply
no prospect of devising a common EU approach. Secondly, therefore,
each member state had to decide for itself whether to join the US-led
coalition or to stand on the sidelines. This produced predictable internal
divisions: nine member states participated in the coalition (Belgium,
Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, UK)
although only the UK, France and Italy provided combat forces.
Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg did not take part, although Germany
contributed cash. Third, those that joined the war had to face up to the
reality of their own military inadequacy. All European militaries, with
the partial exception of the UK, realized, in February–March 1991, just
how dependent they were on US military technology, and how ineffective
and indeed inappropriate their own armed forces were for the type of
post-Cold War ‘crisis management’ epitomized by the coalition against
Saddam Hussein. The EU’s task of emerging as a security actor was
already proving to be daunting.
There was worse to come. The CFSP was set in motion at the
Maastricht European Council in December 1991 at precisely the moment
when Yugoslavia was breaking apart. What soon became known as the
‘Wars of Yugoslav Succession’ (1991–9) constituted the first direct secu-
rity challenge facing the infant EU in the post-Cold War world. War
(both interstate and civil), accompanied by concentration camps, ethnic
cleansing and civilian massacres, had once again reared their heads in a
continent convinced it had transcended such barbarity. The violence
which engulfed former Yugoslavia was a wake-up call for the whole of
Europe. War, it seemed, far from disappearing with the fall of the Berlin
Wall, was as present as ever in a world where ethnic tensions, border
disputes and strategic rivalries had, from 1949 to 1989, merely been
suspended in the permafrost of superpower confrontation. The EU, far
from being able to assume the challenge of containing this new threat –
as many assumed it could and should – proved, on the contrary, to be
incapable of action. Yet former Yugoslavia was not just another ‘far-
away country of which we know nothing’, to adapt Neville
Chamberlain’s 1938 phrase about Czechoslovakia. It lay inside the very
boundaries of the European Union, bordered to the South by Greece, to
the north by Austria and to the West by Italy. But European military
forces were poorly configured to intercede or to project power even as far
as the Balkans. They had been designed to stop Soviet divisions on the
North European plain. The United States possessed power projection of
the requisite type, but a variety of US presidents echoed the view
expressed by Secretary of State James Baker: ‘we don’t have a dog in that
fight’ (Baker 1995). Out of this Balkan dilemma was born the first seri-
ous post-Cold War chapter in the EU’s security work in progress.
It was called the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) and
it was intended to allow European forces, in crisis situations of little or
no interest to the US, to borrow American military assets via NATO.
What ESDI implied was that the EU would seek to organize its security
arrangements entirely within the NATO framework, based on
European-only forces, a European-only command chain, and complex
arrangements for borrowing essential assets from the Alliance (in effect,
from the US). The buzz-word for this arrangement was ‘separable but not
separate’, a formula which consciously eschewed any suggestion of
autonomy – the cardinal feature of what later became CSDP (Bensahel
1999). The object of the ESDI exercise was to provide for circumstances
– of which the Bosnian war in the early 1990s was a prime example –
where the EU needed to (and wished to) deploy military force, but in
which the US did not wish to be directly involved. It was a reasonably
sensible idea, but it did not work in practice. There were two principal
reasons for this. The first was that the formal arrangements under which
the EU might be able to borrow crucial military assets from NATO, and
presumably to return them, were felt to be unsatisfactory for both
parties. The second reason was that the identification of the WEU as the
pivotal structure at the heart of such arrangements was an understand-
able but ultimately misguided choice. It was understandable in that the
WEU was the only existing security structure which acted as an interface
between the EU and NATO. But it was misguided in that the WEU was
too weak politically, too insignificant militarily and too unwieldy insti-
tutionally to be able to carry out the major responsibilities which were
being thrust upon it (Howorth and Keeler 2003). The ESDI project
reached its high point at a joint meeting of NATO defence ministers in
Berlin in June 1996, at which the broad outlines of the procedures for
allowing EU access to NATO assets were first discussed. Thereafter,
seemingly interminable allied negotiations around the fine print became
known as ‘Berlin Plus’ and were revisited after the creation of CSDP in
the 2000s (see p. 78).
One other idea was floated in the late 1990s to try to get round the
unfortunate problem, which ESDI did nothing to resolve, that the EU,
despite its embryonic CFSP, simply had no institutional mechanisms to
take political decisions on security or defence policy and precious little
usable military equipment. A proposal was formulated, initially by
France and Germany but eventually sponsored by eight other nations,

which foresaw the integration of the WEU into the EU (EU-WEU 1997).
This was intended to short-circuit the political incapacity of the WEU to
handle broader defence policy issues, but it ultimately proved a half-
measure, designed partly to get around the UK’s continued opposition to
any suggestion that the EU itself should take on a security and defence
remit. The EU-WEU merger plan was tabled at the Amsterdam European
Council in June 1997. One of Tony Blair’s first political acts was to use
the UK veto to kill it off. But Blair was acting on briefings prepared for
the outgoing Conservative government of John Major, his New Labour
government not yet having found the time to address security or defence
policy. When it did get around to thinking about these issues, as we shall
see, major change was about to happen. Meanwhile, storm clouds were
mustering around the EU’s entire periphery, from the Maghreb to
Kosovo, from the Caucasus to the Baltic. The US was preoccupied else-
where. Europe, ultimately, had little choice but to assume responsibility
for the stabilization of its hinterland.
The Saint-Malo Revolution
Around three o’clock in the morning on Friday 4 December 1998, offi-

cials of the French and British governments slipped under the bedroom
doors of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Tony Blair, both
fast asleep in the French seaside town of Saint-Malo, a document which
was to revolutionize both the theory and the practice of European secu-
rity and defence and to give a considerable boost to the work in progress
(Whitman 1999; Shearer 2000; Author’s interviews London and Paris
2000). The document had been written from scratch during the late after-
noon and evening of 3 December by the Political Directors of the UK
Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the French Quai d’Orsay,
respectively Emyr Jones Parry and Gérard Erreira. The Saint-Malo
Declaration (Box 1.3), as the text was to be known, initiated a new polit-
ical process and a substantial new policy area for the European Union.
The shift in UK policy was the most significant. Tony Blair jettisoned
almost five decades of British opposition to the EU’s acquiring political
capacity to develop a security and defence policy. The Saint-Malo
Declaration broke three crucial logjams with respect to EU security.
First, it stated that the European Union should have ‘the capacity for
autonomous action’ in security and defence matters. This was an
unprecedented and crucial breakthrough asserting the EU’s intention –
and indeed right – to formulate policy independently of the US. The
expectation at the time was that whatever policy might evolve would
prove compatible with US preferences, but the assertion of autonomy
constituted a powerful statement of principle. It removed the blockage
Box 1.3 The Saint-Malo Declaration
British–French Summit St-Malo, 3–4 December 1998
JOINT DECLARATION
The Heads of State and Government of France and the United Kingdom
are agreed that:
1. The European Union needs to be in a position to play its full role on the
international stage. This means making a reality of the Treaty of
Amsterdam, which will provide the essential basis for action by the
Union. It will be important to achieve full and rapid implementation of
the Amsterdam provisions on CFSP. This includes the responsibility of
the European Council to decide on the progressive framing of a
common defence policy in the framework of CFSP. The Council must
be able to take decisions on an intergovernmental basis, covering the
whole range of activity set out in Title V of the Treaty of European
Union.
2. To this end, the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action,
backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them,
and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises.
In pursuing our objective, the collective defence commitments to
which member states subscribe (set out in Article 5 of the Washington
Treaty, Article V of the Brussels Treaty) must be maintained. In
strengthening the solidarity between the member states of the European
Union, in order that Europe can make its voice heard in world affairs,
→
which, for decades, had prevented the EU from embarking on security

and defence as a policy area and therefore from evolving and maturing as
a policy actor. Secondly, the Declaration stated that the EU ‘must be
given appropriate structures’ to take decisions and implement them. This
was a call for new institutions which would allow the EU, for the first
time ever, to make policy in the field of security and defence. Thirdly, it
called for ‘credible military forces’ and ‘the means to decide to use them’
– potentially a major revolution in the Union’s military affairs. This new
approach was rapidly named the Common European Security and
Defence Policy (CESDP) and officials went to great lengths to differenti-
ate it from ESDI, stressing the novelty of both political decision-making
and autonomy – the latter applying both to politics and to military capac-
ity. At this stage, CESDP was as much an aspiration as a reality, once
again part of that work in progress which sought to move from the
‘unconscious’ (nobody in 1998–9 really had much idea how the project
would work out in practice) to the ‘conscious’ (some kind of operational
→
while acting in conformity with our respective obligations in NATO,
we are contributing to the vitality of a modernised Atlantic Alliance
which is the foundation of the collective defence of its members.
Europeans will operate within the institutional framework of the
European Union (European Council, General Affairs Council, and
meetings of Defence Ministers).
The reinforcement of European solidarity must take into account the
various positions of European states.
The different situations of countries in relation to NATO must be
respected.
3. In order for the European Union to take decisions and approve military
action where the Alliance as a whole is not engaged, the Union must be
given appropriate structures and a capacity for analysis of situations,
sources of intelligence, and a capability for relevant strategic planning,
without unnecessary duplication, taking account of the existing assets
of the WEU and the evolution of its relations with the EU. In this
regard, the European Union will also need to have recourse to suitable
military means (European capabilities pre-designated within NATO’s
European pillar or national or multinational European means outside
the NATO framework).
4. Europe needs strengthened armed forces that can react rapidly to the
new risks, and which are supported by a strong and competitive
European defence industry and technology.
5. We are determined to unite in our efforts to enable the European Union
to give concrete expression to these objectives.
Source: Rutten (2001: 8–9).
reality if not a definitive end-state). Within the course of its first year of
existence, CESDP underwent an acronymic abbreviation. The word
‘Common’ was discreetly dropped – not as a political statement, but
simply because the initial acronym was considered too long and
unwieldy – and the project became know for the next decade as the
European Security and Defence Policy. ESDP had the further quality of
chiming with CFSP. The work in progress seemed to be coming along
nicely.
This book will chart in some detail the progress of that work through-
out the decade between the important European Council meetings in
Cologne (June 1999) and Helsinki (December 1999) – when some
programmatic flesh was put on the bones of the Saint-Malo Declaration –
and the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009. During
those years, real progress was made both in embedding institutions appro-
priate to decision-making and in cataloguing requirements for military
and civilian deployments. Lisbon marks the next major chapter in our
work in progress in that it was assumed to constitute the final stage of

institutional adjustment (the creation of the two key posts of High-
Representative/Vice President of the Commission (HR-VP); Council
President; and of the European External Action Service – EEAS: see
pp. 62ff) as well as offering concrete measures designed to boost military
capacity. At the same time, the acronym was changed once again, this
time with the word ‘Common’ slipping back in and the word ‘European’
being removed as superfluous. From December 2009, the project has
been called the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Thus, at
different moments over a period of fifteen years, the same basic project
has changed its name from ESDI to CESDP to ESDP to CSDP. For the
sake of simplicity, I shall refer throughout the book to CSDP (except
when stressing its difference with ESDI or quoting others). Considerable
thought was devoted, towards the end of the 2000s, to defining the
requirements for CSDP to become a consequential project in the interna-
tional arena (Vasconcelos 2009; Grevi et al. 2009). Two main axes
emerged. On the one hand, it was argued that far greater efforts were
required in the area of military capacity (European Council 2008;
Witney 2008; Giegerich & Nicoll 2008; Giegerich 2010; Biscop et al.
2011). On the other hand, it was felt that the EU needed to move beyond
a reactive approach to its strategic environment and develop proactive
strategic vision (European Council 2008a; Biscop et al. 2009; Howorth
2010). However, in the few years since the entry into force of the Lisbon
Treaty, little progress has been made in either of these areas. This book
will end with CSDP still very much ‘in progress’ in that, at the time of
writing (autumn 2013), the fruits of Lisbon were proving difficult to
discern. The performance of the two top post-holders, particularly that
of the HR-VP, was generally considered to have been less than stellar
(Howorth 2011), the EEAS had yet to make its mark and the EU, despite
20 years of preparation after the Balkan fiasco of 1991, had once again
proved incapable of action in the crisis over Libya. Some analysts began
to feel that the work in progress was already over (Armellini 2011).
The 2011 Libyan imbroglio offered yet another reminder that any
hypothetical EU foreign and security policy (CFSP and/or CSDP) neither
challenges nor supplants whatever national foreign and security policies
the member states might continue to favour. That said, one has to ask
how many of the 28 member states can be considered to possess distinc-
tive national foreign and security policies whose reach extends much
beyond their own immediate borders. Only a minority wield significant
influence beyond that range. France and the UK have global interests and
outreach; Portugal and Spain exercise a measure of impact in Latin
America and parts of Africa; Germany has special relations with Eastern
Europe, with Russia, and increasingly with the emerging powers Brazil,
India and China. For most of the smaller member states, however, it is no
secret that their diplomatic clout – hardly impressive on its own – can be
maximized through association with the EU (Thorhallsson and Wivel

2006; Rickli 2008). Moreover, it should be stressed that 25 years ago
there was no EU foreign or (still less) security policy worthy of the name.
Today the EU is – albeit slowly and painfully – generating a series of
commonalities in its approach to the outside world which are distinct
from (though not necessarily opposed to) the policies of the individual
member states. CFSP and CSDP exist. As the EU has grown in interna-
tional stature, the interests of its member states have converged
(Bickerton 2011; Cross 2011). There are growing commonalities in the
EU’s approach to its neighbourhood, to the Balkans, to the
Mediterranean, to Africa, and to the Middle East. Naturally, the
President of France will continue to believe (despite evidence to the
contrary) that he (or she) alone has real influence in Lebanon and even
Syria (Barber 2009); the UK Prime Minister will see British influence in
the Indian sub-continent as more significant than any hypothetical
collective EU influence; and Germany is beginning to learn that its
market potential in the emerging powers is far greater than its current
commercial interests in Europe (Guérot 2010). But EU commonalities do
not evaporate before these assertions of national interest. On the
contrary, they continue to develop, driven by the process of
Europeanization (Gross 2009). In particular, a distinctive EU approach
to international crisis management has picked up both steam and cohe-
sion over the past ten years. This also includes an increasingly common
approach to armaments procurement and even to defence spending. It is
these commonalities to which I refer when focusing on CSDP as a work
in progress.
The decade after Saint-Malo was marked by an uninterrupted succes-
sion of major international developments, forming a highly turbulent
context within which the infant CSDP project was obliged to emerge.
Significantly, most of these developments tended to enhance divisions
either between the EU and the US or among the EU member states – or
both. These events included: the 1999 Kosovo crisis and NATO military
operations in former Yugoslavia; growing tensions between the EU and
the US over missile defence schemes; the 2000 election of President
George W. Bush and the advent of a new, less Euro-friendly administra-
tion in Washington; the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington, the subsequent war in Afghanistan and the ensu-
ing ‘global war on terrorism’ (GWOT); the massive increase in US mili-
tary capacity outlined in the October 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review
(QDR) followed by the September 2002 US National Security Strategy
with its emphasis on the new doctrine of pre-emptive warfare; the escalat-
ing crisis between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, giving rise to new
wars in 2006 and 2009; a radical renewal of NATO’s membership, struc-
tures and remit, including, in 2009, the return of France; the 2002 inter-
national crisis over Iraq, leading to the 2003 war and US occupation, and
the concomitant crises of United Nations legitimacy and European unity;

the 2003 Convention on the Future of Europe which, after many
setbacks, eventually led to the 2009 Lisbon Treaty; nuclear alerts in
North Korea and Iran, with the EU assuming initial diplomatic responsi-
bility for negotiations with the latter; the 2003 launch of the first ever
European Union military missions and the drafting of the EU’s first secu-
rity strategy document; the escalating NATO mission in Afghanistan; the
Russia–Georgia War in 2008; the global financial meltdown and the rise
of the emerging powers; and finally, as 2010 turned into 2011, the ‘Arab
Spring’. Rarely can a single decade have been marked by so many porten-
tous events. To say that the circumstances surrounding CSDP’s birth and
infancy were unpropitious would be an understatement. Yet the work in
progress continued to advance. To understand why, we need to frame it
within the broader context of transatlantic relations.
While, throughout the 1990s, the EU sought to discover the necessary
and possible framework for its security policy ambitions, most member
states continued in practice to look for their security and defence require-
ments to NATO. In 1990, there were 12 EU member states, of which
only one, Ireland, was not also a member of NATO. In 1995, with the
accession of Sweden, Finland and Austria, the increasingly inappropri-
ately labelled ‘neutrals’ grew to four out of a total EU membership of 15.
In 2004, however, with the advent of the predominantly Central and
Eastern European accession states, the proportion of NATO members in
the EU rose once again, to 19 out of 25 (76%). That ratio changed again
in 2007 when the EU embraced 21 NATO member states out of 27
(78%) (Box 1.4). If around 80% of EU member states were reliant for
their defence on NATO, why was there any necessity for the EU to
embark on its own autonomous security project? This is a question we
shall examine more fully in Chapter 4. It goes to the heart of the contro-
versy surrounding the new EU policy area. Why, many critics of CSDP
later asked, did the Union feel the need to go beyond the NATO-friendly
framework of ESDI and to develop the autonomous capabilities required
by CSDP (Sangiovanni 2003; Menon 2003)? We saw above that a major
reason is that ESDI did not really work.
A further reason is that NATO itself, while undergoing a constant
process of self re-invention from 1989 onwards (Yost 1998; Rynning
2005; Rupp 2006), failed ultimately to convince its major partners – on
either side of the Atlantic – that it remained the key Atlantic security
instrument for the rapidly unfolding new world in which powers were
finding themselves required to act. Outgoing Defence Secretary Robert
Gates’s stark warning, in June 2011, that NATO faced a ‘dim if not
dismal future’ was only the most recent of a long line of similar injunc-
tions (Gates 2011). The emergence of CSDP was, to this extent, in large
part the result of the absence of suitable existing alternatives in a world
that was changing rapidly from year to year. However, it is important to
Box 1.4 EU and NATO memberships, 1994–2013
Date EU and NATO Non-NATO EU %* Non-EU NATO
1994 UK, France, Germany, Ireland 92 Turkey, Norway,

Italy, Spain, Portugal, Iceland
Belgium, Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Denmark,
Greece
1995 UK, France, Germany Ireland, Austria, 73 Turkey, Norway,
Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden Iceland (joined in
Belgium, Netherlands, 1999 by Czech,
Luxembourg, Denmark, Hungary, Poland)
Greece
2004 Above, plus: Ireland, Austria, 76 Turkey, Norway,
Poland, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Bulgaria,
Czech, Latvia, Malta, Cyprus Romania
Lithuania, Estonia,
Slovenia, Slovakia
2007 Above, plus Bulgaria, Ireland, Austria, 78 Turkey, Norway,
Romania Finland, Sweden, Iceland,
Malta, Cyprus
2008 Above Above 78 Above plus
Albania and
Croatia
2013 Above plus Croatia Above 81 Above plus
Albania
* Percentage of EU member states which are also members of NATO.
understand that, unlike NATO, CSDP is not a response to a sense of exis-

tential threat hanging over Europe. It does not involve the creation of a
potentially offensive or aggressive armed force poised to engage in expe-
ditionary warfare or to enter into conflict with other powers. It is not
(yet) a project geared to addressing the issue of collective defence as such.
CSDP represents the generation of a range of instruments appropriate to
the task of crisis management, or in Alexander Mattelaer’s phrase, ‘crisis
response operations’ (Mattelaer 2013). Such operations might involve
the deployment of diplomatic or economic instruments, the dispatch of
police or administrative agents, or the deployment of combat troops.
Most often, it involves the mobilization of all of these instruments. CSDP
is therefore a policy area akin to risk management on a regional scale. To
that extent, it offers a new paradigm in international relations, compara-
ble only in scope and range to the United Nations as a peacekeeping
body, but potentially more effective than the UN in that it represents the
collective will of its own member states who have agreed to bestow upon
themselves the necessary instruments to enforce that will. The deepening
financial crisis in 2010–11 threw a temporary budgetary question mark.
Controversial Origins
The development of CFSP has not been without controversy. Many, both
in Europe and in the United States, initially deplored its advent as a step
in the wrong direction for an EU which had hitherto steered resolutely
clear of any involvement in military affairs. Many have seen in this
emerging force a threat to NATO and to the Atlantic Alliance.
Traditional theorists of international relations, for whom only states or
alliances of states can engage in security and defence activities, have
scratched their heads in disbelief as this new actor, which is clearly less
than a state but more than an alliance, has taken the stage. Others have
applauded the EU’s initiative. The EU, having already emerged as a
major international actor in the fields of trade, economics, competition
and other policy areas, was, in this more positive view, only taking the
logical next step by assuming responsibility for regional (and to a certain
extent global) stability and security. Some have hoped that these new
responsibilities will hasten the moment when the EU will be forced to
transform itself into a supranational federal structure. Others have
feared and denounced precisely such an outcome. More significantly,
probably a majority of European citizens, and an even larger majority of
people elsewhere in the world, have never even heard of CSDP (my hair-
dresser in Paris this morning was utterly astonished to learn of its exis-
tence!).
Academics, policy analysts and practitioners have pored over every
detail of CSDP’s existence and activities in an attempt to understand
precisely what it is and where it is heading. Academics in particular –
and, through them, an entire generation of students – have been fasci-
nated by what is widely seen as a relatively dramatic development. The
literature on CSDP is extremely voluminous considering the short lifes-
pan of the project. The 33 pages of Bibliography accompanying the first
edition of this book have doubled in the five years since it was published.
Robert Cooper, the then Director General for External and Politico-
Military Affairs in the European Council, remarked to me in May 2006
that his Brussels staff of 200 ‘effectively do CSDP’, whereas there were
many thousands of academics and students all over the world who
engaged in study of the subject. Those numbers have swollen consider-
ably since then. The questions asked by academics generally differ from
those posed by policy analysts and yet again from those of interest to
practitioners. Where academics agonize over theory, analysts tend to
delve into political and strategic implications and practitioners deal with
planning and organizational realities. This book will attempt to bring in

insights from all three of these communities, but it will lean more
towards the empirical, political and strategic side of the debate than
towards the pure theory. A theory chapter at the end (Chapter 6) will
attempt to do justice to the growing mass of academic literature address-
ing purely theoretical questions about CSDP.
The Saint Malo Declaration unleashed a furious debate both within
and outside Europe. The relatively dramatic – and certainly unprece-
dented – prospect of the Union emerging as a military actor in its own
right gave rise immediately to major controversies. What did this imply
for the Union’s deeply-etched ethos as a civilian actor relying on
normative and transformative power (rather than on hard power) to
achieve its objectives both internally and externally? What were the
implications for European integration of the prospect of pooling
resources in this first and last bastion of state sovereignty? How would
such a decision impact on NATO, on the Alliance and on the United
States? Could the Franco-British couple, so central to the launch of
CSDP, remain united despite their very real differences over its deeper
significance? Above all, where would it all lead? What was the finalité
behind CSDP? The debates on all these issues were immediately
engaged. They are still ongoing and will remain ongoing for years to
come. There are, as yet, no definitive answers to any of the questions
just posed. But these questions about ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ – important
though they are – have clouded our understanding of the key question:
‘why?’. Chou En Lai famously quipped in 1956, in answer to a ques-
tion about the historical consequences of the French Revolution: ‘it’s
too soon to say’. Fifteen years after Saint-Malo, it is still too soon to
speculate about its long-term consequences. But it is not impossible
clearly to understand how the work in progress came into being, to
evaluate its fundamental drivers.
Misleading Allegations
In order to begin to answer the question of CSDP’s fundamental

origins, it is first necessary to dispel a number of major misunderstand-
ings about motivations and to make it clear where CSDP is not coming
from. Many of the project’s early critics succeeded in confusing its true
sources and motivations by attributing to it false origins or intentions.
Four basic charges have been levelled, all of which are misguided.
CSDP is not a mistake and it is not irrelevant. It is not an attempt to
create a European army. It is not designed to undermine or weaken
NATO. And it is not intended to rival the US or to engage in ‘balanc-
ing’ against US power. The following sections will address these red
herrings sequentially.
Neither a Mistake nor Irrelevant

One puzzle which many have pondered is: why did Tony Blair sign off on
the Saint-Malo Declaration and apparently jettison 50 years of consis-
tent UK opposition to any regional security role for the EU? Many polit-
ical opponents who have sought reasons to denounce CSDP have
suggested that the whole project was a mistake, entered into for the
wrong reasons by a naïve and inexperienced Prime Minister who did not
realize what he was doing. This type of argument is often voiced in
British or other European Euro-sceptic circles by those who deplore the
implicit departure from a long history of Anglo-Atlantic security priori-
ties. A former UK Conservative Defence and Foreign Affairs ‘shadow’
minister argued that it was ‘very clear’ to him that CSDP was designed ‘to
get the government some good European coverage for not joining the
single currency a month later. And that was what it was all about (my
stress)’ (New Europe 2001: 65). The idea that CSDP arose primarily
from a Blair quest to secure a European role for the UK is widely encoun-
tered in the mainstream literature on the topic (Hunter 2002: 29). Put in
these terms, the proposition is misleading. This is not to dismiss the
rather different proposition that Britain in general and Tony Blair in
particular were, in the early days of the New Labour government, casting
around for some sort of European role, and that defence offered itself as
an obvious candidate. That is undoubtedly true. But one should reject the
simplistic notion, often advanced in Euro-sceptic circles, that this was the
fundamental driver behind the project – and that the Prime Minister did
not understand the consequences of what he was doing. Blair’s European
aspirations undoubtedly facilitated a development which, as we shall see
shortly, arose from the movement of history’s tectonic plates. But they
did not generate that development. It cannot, deep down, be attributed
primarily to Blair’s search for a European role. This is a very important
distinction.
Another allegation which is even further from reality comes from
those not infrequent early US commentators who, in one way or another,
dismissed the project as irrelevant, usually on the grounds that it was
simply never going to work – ‘working’ often being defined in terms of
US military criteria (Hamilton 2002: 150). For years, Washington offi-
cials tended to deride CSDP as hardly worthy of their attention: ‘an exer-
cise in photocopying machines’ as one US official called it (Giegerich
2005: 75). At a seminar on Europe’s CFSP in Washington, DC in
September 2003, I was taken aback when a senior US official introduced
the event with a request: ‘And please, let’s not waste time talking about
CSDP! It used to be interesting. Then it became irritating. Today we see
it as irrelevant’. Another example of this attitude is provided by
Washington analyst de Jonge Oudraat who, in a concluding remark to a
section of her study on CSDP headed (forthrightly) ‘An Irrelevant
Irritant’ argued that: ‘The lack of strong support from the major
European powers for CSDP points to its irrelevance. European govern-
ments should … remove a prominent irritant in US–European security
relations’ (de Jonge Oudraat 2002: 23). This argument is regularly
dusted off and recycled during crises such as the Iraq imbroglio of 2003
or the Libyan crisis of 2011. Several analysts in spring 2011 rushed to the
conclusion that CSDP had been killed off in the deserts of Libya
(Armellini 2011; Galbreath 2011). Quite apart from the inconvenient
detail that the ‘major European powers’ have in fact all been broadly
supportive of CSDP, this line of criticism has missed the point altogether.
CSDP may well irritate its critics, but to dismiss it as ‘irrelevant’ or
‘unworkable’ is to fail even to begin to understand its origins.
Not a ‘European Army’

The second red-herring stems from the widely hawked suggestion that
the real motivation, often attributed to closet federalists, was the desire
to create a ‘European army’ – usually referred to in the popular press as
the ‘Euro-Army’ (Evans-Pritchard and Jones 2002). Some critics of CSDP
assume that the project in some way amounts to the transposition, to the
European level, of the role and function of traditional national armies
with their responsibilities for national, territorial defence – in other
words that the project is geared to ‘defending’ the EU space against an
existential external threat (Cumming 2002). For this reason, it is often
asserted that it will not work because no Italian, or Spaniard, or Slovene
or Pole will be prepared to ‘die for Europe’ (Assinder 2000). The absence
of European identity, in this view, is the Achilles heel of CSDP. Only
national armies, it is argued, actually work. The ‘Euro-army’ charge,
levelled against CSDP quite regularly in the early 2000s, refuses to go
away. Leading British Euro-sceptics, including (particularly when he was
in opposition) David Cameron’s first Defence Secretary, Liam Fox,
opposed further developments in CSDP out of conviction that this would
create ‘the foundations for a European army’ (O’Donnell 2011: 426).
There are three major flaws in this line of argument. The first is that
there has never been any suggestion that national military assets should
be detached from national command and permanently reassigned to a
European command. There has never been any question of creating a
‘standing European army’, or of forging common European ownership
of weapons systems or other assets, or (to date) any serious thought of
developing a European defence budget. Europe does not have a single
unified political executive. Therefore a ‘European army’ in the strict
sense of the term is logically inconceivable and it is unwise to use the
expression lightly (Salmon and Shepherd 2003). Secondly, the ‘Euro-
Army’ thesis fails to recognize that, in the presence of regional crises,
such as the wars in the Balkans, which require management, CSDP
amounts not to a traditional army based on citizen conscripts but to a

professional fire-fighting force acting in the interests of the Union as a
whole or even of the ‘international community’. No ‘citizen’ is being
asked to ‘die for Europe’. Professional soldiers – volunteers one and all –
are being asked to do a necessary and sometimes dangerous job. The
third flaw in this argument is that there is not a shred of doctrinal
evidence to support it. Every official EU statement about European
defence (including a consistent line from France) stresses that the territo-
rial defence of the European landmass (to the extent to which it faces an
existential threat) remains the sole responsibility of NATO. The ‘Euro-
Army’ argument is usually either emotive or ideological and designed to
evoke strong visceral reactions (Marsden 2000).
However, there can be no denying that what is being created is a
European armed force, for use on behalf of the European Union and the
wider international community. Occasionally, government leaders
favourable to the project will, in an unguarded moment, refer to it as a
‘European army’ (Cienski and Wagstyl 2006; Merkel 2007; Oakshott
2008). Technically, of course, they are incorrect to do so. European mili-
tary forces are increasingly deployable, but have several potential uses.
As a CSDP force, they can operate under a European commander and a
European flag with exclusively European military assets. In other guises,
they can be assigned to NATO, to the UN, or even to an ad hoc coalition
of the willing. The key point, however, is that the CSDP process is
destined to remain strictly voluntary, consensual and intergovernmental
for as long as the Union remains a body which falls short of fully fledged
federalism. Most of the discussion of a ‘Euro-Army’ is little more than
politically motivated chatter.
Not Designed to Undermine NATO

The third major charge that has been levelled against CSDP is that it is in
some devious way designed to undermine or weaken NATO (Weston
2001; Menon 2003; Cimbalo 2004; Fox 2008; Amory 2008; van Orden
2011). This leitmotif, which consistently points the finger at France, has
run continuously since 1998. It has never been satisfactorily refuted and
has never really gone away. For hard-line Atlanticists in every country,
the emergence of CSDP has always been assumed to be prejudicial to
NATO. The idea was forcefully articulated by Strobe Talbott in his
premonitory speech on the new developments at Chatham House,
London in October 1999:
We would not want to see an ESDI that comes into being first within
NATO but then grows out of NATO and finally grows away from
NATO, since that would lead to an ESDI that initially duplicates
NATO but that could eventually compete with NATO. (Talbott 1999)
When Tony Blair was UK prime minister, he devoted himself tirelessly to

countering this allegation. Virtually his every early utterance on CSDP
contained (at some point) the defensive and reassuring mantra that the
project remained ‘entirely consistent’ with NATO. The suspicion that
France, ever the ‘reluctant ally’, is somehow the éminence grise behind
this ‘anti-NATO’ project has fuelled the notion that CSDP is a scheme
designed in Paris to weaken the Alliance. This was a suspicion that was
widespread in Central and Eastern Europe at the time the former
Warsaw Pact member states joined the Alliance and, later, the EU
(Jacoby 2006). The problem with this argument is reality. The reality is
that, while France has never, at any time, sought to weaken the Alliance
(even at the height of Gaullism – Vaïsse et al. 1996), as early as the early
1990s Paris was keen to re-integrate NATO’s structures (Grant 1996).
Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac and other French leaders consistently
stated that France considered NATO a vitally important ally (Villepin
2003a: 345–6). And in 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy grasped the nettle and
returned France (almost) fully to the NATO fold. What the ‘France is
anti-NATO’ argument failed to appreciate was the totally changed
circumstances of France’s relationship with the Alliance in the interven-
tionist climate of the post-Cold War world. This became self-evident in
Bosnia and has remained true ever since (Howorth 2010; Pesme 2010).
Intervention in Bosnia meant that membership of NATO’s alliance over-
sight committees, especially the Military Committee, far from being a
constraint on French action (as had been considered to be the case during
the inactivity of the Cold War) had become a strategic and political
necessity (Brenner and Parmentier 2002: 42). France has played a key
role in all NATO’s military operations since the end of the Cold War. It
was, ironically, Jacques Chirac – the pseudo-Gaullist president – who
persuaded Bill Clinton actually to deploy NATO’s military assets, for the
first time in its history, to end the Bosnian conflict (Holbrooke 1998: 67,
330). It was France who provided the lion’s share of NATO’s European
military assets during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. France has, for the
last ten years, provided at any given moment either the largest or the
second largest contingent of NATO peacekeeping forces. Indeed, there
are those who suggest that far from France promoting CSDP in order to
undermine NATO, Sarkozy’s return to NATO in 2009 might spell the
‘death knell for ESDP’ (Irondelle and Mérand 2010).
Not ‘Balancing’ Against the USA

The final accusation that needs to be laid to rest is also the most serious
and potentially the most explosive. ‘The Euro Army stands on the thresh-
old of becoming the greatest combat force of modern times. The EU has
every intention of being the economic and military rival of the United
States’, argued one polemicist (Cumming 2002). Had such motivations
been alleged only by the whackier websites, the charge could be

dismissed as unworthy of comment. However, both US officials and US
academics have feared something similar. Three days after Saint-Malo,
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted on ruling out what
became known as the ‘three-Ds’: decoupling, duplication and discrimi-
nation (Albright 1998). The US could live with the consequences of
Saint-Malo, she implied, as long as the two sides of the Atlantic
remained allies, as long as the Europeans did not duplicate capacity
already existing in NATO and as long as non-EU allies such as Turkey
and Norway were not discriminated against in the new arrangement.
This initial reaction reflected concern in Washington that CSDP might
aim to rival the US in various ways. Robert Hunter notes that the ‘risk’
of the EU coming to rival the US ‘should have appeared to be minimal.
But as a political matter, it gained greater currency in Washington and,
rightly or wrongly, has been a source of concern ever since’ (Hunter
2002: 35).
US concerns about motivations concerning competition and rivalry
never completely disappeared. They resurfaced with a vengeance at the
time of the Quadripartite summit between France, Germany, Belgium
and Luxembourg on 29 April 2003 at the height of the Iraq War (Black
2003; Le Monde 2003). Some critics indulged in straw-man tactics, ridi-
culing the alleged European ‘pipe-dream’ of ‘rivalling the United States’
(Moravcsik 2003), but others saw it as a genuine threat to American
strategic interests (Bremner 2003; Geyde and Evans Pritchard 2003).
While US officials and journalists worried about empirical military
rivalry, US scholars and academics worried about ‘balancing’. Balance
of power theory is a central pillar of structural realism – the dominant
school in the American IR community (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer
2001). Throughout history, it is argued, whenever a great power rises
significantly above its rivals, second-tier states will try to ‘balance’
against it, either by developing their internal resources or by forming
balancing coalitions. Stephen Walt has outlined the central puzzle – for
structural realists – of the contemporary period: that ‘power in the inter-
national system is about as unbalanced as it has ever been, yet balancing
tendencies have been comparatively mild’ (Walt 2005: 123). Since the
end of the Cold War, under the administrations of Presidents George H.
W. Bush (1988–92) and then Bill Clinton (1992–2000), the US – the
world’s only ‘hyperpower’ – appeared to have been exempt from balanc-
ing efforts on the part of second-tier powers. This posed a real theoreti-
cal dilemma for structural realism. However, under the Presidency of
George W. Bush, theorists from this school began detecting various
forms of balancing, one of which was alleged to be CSDP. Since it was
difficult to portray this as classical ‘hard’ balancing, the notion of ‘soft
balancing’ was devised to categorize looser types of resistance to the
hegemonic power (see Chapter 4).
Anand Menon and I have put forward a detailed case to refute these
notions of balancing (Howorth and Menon 2009). We argue that US
analysts have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of CSDP – which
is highly unlikely ever to emerge as a huge war-fighting machine akin to
the US military. Moreover, the thesis put forward by the ‘balancers’
contains a number of methodological flaws and theoretical ambiguities,
largely deriving from their advancing too permissive a definition of
balancing, which in effect strips it of all substantial meaning. They also
fail adequately to deal with the problem of intentionality (the notion that
the primary intention of CSDP is to rival America simply does not hold
water). There is also the problem that several US scholars attribute
balancing behaviour to one or other of the EU member states, failing to
recognize that CSDP is a very different phenomenon. There is absolutely
no evidence of ‘balancing motives’ among the EU’s member states. Nor
is there any evidence of ‘balancing outcomes’: the most common US
complaint in the last decade has been precisely the opposite – that EU
member states are doing nowhere near enough to become consequential
players on the global stage. But finally, the institutional processes which
lead to CSDP projects are so convoluted that, even if an EU member state
wished to use the EU as a balancing mechanism, this objective would
immediately run up against the complex institutional reality which is the
EU at 28. We shall explore this reality further in the following chapter.
Those US scholars who detect in the recent policies of the EU – and
particularly in the CSDP project – evidence of balancing have lined up a
series of hypotheses concerning the eventual effect of those policies: that
the EU may acquire greater influence in Washington (Art 2005), that
Europeans may be in a better situation to influence the agenda in NATO,
and eventually take positions at odds with US preferences (Walt 2005),
that they might even ‘decamp’ or ‘cause some mischief’ (Posen 2004).
Some or even all of these predictions may in fact prove – over time – to be
correct. However, in terms of understanding what CSDP is and where it
comes from, it must be stressed that all such considerations are outcomes
– and only potential outcomes – of the project, rather than drivers. They
are hypothetical consequences rather than motivating forces or inten-
tions. They are not what the project is about. We can now turn to an
assessment of the real fundamental drivers behind this project.
The Fundamental Drivers behind CSDP
There are four fundamental reasons why the European Union became a
security actor. First, CSDP is the logical offspring of exogenous forces
deriving from the end of the Cold War – most notably the lessening
strategic importance of Europe for the USA and, as a consequence, the
diminishing political and military significance attached by Washington
to European security (Kopstein and Steinmo 2008; Anderson et al. 2008;

Lundestad 2008). In 2004, the US Global Posture Review exercise
completed the logic of this process by drastically reducing the US military
presence in Europe (IISS 2004). The most salient consequence of that
shift would be eventual US military disengagement from the old conti-
nent. As long as the Cold War persisted, Europe was, de facto, at the
heart of global geostrategic reality. European security was the stake in
the global confrontation between ‘East’ and ‘West’. All Europeans were
concerned to ensure ongoing US commitment to that security. But US
commitment inevitably implied US leadership. And although the West
Europeans shared much more of the burden than the US was prepared to
recognize (Sharp 1990), it was US leadership which defined the relation-
ship. Hegemony mirrored by dependence. This was an unnatural – even
aberrant – situation. The quest for European security ‘autonomy’ is an
entirely logical consequence of the end of the Cold War. Moreover, the
US had long been urging some form of it upon the Europeans.
Persistently throughout the Cold War, and intensively thereafter, the US
admonished the Europeans to take greater responsibility for their own
regional security (Sloan 2003; Gates 2011). Why should the US taxpayer
continue to underwrite the security of a political entity with a larger
population and GDP than that of the US – particularly since Europe was
no longer under any apparent ‘threat’?
While the French had long been urging greater autonomy on their
European partners, it required Tony Blair to cross a Rubicon for this to
happen. His crossing was assisted by two major factors. The first was
that, by late 1997, the new UK government was beginning to receive a
very clear message from Washington. Far from a European security
capacity being perceived in DC as prejudicial to the Alliance (as London
had believed for 50 years), it was now being openly touted as the very
salvation of the Alliance: unless Europe got its security act together,
NATO was dead in the water. The author was told by a senior FCO offi-
cial in 2000 that, had the UK not been convinced that the Alliance was in
serious trouble, ‘we would not have touched Saint Malo with a barge-
pole’ (Howorth 2004: 220–2). The second factor urging Blair to embrace
CSDP was the rising storm cloud in Kosovo.
A second and rather more normative driver behind CSDP also
followed from the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ‘new world order’ called
into being by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 was one in which
some of the old rules of the Westphalian system (see Box 1.1) came to be
questioned. The ‘international community’, which a reinvigorated
United Nations appeared to conjure into existence, began to think in
terms of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states in order to
safeguard human rights and right humanitarian wrongs (Wheeler 2000).
This was to happen regularly throughout the 1990s – in Kurdistan
(1991), Bosnia (1992), Somalia (1993), Sierra Leone (1997), Kosovo
(1999), East Timor (1999). In Chicago, in April 1999, at the height of the
Kosovo crisis of that spring, Tony Blair attempted for the first time to lay
down guidelines for what he called ‘the doctrine of international commu-
nity’:
We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international

community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more
than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to
a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that
we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction this doctrine
takes us in each field of international endeavour. (Blair 1999)
This amounted, in effect, to re-drafting, for the twenty-first century,

some of the oldest precepts of Thomas Aquinas’s ‘just war’ theory
(Walzer 2000). The main thrust was to generate a politico-intellectual
rationalization for transcending the state sovereignty which underlay the
Westphalian system. The concept of ‘crisis management’ entered the IR
lexicon (Lindborg 2002). This consideration meshed easily with the
multilateral internationalism which typified most aspects of the EU’s
activities. After 40 years of institutional bargaining, the EU had become
genetically incapable of not thinking in such terms. The desire to write
the new normative rules of the game – especially the international legal,
institutional, regulatory, interventionist and ethical – rules came natu-
rally to Europeans who believed that they had finally put their own
unruly house in order.
The third fundamental driver behind the birth of CSDP was, of course,
the reappearance of military conflict on the continent of Europe. In June
1991, Serbia and Slovenia fought a brief war, followed by a much longer
war between Serbia and Croatia. In 1992, conflict broke out in Bosnia
Herzegovina which was to engulf the region for the next three years.
When, in response to these events, the Luxembourg foreign minister
Jacques Poos, temporarily chairing the EU’s Council of Ministers,
famously declared, ‘It is the hour of Europe, not of America’, few
Europeans suspected the extent to which those words would acquire an
aura of historical ridicule. Most assumed that the nations of Western
Europe, which collectively were then spending almost $230 billion on
‘defence’, would rapidly put an end to this little local crisis. The fact that
they did not – and could not – goes directly to the heart of Europe’s secu-
rity dilemma (Glaurdic 2011). It would require a major shift in security
thinking, military procurement and normative approaches for the EU to
be able to take on the challenge which actually presented itself. The crises
in the Balkans, which dominated the entire decade of the 1990s, were to
create a powerful stimulus behind CSDP. Appropriately, the Balkans
proved, from 2003 onwards, to be the theatre of the EU’s first incursions
into military operations under an EU flag.
At the same time, these three developments, all responses to exoge-

nous factors, meshed neatly with the endogenous dynamics of the
European Union itself as it ceased to be ‘just’ a market and aspired to
emerge as a political actor on the world stage (McCormick 2006). This is
the fourth underlying driver behind CSDP. Some have argued that the EU
can never be a fully-fledged international actor unless and until it
acquires credible military capacity (Cooper 2003; Freedman 2004;
Salmon 2005). This is a significant claim which we shall examine in more
detail in Chapter 3. It is not immediately clear how or why the acquisi-
tion of military ‘teeth’ enhances the EU’s credibility or viability as an
international actor whose influence had previously derived from softer,
transformative methods of exerting influence – such as its own attrac-
tiveness as a model – particularly for potential members (Vachudova
2005) – or its use of financial and commercial levers (Youngs 2004;
Leonard 2005). But the correlation between political unity and strength
and the development of military instruments seems, on the surface, logi-
cal enough – particularly in the context of a revival of turbulence on the
European continent. The development of a modicum of military capacity
was probably an inevitable concomitant of that political ambition and
that historical context.
One final (indirect) stimulus came from another indigenous source:
the European defence industry. Throughout the Cold War, many
European nation-states had retained a number of defence-related compa-
nies producing everything from rifles to fighter aircraft. In most cases,
these companies depended for their very existence on orders from their
own national government which often sought to bring down unit costs to
an affordable level through an aggressive export policy. France had
developed this approach into an art form (Kolodziej 1987). However, as
the Cold War ended and defence spending around the world plummeted,
this demand-led approach became doomed. The United States proceeded
rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the restructuring and ratio-
nalization of its many defence industries. By the mid-1990s, there were
only a handful of major players left (Gansler 2011). The EU, if it was to
retain anything approaching a cutting industrial edge, if it was to avoid
being relegated to the status of sub-contractor to US companies, and if it
was to safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs, had little alternative but
to rationalize as well (Schmitt 2000). The Saint-Malo Declaration speaks
explicitly of the need to forge ‘a strong and competitive European
defence industry and technology’ (Rutten 2001: 9). From 1996 to 2003,
the EU reduced its own defence industrial base to four major players,
capable of competing on reasonably level terms with their US counter-
parts. The forging of a transnational European defence industry has also
– albeit painfully slowly – had a major impact on the course of CSDP
(Schmitt 2003, 2003a).
Public Policy and Public Opinion
In its brief career, CSDP has had to cope with a large number of false
accusations, misunderstandings, straw men and crossed wires. The real-
ity is that CSDP as an embryonic actor disturbs and offends as many
people as it satisfies or reassures. It disturbs those who believe that
American hegemony is both an entitlement and a necessary underpinning
of lasting stability, and who feel that the proper place for any EU military
capacity is as an adjunct to US capacity and leadership rather than as an
autonomous actor. It also offends many (predominantly in Europe) who
are basically opposed to the entire project for European integration and
who see the military dimension of it as particularly alarming. Those who
are uncomfortable with the integrationist dynamics of the European
Union also fear that the ‘pooling’ of that first and last bastion of national
sovereignty (security and defence) will, ipso facto, lead to ever more
intensive federalism within the EU. Many of these critics have claimed
the ‘impossibility’ of reaching political and strategic consensus among 28
sovereign nation-states. Finally, the CSDP project worries numbers of
‘ordinary’ citizens across the Union who perceive in it an ill-thought-out
scheme, dreamed up by elites with no consultation and no – or inade-
quate – popular explanation.
It is hardly surprising that national leaders and statesmen, elected by
their national constituencies to defend and promote the national interest,
should find it hard to construct a discourse which explains to those same
citizens why cooperation in the field of European security should be in
everybody’s interest. For this is tantamount to recognizing limitations on
their own power and influence. It amounts to recognition that nation-
states are no longer the only actors in the international system and that the
rules of the game have changed. Most national leaders, on the contrary,
have a vested interest in pretending that the rules of the game remain the
same (Schmidt 2006). This constitutes a problem for CSDP, which has
been presented to different national publics in the various member states in
very different ways. In France, it has been put across as enhancing and
‘multiplying’ French power and influence. In the UK, it has been presented
as a limited measure only to be implemented in urgent cases where the
United States does not wish to be involved. In Germany, it has increasingly
been put across as corresponding to the new normative security culture
which has epitomized the country since 1945: non-aggressive, legalistic
and humanitarian. In some of the Central and Eastern European countries,
it is cast in the light of a necessary step towards membership of the Union.
Other countries have their own distinctive takes (Biehl et al. 2013).
Newspaper proprietors with global reach might be thought to be opposed
to the EU project precisely because, being global in their objectives, they do
not wish to be constrained by regional entities. The reality is that they
believe scaremongering articles about the ‘Euro-Army’ are good for sales.
The surprising factor is that European publics, in almost every coun-

try, have little difficulty in accepting that ‘security and defence’ is a policy
area which logically should be handled at European level. The
Eurobarometer (see Figure) shows that the average level of support for
CSDP among the different member states of the EU is high.
However, when one asks more probing questions about taking CSDP
beyond intergovernmentalism, and above all about paying for a common
defence, then member states break down into supporters and sceptics.
There are significant differences in the level of support among the EU
member states. The most enthusiastic citizens are to be found in (non-
NATO) Cyprus, Slovenia, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Germany,
Spain and the Netherlands. The sceptics include, in addition to the UK,
Denmark, Sweden and Finland. However, the bottom line is that, among
the EU’s publics, CSDP is a relatively uncontroversial notion – although
this is probably more the result of ignorance than considered releflection.
The Basic Structure of the Book
Chapter 2 updates the first edition’s brief summary of the politico-insti-

tutional development of European security and defence coordination
from the 1940s to the 1990s. It explains why, given the unexpectedly
conflict-prone world of the post-Cold War period, the EU was unable to
continue as it had for the previous 40 years without any institutional
capacity to take decisions affecting security and defence policy. It briefly
traces the early attempt to generate such a capacity through the Western
European Union (WEU) in the guise of the so-called European Security
and Defence Identity (ESDI) and the reasons why this solution proved
inadequate, leading to the call, at Saint-Malo, for autonomous institu-
tions. The chapter charts the initial politico-institutional challenges
facing the infant CSDP and the ways in which its various participants
rose to those challenges. It explains how decisions are shaped and taken
through the complex network of agencies and actors involved in this
policy area. It assesses the extent to which there is (or is not) a structural
tension between the collective endeavours of the EU-28 and the individ-
ual actions of the member states in this policy area.
The chapter traces these developments through from 2000 (Treaty of
Nice) to 2009 (Treaty of Lisbon). It includes a critical analysis of the
entire new raft of politico-institutional instruments launched via the
Lisbon Treaty (High-Representative/Vice-President, Council President,
European External Action Service (EEAS), European Defence Agency
(EDA)). In particular, it assesses the performance of the two key post-
holders appointed after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, Catherine
Ashton and Herman van Rompuy, as well as offering an initial prognos-
tic for the implementation of the External Action Service.
Figure 1.1 Support for a common defence and security policy among the
European Union member states
%EU
100 For Against Don’t Know
90
80
77% 79% 78%
76% 77% 75% 75% 75% 77%
70 73% 73% 73% 72% 73% 73% 73% 74% 73%
68% 68% 69% 70% 71% 73% 70%
60
50
40
30
20% 19% 19% 19%
15% 16% 14% 14% 14% 15% 11% 17% 15% 17% 15% 16%
20 11% 13% 14% 13% 13% 14% 14% 11%
11%
10
10% 9%
0
Spring Spring Spring * Spring Spring Spring Spring Spring Spring Spring Spring Spring
1993 1994 1995 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
EB39 EB41 EB43 EB47 EB49 EB51 EB53 EB55 EB57 EB59 EB61 EB63
Notes: Spring 2005 support figure breaks down as EU-15 75%; 2005 accession states 85%. * No reading for Spring 1996.
Source: Eurobarometer (report number as indicated).
27
Chapter 3 begins with an inventory of EU military capacity at the end

of the Cold War, demonstrating how, even though the member states
collectively were spending huge sums on ‘defence’, their ability to deal
with the threats of the post-Cold War world, all of which required force
projection, mobility, rapidity and coordination potentially over long
distances, was extremely limited. This therefore required major transfor-
mation. While most European nations greeted the end of the Cold War
with calls for a ‘peace dividend’ and defence budgets began to fall, others
saw immediately that new challenges were emerging. The new direction
was initially indicated by a small number of countries (UK, France,
Belgium and the Netherlands) which, through a succession of
programme reviews, nudged their armed forces into the new world
order. All of this took place before the CSDP project emerged.
The chapter charts the evolution and progress of thinking in Europe
about the generation of appropriate military capacity. Beginning with the
notion of Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTF) in the mid-1990s, to the
Helsinki Headline Goal (HHG) of 1999, through the capacity generating
conferences of the early 2000s and on to the Headline Goal 2010, formu-
lated in 2004, the early process of military transformation was bottom-
up, uncoordinated and voluntary. As the defects of this process became
apparent, increasing numbers of studies, emanating from both think
tanks and official bodies, stressed the need for greater top-down direc-
tives, for a focus on rationalization, specialization, pooling and sharing
of scarce military resources. By 2008, this series of initiatives, impelled by
the French presidency of the EU in the second semester of 2008, led to an
interim synthesis in the European Council’s December 2008 Declaration
on Strengthening Capabilities which set ambitious objectives for the EU
to be able to take on a wide variety of both combat and non-combat
missions in the medium term. At the same time, all member states sought
to restructure their militaries and their defence budgets to reflect the need
for all-volunteer, professional, deployable forces. These developments
were given a potential boost with the introduction of permanent struc-
tured cooperation (PESCO) under the Lisbon Treaty, which gave rise to
imaginative German–Swedish proposals for force rationalization in
November 2010 and to the so-called ‘Ghent Framework’ process driven
by the meetings of the EU’s 27 defence ministers. At the same time,
France and the UK signed a Treaty on Defence and Security Cooperation
aiming above all to offer them the capacity to remain global military
players in the context of a significant squeeze on resources.
Yet military capacity has proven to be only one part of the overall
requirements of the crisis management resources of CSDP. Equally
important (some would say of greater importance) has been the develop-
ment of civilian capacity: police forces, judges, penitentiary officers,
accountants, border control agents, administrators of all types: in short,
the type of skills required for stabilization and reconstruction operations
in the context of ‘nation building’. A massive literature has been gener-

ated on this topic since 2006/2007 and this chapter assesses its findings.
Increasingly, it became clear that the initial projections of an essentially
military CSDP were proving to be misguided. The name of the game
became that of creating synergies between the civilian and the military
capacities available under CSDP. This involved the launch of new agen-
cies within the Council Secretariat and the drawing up of blueprints
within the EU’s Military Committee for what became known as the
‘Comprehensive Approach’, involving an attempt to synergize opera-
tional planning for joined-up civilian and military missions. As this book
goes to press, this is still in very embryonic shape, but it has already
emerged as the distinctive profile of the EU’s approach to international
crisis management.
Chapter 4 assesses the extent to which CSDP arose out of the confu-
sions and tensions characterizing the transatlantic relationship through
five US presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Each of these reacted somewhat
differently to the project and each has played a role in stimulating further
progress. It was during the tense years of nuclear confrontation with the
USSR under Reagan that the aspiration towards EU autonomy first
emerged. Under Bush Sr, an initial clash over the respective roles of an
embryonic EU actor and NATO first arose. Bill Clinton attempted to
explore the potential for EU–NATO cooperation in the context of US
reticence to become involved in European firefights such as those in the
Balkans and also in light of US aspirations to transform NATO into a
global alliance. What emerged was European clarity that the only viable
solution would come via greater autonomy. With George W. Bush, we
witnessed the most dramatic and serious clash within the transatlantic
family, leading to ever greater European determination to pursue an
autonomous path – a determination which also divided Europeans inter-
nally. Barack Obama came to office determined to encourage the
Europeans both to develop their crisis management capacity and to be
prepared to share the burdens of global leadership. This approach was
best illustrated during the 2011 Libyan crisis.
All of these interactions have been accompanied by crossed wires,
mixed messages, mutual suspicions and recriminations. They have also
been highly divisive inside both communities. Within the US, three
constituencies have emerged. The traditional East coast-based
Atlanticists have poured all their energies into revitalizing the transat-
lantic relationship and shoring up both NATO and CSDP and attempt-
ing to find forms of cooperation between them. The academic
community, informed with neo-realist approaches to international rela-
tions, has generated a sizeable constituency which argues that CSDP is
essentially intended to ‘balance’ against US power and to make life
increasingly difficult for the global hegemon. Probably a majority of
Americans have concluded that Europe is no longer of primary interest to

the US and effectively washed their hands of the old continent for all
purposes other than tourism and trade. But the US confusion is reflected
back across the Atlantic not only in the dichotomous line-up of
‘Atlanticist’ and ‘Europeanist’ countries, but also in the fact that impor-
tant nuances to that line-up exist around the margins: Denmark, which
combines rejection of the CSDP project politically with espousal of its
ethos culturally and which prefers NATO while asking serious questions
about the USA; the Netherlands, which combine Euro-federalist and
Euro-Atlanticist impulses; Norway and Turkey which, from a starting
position of unreconstructed Atlanticism, have begun to look upon CSDP
as a project with some potential; a series of Central and Eastern
European countries which were hailed by Donald Rumsfeld as ‘new
Europe’ but which are already shifting the balance of their security pref-
erences in the direction of their new alma mater, the EU. The end of the
Cold War has changed the entire nature of the transatlantic equation,
with significant consequences for both sides.
The hardest part of that equation to resolve has been the protracted
infighting between NATO and CSDP over their respective remits and
over the nature of their relationship. Since the end of the Cold War, both
entities have been in a constant state of becoming. Each, to a large extent,
has experienced that becoming as a function of the other. NATO, in a
permanent quest for re-invention after the demise of its existential adver-
sary, the USSR, rapidly sought to shift from a focus on collective defence
to an experiment with collective security. However, given US reluctance
to maintain its security focus on Europe, this recalibration ran into two
obstacles. The first was the Europeans’ unwillingness to turn NATO into
a global alliance. The second was the growing European preoccupation
with collective security in the EU’s near-abroad. As both entities
attempted to devise clear strategic concepts at the end of the 2000s, the
nature of their interaction only became more confused. The chaotic
European and American responses to the Arab Spring in 2011 did not
help resolve this confusion. As the second Obama administration
attempted to square the circle of an unmanageable national debt, esca-
lating defence costs and the desire to retrench, the consequences both for
NATO and for CSDP remained unclear. However, the chapter concludes
that, despite today’s lack of clarity in apprehending the precise future of
transatlantic relations, the picture that will emerge is one in which CSDP
will eventually complement rather than compete with, enhance rather
than weaken, and assist rather than complicate the strategic efforts of the
US.
Chapter 5 begins with a typology of the almost 30 missions under-
taken between 2003 and 2011. Case studies focus on increasingly strate-
gic operations such as Atalanta – the anti-piracy mission off the coast of
Somalia – and EU-Lex Kosovo – the rule of law mission in Kosovo. Over
the past five years, there has also been a huge outpouring of analytical
literature focusing on these missions. This chapter offers a focused criti-
cal analysis of both the missions themselves and of the literature devoted
to them. The authors of that literature tend to divide into two groups:
those who feel that the EU has already come a long way in a short time
and is making fair progress; and those (the majority) who are highly crit-
ical of what they portray as amateurish ad-hocery.
The chapter assesses the extent to which the EU is beginning to select
its overseas missions less as a reaction to urgent events and more as a
result of a strategic assessment of vital collective interests. It considers the
way in which priorities – geo-strategic, political, diplomatic and values-
driven – have been established. It analyses the chain of command and the
decision-making procedures involved in mounting such missions. It
concludes by evaluating the likely profile of forthcoming missions and by
assessing the extent to which these missions enhance the EU’s role on the
global stage.
Chapter 6 offers a perspective based on theory. Doctoral theses have
been appearing on CSDP over the past ten years and have multiplied in
intensity over the past five years. Many of these dissertations have found
their way into book form and there is a voluminous body of literature
contributing to the theoretical debate about the nature of CSDP. These
works cover the entire span of theory from neo-realism to historical insti-
tutionalism to constructivism and discursivism. This chapter charts the
fortunes of theoretical approaches, from the early discomfort with a
policy area which did not appear to fit any of the theoretical perspectives,
to the increasingly confident analyses of the new generation of scholars,
the majority of which appear to be pursuing various types of social
constructivist paths. Their conclusions add significantly to the percep-
tion that CSDP is indeed sui generis and fails to fit into traditional
patterns of international relations or even European integration theory.
Chapter 7 assesses, by way of conclusion, two of the major challenges
which still confront the infant CSDP as it approaches maturity: the need
for the EU to begin to develop some sort of strategic vision; and the
generation of a trans-European common security culture. As the
December 2013 milestone European Council summit on defence
approached, the issue of ‘strategic vision’ became more and more widely
discussed. At the same time, a disconnect began to appear between those
scholars, analysts and think-tankers who were pushing for some type of
‘grand strategy’, and officials, ministers and heads of government who
preferred the notion of a ‘strategic narrative’. To a large extent, beyond
semantics, this reflected nervousness at the member state level about two
potential risks. First, the danger of failure to reach agreement on a
common strategic approach. Second, the danger of entrapment if the EU
were to endorse a strategic approach going beyond the level of commit-
ment with which any given member state might feel comfortable.
However, there was growing recognition that CSDP could not continue
to muddle along without some much clearer understanding of what it
was attempting to achieve, about its level of ambition and about the
instruments required to reach its objectives.
The second challenge is to narrow the strategic-cultural gaps between
the main nation-states of Europe with regard to security and strategy:
allies and neutrals; bigs and smalls; professionals and conscripts; Nordics
and non-Nordics; extroverts and introverts. It argues that the EU’s expe-
riences with the Common Foreign and Security Policy have already
‘Europeanized’ some of the national reflexes which used to characterize
foreign and defence policies. It will assess the significance of the EU’s
determination to generate a unique and unprecedented mix of civilian
and military instruments, offering the Union the largest possible ‘tool-
box’ for the management of regional crises. A growing literature inspired
by social constructivism has trail-blazed inquiry into the cultural dimen-
sion of CSDP and this section evaluates that literature.
The Conclusion offers a balance sheet of the debate over CSDP. In
researching new material for this second edition, I came across some 200
substantial books and over 1,500 journal articles on the topic since the
first edition was written in summer 2006. CSDP has become a phenome-
nal growth area both in academia and in the policy world. The conclu-
sion to the new edition attempts to parse the ‘debate’ emerging from this
literature over the origins, nature and future of CSDP: truly a unique type
of international relations ‘work in progress’.
Chapter 2
Decision-Making: The Political

and Institutional Framework
‘You can’t send a wiring diagram to a crisis.’ – George Roberson,

NATO Secretary General, 1999
It will be recalled that the two main innovations required for the infant
CSDP in the Saint-Malo Declaration were political institutions and mili-
tary capacity. The latter will be dealt with in Chapter 3. Politicians and
opinion-formers occasionally trade polemics over the relative virtues and
vices of these two requirements. In particular, British spokespersons have
enjoyed poking fun at the alleged propensity of continental Europeans in
general and the French in particular to attach undue importance to insti-
tutions. Lord George Robertson, former UK defence minister and, at the
time, Secretary General of NATO, gently teased his European counter-
parts from the other side of Brussels who were, in 1999, attempting to
deliver on the institutional promises of Saint-Malo. He castigated ‘the
narrow and sterile institutional debate that has so often dominated this
subject’, insisting that it was ‘political will plus the ability to act that
matter first and foremost, rather than the way they are wired together’.
‘You cannot’, he quipped, ‘send a wiring diagram to a crisis’ (Robertson
1999). For the British, one is invited to conclude, what really matters is
military capacity. Robertson was being somewhat playful, reminding his
audience that all of the blueprints for a European security project which
had dotted the period from the 1940s to the 1980s had floundered on
institutional inadequacy. But there was also a second message behind his
warning. This was the fear, which haunted many at the time of Saint-
Malo, that the institutional dimension of CSDP was, in an indirect way,
an attempt to step up the pace of European integration. The US ambas-
sador to NATO, Sandy Vershbow, put this in less diplomatic terms than
Robertson when addressing a seminar in Paris in May 2000:
If ESDP is mostly about European construction, then it will focus more

on institution-building than on building new capabilities, and there will
be a tendency to oppose the ‘interference’ of NATO and to minimize the
participation of non-EU Allies. The danger here is that, if autonomy
becomes an end in itself, ESDP will be an ineffective tool for managing
crises, and transatlantic tensions will increase. (Lindley-French 2000)
33
Those who are concerned with power relations and military capacity (the
primary focus of the school of international relations scholars known as
realism – see Box 2.1 and Chapter 6 below) believe that institutions are
mere instruments which allow states to exert their power. They can in no
way affect the behaviour of states or the outcome of international rela-
tions (Mearsheimer 1994/95). In short, security institution-building,
from this perspective, is believed to be a secondary activity and one that
can even carry within it, self-defeating propensities.
And yet, from a different perspective, institutions are clearly both
indispensable for the functioning of any international project and also
important internal drivers behind its progress. Political institutions and
military capacity are equally essential. The UK was never opposed to
institution-building. Indeed, the new institutional architecture of CSDP
which the EU was to put in place after Saint-Malo, George Robertson’s
quip notwithstanding, was to a large extent devised in London
(Interviews at FCO April 1999). Recent theoretical scholarship on the
nature and function of the institutions behind CSDP has insisted on the
vital importance of this dimension:
it is only through an appreciation of the nature and workings of inter-

national institutions that one can understand CSDP. Institutionalism
offers the analytical tools to allow us not only to explain its develop-
ment over time, but also the impact of how policies are made on the
policies pursued, and, more broadly, both the potential and limits of
the Union’s security and defence policies. (Menon 2011)
Those scholars who believe that institutions can progressively take on a

life of their own and exert an influence both over the institutional process
and over the outcome of its activities (coming from the broad schools of
historical institutionalism and sociological institutionalism) attach
fundamental importance to this dimension. This chapter reflects a belief
that institutions are important in their own right, even in the field of secu-
rity and defence policy, but it also takes it as axiomatic that they must
interact with both power and ideas to generate a policy area that is effec-
tive. The institutions of CSDP, taken on their own, do indeed amount to
something of a wiring diagram. Nevertheless, when taken in the context
of the multifaceted series of interactions – political, social, economic,
military and strategic – that make up CSDP, we shall see that institutions
have had a very significant effect on the work in progress. A ‘wiring
diagram’ is in fact necessary to deploy troops to a crisis. The institutions
of CSDP have (unlike many complex and deeply embedded institutions
which gravitate towards stasis) evolved constantly over the past 15 years.
Moreover, they have helped draft the CSDP narrative as a composite of
the different aspirations of the EU member states, whereas otherwise it
may well have taken on a different form – possibly more in line with the
Decision-Making: The Political and Institutional Framework 35
Box 2.1 Theoretical Approaches to International Relations
Realism
The absence of any overarching international structure (what realists call

'anarchy' in the international system) creates uncertainties among states
about other states' true intentions; anarchy causes world politics to be
competitive and conflict-prone. Strong states seek to dominate weak ones.
War is relatively normal and only mitigated by balances of power.
International institutions serve the interests of powerful states and have
minimal independent effect on state interests; institutions reflect the distri-
bution of power between states. Since relative gains are more important to
realists than absolute gains, little interstate cooperation can be expected.
Liberalism/Institutionalism
The stability of the international system is facilitated by cooperation,

shared legal norms, repeated interactions, and increased communications
that overcome uncertainty. Absolute gains are important and all actors
can participate in positive-sum relations. International institutions can
help prevent war. States can cooperate through forming international
institutions, which provide common rules, supply more information,
reduce uncertainty, decrease transaction costs, and help solve collective
action and coordination problems.
Sociological Institutionalism (Constructivism)
Ideas, norms, identities, beliefs determine which interests are most impor-
tant (whether power, economic wealth, legitimacy, prestige, etc.).
International institutions can teach new norms (UNESCO & Science
bureaucracies; World Bank and notions of development as security, etc.).
Socialization among cognate actors can create consensual preferences.
more extrovert ambitions of the two founding members of the policy

area: the UK and France. Indeed, as we shall see, the institutional frame-
work of CSDP has been instrumental in helping achieve consensus
among the member states – at least on the definition of what is actually
possible – both possible to undertake and possible to bring to a success-
ful conclusion.
The Pre-Saint-Malo Framework
I have already noted that one of the reasons the EU per se eventually
found no alternative, in 1998/99, but to take upon itself a security and
defence remit (rather than relying on outside agencies such as NATO or

the WEU) was precisely because there was no existing institutional
framework through which EU member states might discuss and formu-
late policy in this area. Although the regular exchanges of views between
foreign ministers known as European Political Cooperation (EPC –
Nuttall 1992) had been in existence since the 1970s and although CFSP
had been launched in 1991, the Union, at the turn of the century as crises
around the world proliferated, was simply unable seriously to engage in
this policy field without establishing new institutions. This is not to say
that there was an institutional vacuum prior to the new agencies which
followed Saint-Malo. Indeed, in addition to the long-standing national
institutions in each member state such as ministries of defence and
foreign affairs, defence chiefs, etc., there were already no fewer than nine
European bodies with inputs to EU foreign and security policy. Those
agencies, for the most part, still exist today, but have, since Saint-Malo
and especially since the Treaty of Lisbon, been adapted and in some cases
overlain by the many new post-Lisbon institutions we shall examine
shortly.
At the highest level lie the three-monthly European Council meetings
of heads of state and government with ultimate decision-making and
political responsibility for all matters connected with foreign and security
policy (and all other policies) (Naurin and Wallace 2010). It was agreed
in the Maastricht Treaty (and subsequently confirmed by the Treaty of
Amsterdam (1997) and the Treaty of Nice (2000) that CFSP/CSDP
would be conducted by a special intergovernmental pillar of the EU in
which the heads of state and government, voting unanimously, would
take all ultimate policy decisions. Although technically the pillar struc-
ture of the EU was phased out in the Treaty of Lisbon, nevertheless the
unanimity rule was strictly retained for CFSP and CSDP. During the
negotiations leading up to Maastricht, several EU member states had
wished to ‘communitarize’ this new policy area along the same lines as
those governing trade and the single market: in other words, to subject
CFSP decision-making to qualified majority voting in the first pillar
(Dehousse 2011). The intergovernmental unanimity procedures agreed
under the second pillar reflected the absolute refusal of countries such as
the UK and France to accept such arrangements. Not surprisingly, the
institutions devised for CSDP further reinforced the technical control of
the member states over this new policy area (Wessels 2001: 77).
Nevertheless, as we shall see, the strict differentiation between the inter-
governmental and the supranational in CFSP/CSDP decision-making is
less absolute than the politicians (and some academics) claim.
Below the European Council came what, prior to the Lisbon Treaty,
used to be called the General Affairs Council (GAC). Since Lisbon, its
successor has been called the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC). Whatever
the name, this body has always met monthly and comprises all of the
EU’s foreign ministers. It is, in practice, the main decision-taking body

for CFSP and CSDP. However, by the turn of the century, its agenda had
become overloaded (in part as a result of the launch of CSDP), compro-
mising its ability to remain abreast of the minutiae of foreign and security
policy. From 2003, it was renamed the General Affairs and External
Relations Committee (GAERC) and divided into two separate sessions,
usually on successive days, dealing first with ‘General Affairs’, covering
the overall ‘internal’ coordinating work of the Council, and secondly
with ‘External Relations’, covering the EU’s policy towards various parts
of the world and towards specific foreign or security policy issues or
crises. It is this latter body which now functions as the FAC.
Traditionally, the meetings of the GAC/GAERC/FAC have been
prepared by the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER)
formally comprising the ambassadors (referred to in this context as
permanent representatives) of the member states to the European Union.
This committee, the third of our long-standing foreign and security
policy institutions, meets at least once a week in Brussels, and has tradi-
tionally enjoyed considerable influence over the policy-shaping process
(Lewis 2007; Cross 2011). Any items on which the permanent represen-
tatives agree unanimously have normally been adopted by the
GAERC/FAC without discussion.
Until the turn of the century, the Political Committee (PoCo) compris-
ing the Political Directors of the member state Ministries of Foreign
Affairs (MFAs) was a fourth body of some significance. This agency
traditionally met monthly, with a view to coordinating foreign and secu-
rity policy at senior MFA level. However, much of its security and
defence agenda was subsequently taken over by the new body established
after Saint-Malo – the Political and Security Committee (PSC; see
pp. 41–7). The fifth pre-1999 institution is the Council Secretariat, which
dates from the Single European Act of 1985 when it was felt necessary to
establish a permanent secretariat to help coordinate the foreign policy
implications of the EU’s growing trade and economic relations with the
rest of the world. Prior to 1999, the Council Secretariat, which today
involves some 2,500 officials from across the EU organized in geographic
or thematic working groups, was primarily responsible for overseeing
and servicing CFSP. It has subsequently redefined its brief to concentrate
on the more juridical aspects of foreign and security policy (Dijkstra
2008; Warntjen 2010). The sixth institutional input comes from the
rotating Presidency of the EU, which traditionally had responsibility for
galvanizing and even initiating policy during its six-month term of office,
and for drafting the ‘Presidency Conclusions’ which were presented at
the final European Council meeting of each semester. The ‘ESDP/CSDP
Annexes’ to the Presidency Conclusions cumulatively represent the
stages of development of the CSDP work in progress. However, since
Lisbon, the work of the rotating presidency with respect to foreign and
security affairs has been taken over by new actors associated with the
European External Action Service (EEAS; see pp. 62–6ff). Technically,
all of the above agencies can be considered to be sub-groupings of the
European Council.
In addition to these six separate agencies of intergovernmentalism,
there is, of course, the supranational European Commission (EC), which,
until the Lisbon Treaty, was largely responsible for the delivery and
implementation of CFSP/CSDP via the Directorate General for External
Relations (Relex) and the Commissioner for External Relations. In many
ways, since the single largest element of European foreign policy involves
trade and economic policy, the Commission is also a key player in CFSP.
For CSDP purposes, it established a Conflict Prevention and Crisis
Management Unit which monitors data relating to looming crises and
aims to foster coherence in response (Rippert et al. 2011; Schön-
Quinlivan 2011). The Commission has access to significant funds and, in
2006, launched the Instrument for Stability (IfS) which, with a total
budget of €2 billion over seven years (2007–13), provided financial
support for projects underpinning the following priorities (European
Commission 2006):
• efforts to mitigate chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear

(CBRN) risks and to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD);
• global and trans-regional efforts to address the threats posed by traf-
ficking, terrorism and organized crime;
• capacity within the EU and the international community for effective
crisis preparedness and response.
The eighth institutional input comes from the European Parliament (EP).
Prior to the Lisbon Treaty, the views of the EP on all aspects of
CFSP/CSDP were – at least formally – (merely) ‘taken into considera-
tion’, but parliamentarians complained bitterly about the inadequacy
and tardiness of information flows. Any voice which the EP has tradi-
tionally raised in foreign and security policy has tended to come via its
different specialist committees: Human Rights (DROI), Foreign Affairs
(AFET), and Security and Defence (SEDE) (Cutler and Von Lingen 2003;
Thym 2006; Judge and Earnshaw 2008). Since Lisbon, the EP has seen its
powers grow considerably.
The ninth pre-Saint-Malo institution is the original post of High
Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (HR-CFSP),
which was occupied for the entire ten years of its existence (1999–2009)
by the former Spanish foreign minister and Secretary General of NATO,
Javier Solana (Barros-Garcia 2007; Kurowska 2009). The post was
transformed under the Lisbon Treaty into the grandly-titled position of
High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-
President of the Commission (HR-VP) which will be assessed shortly.

The need for some sort of HR position had been felt ever since the 1970s
when Henry Kissinger, perhaps apocryphally, remarked that he did not
know the telephone number of the European Union. The post was
created by the Amsterdam European Council in June 1997 – although the
appointment of its first incumbent (Solana) in the summer of 1999 had to
await the outcome of a political battle among the national capitals over
the level of seniority and the political remit of the appointee. It is often
alleged that France had hoped that a high-profile heavyweight such as a
former French President (the name of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was
mentioned in this connection) would succeed in injecting a clear French
voice into Europe’s common message to the outside world. The UK, on
the other hand, had wanted the post to be filled by a mid-career civil
servant who could be kept by the Foreign Office on a relatively tight
political leash. Some argue that this is what actually happened in 2009,
when Solana was replaced by the inexperienced and uncharismatic
Catherine Ashton (see pp. 58–62). In the event, the choice of Javier
Solana in 1999 derived from his diplomatic skills and consensus-forming
successes as Secretary General of NATO during the Kosovo War of
spring 1999. Initially, the HR-CFSP was assisted by a small 26-member
Policy Unit – also created by the Amsterdam European Council. The
Policy Unit’s function was to assist the HR-CFSP in assessing situations
and in formulating policy responses.
One major role performed by Solana was to act as the external face of
the EU and to help forge consensus on policy issues within the Council.
At this, within the limits of his remit, Javier Solana was relatively success-
ful. ‘Quietly and almost unnoticed,’ commented a leading weekly, ‘Javier
Solana has done the unthinkable: he has created a European foreign
policy’ (Ephron 2002). But Solana was disadvantaged by the inadequate
size of his staff and of his budget and of course by the existence of
competing agencies with high stakes in the formulation of CFSP and
CSDP, especially the member states. Two entire volumes devoted to
Solana and his tenure both offer a cautiously positive satisfecit concern-
ing his legacy. Gisela Müller-Brandeck-Boquet and Carolin Rüger judge
that ‘it was through his continuous, persistent and determined advocacy
of a credible and fully capable ESDP that Solana made his greatest contri-
bution to EU foreign and security policy’ (2011: 262). They further add
that all the contributors to their collective volume believed that Solana
‘[left] his successor a remarkable legacy’ (2011: 285–6). But they qualify
this verdict with two caveats: first, that Solana himself became somewhat
more disillusioned with the passage of time; and secondly that he bene-
fited enormously from the launch by the member states of the original
CSDP project. Estelle Poidevin, for her part, is more guarded in her
judgement. Despite his physical energy, personal charm, political astute-
ness and strategic creativity, and despite capitalizing on his freedom to
‘translate into operational terms the political will of the member states to
engage in crisis management missions’, Javier Solana never succeeded in
becoming a genuine motor, a leader of CSDP or CFSP (Poidevin 2010:
188). This judgement is harsh but nevertheless reflects the political real-
ity of an institution which remains dependent on the goodwill of the
member states.
One final – but increasingly important – mechanism, which lies
entirely outside the Treaties and has no official status, is what has been
called ‘intensive trans-governmentalism’ (Wallace et al. 2005: 87–9;
Dijkstra 2013). Since the late 1990s, significant strides have been taken,
both bilaterally and multilaterally, across European ministries in knitting
together the finer points of security policy. Exchange diplomats and offi-
cials have spent extended periods in ‘sister’ ministries in foreign capitals
and specialized teams working on European issues have been established
in all these ministries. These epistemic communities have acquired the
habit of communicating regularly, via e-mail, telephone or more formal
conferences, with their opposite numbers around the EU. All this has
resulted – at the very least – in far greater awareness, in the major capital
cities, of the respective positions of the different partner countries on
security policy issues (Cross 2011).
The Post-Saint-Malo Institutions
One might have imagined, given this multilevel and already somewhat
overcrowded and cumbersome decision-making apparatus, that the
advent of CSDP and the call in Saint-Malo for ‘appropriate structures’
would have presented a golden opportunity for institutional rationaliza-
tion. However, the intergovernmental conference leading up to the
Treaty of Nice (2000) was already in full swing and was essentially
concentrating on the institutional consequences of the major enlarge-
ment foreseen for 2004. Therefore, Nice simply acknowledged what had
been decided throughout 1999, and added four new institutional agen-
cies to the already complex nexus we have just outlined. These were the
Political and Security Committee (PSC), the European Union Military
Committee (EUMC), the European Union Military Staff (EUMS) and the
Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management (CIVCOM).
These bodies were essential for the immediate operationalization of
CSDP. A more wholesale restructuring of the institutions of the EU was
anticipated through the reform process launched at the Laeken European
Council in December 2001, leading to the establishment of the European
Convention which met between 2002 and 2004 under the chairmanship
of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and drafted the Treaty Establishing a
Constitution for Europe (TCE) (Beach 2013). Although this ambitious
document was signed by all member states on 29 October 2004 and
subsequently ratified by 18 of the then 25 members, it was rejected in

referenda in France (29 May 2005) and the Netherlands (1 June 2005).
After a brief period of reflection, the idea of a European constitution was
abandoned and the TCE’s main articles re-packaged as simple amend-
ments to the existing Treaties. The result was the Treaty of Lisbon,
signed by all heads of state or government on 13 December 2007. After
many trials and tribulations, and two Irish referenda, the final member
state (the Czech Republic) ratified the Treaty in November 2009, allow-
ing it to enter into force on 1 December 2009 (Whitman and Juncos
2009). The Lisbon Treaty introduced a number of significant institu-
tional innovations, which I shall analyse shortly. But first, let us examine
the four innovations that Lisbon inherited from the post-Saint-Malo
period.
Political and Security Committee (PSC)

This key Committee was designed to correct two weaknesses in the previ-
ous institutional arrangements for foreign and security policy-making.
The first was the lack of continuity and permanency in the personnel
involved in key organisms (the six-month presidency, and the regular
rotation of ministers and other officials). The second was the shifting
location of meetings, which tended to follow the six-monthly roster of
each presidency, the circus moving on constantly from one capital city to
another. This was particularly true of the meetings of the Political
Committee (PoCo), the de facto predecessor to the PSC. As we saw
above, prior to 2000, this body had traditionally met monthly, with a
view to coordinating foreign and security policy at senior MFA level. As
CFSP began to demand more and more of the Political Directors’ time,
and as security issues began to flood their agenda, it became apparent
that what was required was a permanent body, based in Brussels,
comprising ambassadors with a substantial (three to four year) term of
office – hence, the birth of the PSC. The terms of reference of this
Committee (sometimes referred to after its French acronym as COPS)
were enshrined in the Treaty of Nice (and slightly modified in the Treaty
of Lisbon) under Article 25 (the precise wording below comes from the
text of the Lisbon Treaty):
a Political and Security Committee shall monitor the international

situation in the areas covered by the common foreign and security
policy and contribute to the definition of policies by delivering opin-
ions to the Council at the request of the Council or of the High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, or
on its own initiative. It shall also monitor the implementation of
agreed policies, without prejudice to the powers of the High
Representative.
Within the scope of this Chapter, the Political and Security Committee
shall exercise, under the responsibility of the Council and the High
Representative, political control and strategic direction of […] crisis
management operations.
The Council may authorise the Committee, for the purpose and for the
duration of a crisis management operation, as determined by the
Council, to take the relevant decisions concerning the political control
and strategic direction of the operation.
The PSC as an institution was first convened on an interim basis in

March 2000, becoming permanent in January 2001.
From the outset, the Committee was the subject of multiple political
sensitivities. In particular, some national capitals, having agreed on its
very necessity and indeed its inevitability, were nevertheless keen to
ensure that it remained under strict MFA control. In a repetition of the
discussions over seniority after the 1997 decision to create the post of
High Representative-CFSP, the big debate during the Finnish presidency
(June to December 1999) was over the level of representation of the
ambassadors to the PSC. France, confident that the very existence of this
Committee would consecrate ‘l’Europe de la défense’, leaned towards
‘senior ambassadorial’ representation. Paris never doubted for a moment
the Quai d’Orsay’s capacity to keep its own senior ambassador ‘on
message’, and by the same token it saw in the PSC a golden opportunity
for France to lead the debate on European security. France argued that,
unless the PSC became a high-level body with genuine ability to influence
policy, it would prove to be somewhat redundant. In addition, since the
EU had selected the heavyweight Javier Solana for the post of HR-CFSP,
France argued that it would be illogical to have him presiding over a
lightweight PSC. The British preference for a lower level of seniority in
the envoys to the PSC (deputy political director) reflected in part a desire
to keep this institution firmly under national control and in part a sense
of unease about what seemed to London to be an undue prioritization of
institutions on the part of other EU member states. In addition, the UK
was preoccupied with US suspicions that the proposed new body would
escape all control from NATO. The UK initially proposed that the
permanent representatives to the PSC should be ‘double-hatted’ with the
permanent representatives to NATO – a proposal which was dismissed
out of court in Paris (Interviews in Paris and London 1999). Eventually,
the British trade-off in the run-up to the European Council in Helsinki
(December 1999) was agreement to accept a relatively high-profile PSC
in exchange for a genuine commitment, at Helsinki, to the elaboration of
serious European military capacity. The wording of the Helsinki docu-
ments speak of the PSC as being made up of ‘senior/ambassadorial’ offi-
cials. In the event, member states sent a variety of different level envoys
to constitute the first generation of PSC representatives (2000/1–

2003/4), ranging from very senior and experienced ambassadors to mid-
career diplomats. The large countries, France included, proved, in the
event, most anxious to keep their representatives on a tight leash and
tended to send more junior officials than some of the smaller countries
eager to help develop CFSP/CSDP and willing to engage a senior ambas-
sador. With the passage of time, the average seniority of ambassadors to
the PSC has risen.
The sensitive issue of the division of labour between COREPER and
the PSC, both of which agencies found themselves legally responsible for
preparing Council meetings (Duke 2005: 10–12), was partially resolved
at the Seville European Council in June 2002 by the introduction of the
distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ agendas of the General
Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC). This was clarified
under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty whereby the former configuration
reverted to the original title of General Affairs Committee and is serviced
by COREPER, the latter becoming the Foreign Affairs Committee
(FAC), serviced by the PSC. Formally, COREPER (comprising the
permanent representatives of the member states) enjoys hierarchical
superiority over the PSC and the latter’s decisions go via COREPER to
the ministers sitting in the FAC. If PSC ambassadors (as happens occa-
sionally) cannot reach consensus on a particularly sensitive issue, then
the dossier ‘goes up’ to COREPER for resolution. This happens roughly
once a month. Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the PSC is no longer chaired,
as previously, by its ambassador from the rotating presidency but by a
permanent official appointed by the HR-VP.
The PSC thus deals with all aspects of the common foreign and secu-
rity policy, although interviews with current and former ambassadors
suggest that it works best in what is considered its ‘core business’ – the
planning, preparation and oversight of crisis management operations. In
this sense, it tends to spend most of its time on CSDP matters. A represen-
tative of the European Commission is also a full member of the PSC to
ensure cross-pillar consistency and coherence, and meetings are attended
by several representatives of the Council Secretariat. The work of the
Committee is assisted by ‘European Correspondents’ based in the MFAs
who form a liaison between the political directors and the representatives
to the PSC (Duke 2005: 20). The wide-ranging remit of the Committee
generates a vast amount of paperwork, thus intensifying the workload of
its members. This pressure is somewhat alleviated by the assistance of the
Politico-Military Working Party, comprising Brussels-based officials from
both MFAs and MODs and which convenes up to four times per week,
dealing with both the diplomatic aspects and the technical details of
planned operations, including (where relevant) relations with NATO. In
addition, PSC agendas are prepared by a working group (sometimes
referred to as the Nicolaidis group after its first chairperson during the
Greek Presidency in early 2003). This group fixes the most logical order
for discussion of agenda items and indicates in advance where specific
member states may have concerns that they may wish to raise. Interviews
with the ambassadors to the PSC revealed a relatively widespread sense
of dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of these preparatory committees.
Many members deplored the fact that the Committee itself spends too
much of its precious time on ‘nuts and bolts’ issues, which should have
been the subject of preparatory agreement in the subordinate working
groups, and often this is not the case. In the view of some of the intervie-
wees, this goes back to the vexed question of seniority. For the most part,
Nicolaides group members are junior diplomats who are hardly in a posi-
tion to resolve tricky technical or political issues on their own. Several
ambassadors insisted that this was deliberate policy on the part of a
number of member states. For these critics, the solution would be to
upgrade Nicolaides members to junior ambassador status, thereby
allowing for greater decision-making at that level, leaving the PSC itself
to tackle only the really thorny issues.
Several major studies of the PSC have now appeared (Duke 2005;
Meyer 2006; Juncos and Reynolds 2007; Cross 2007; Howorth 2010a;
Cross 2011). The first systematic attempt to evaluate the influence of the
PSC was conducted by Ana Juncos and Christopher Reynolds (2007).
They sought to assess the Committee with reference to the methodologi-
cal and theoretical debates between rational choice institutionalism,
which sees states retaining control of power relations and using institu-
tions as agents of their will, and sociological institutionalism, which
increasingly posits the ability of institutions, through the socialization of
their members, to determine policy preferences (Hall and Taylor 1996;
Schmidt 2010). Recognizing that rational approaches fail to grasp the
significance of the permanence of the PSC in Brussels, they conclude that
their interviews ‘suggest that national representatives are expressly not in
Brussels simply to represent and bargain over rigid, predefined national
positions. Rather, they adopt a problem-solving approach […] and are
there to sound out other national positions, gain information and find out
what is and is not possible.’ Taking issue with a rationalist or even a
liberal intergovernmentalist perspective on EU decision-making
processes, Juncos and Reynolds note that PSC ambassadors (depending to
some extent on the member state) have considerable margin of manoeu-
vre in decision-shaping and conclude that ‘interaction [in PSC] can and
frequently does impact upon the definition of preferences’. Furthermore:
we cannot understand the definition of national interest in the field of

foreign and security policy among EU Member States without refer-
ence to institutional environments in Brussels and the interaction that
takes place within them. From such a perspective, the national interest
is not defined in an isolated manner in a national capital and brought
to Brussels to be bargained over, as inter-governmentalist approaches

suggest. Instead, it is constructed in an institutional context/space in
which the national cannot be easily separated from the international,
nor the self from the other. (Juncos and Reynolds 2007)
Although the authors use the somewhat ambiguous notion of ‘govern-

ment in the shadow’ as the sub-title of their article, the intention behind
this notion is to argue that the members of the PSC do take decisions in
the manner of governments and to some extent operate, in their words,
‘outside the charmed circle of diplomacy’. The Committee, they
conclude, ‘remains a forum where informal norms and rules play an
important role and in which routine interaction can make a difference,
both to the representatives themselves and to the actual substance of
national foreign and security policies (my stress)’. Clearly, the PSC has
already emerged as a major decision-shaping and even decision-making
agency of the CSDP.
My own work on the PSC (Howorth 2010a) is entirely consistent with
that of Juncos and Reynolds. It is based on substantive interviews over
several generations of PSC ambassadors and, in 2007, with all 28
members of the Committee, plus several of their deputies, as well as with
some 40 additional decision-shapers in CSDP from the General
Secretariat of the Council, the European Commission, and national offi-
cials in MFAs and MODs from five large countries. These interviews
reveal a unanimous sense that, above all, the Committee seeks to achieve
consensus. All ambassadors felt strongly that the PSC is a forum in
which consensus can usually be achieved. In many instances, the starting
positions of EU member states are at variance. But the process involved
in decision-making via the PSC most often ends up with a broad consen-
sus or even unanimity.
The degree of socialization obtaining within the Committee is a major
factor in generating the type of compromise which allows consensus to
emerge. The members know one another well. Their average tenure is
around three years. The key element is a deeply-rooted sense of mutual
trust:
I think we all have a trust in each other that whatever compromise is

possible we will find it … And so, even if you have instructions where
you have to cross your own red lines, you can then get back to capi-
tals. It is really true that there is a trust among colleagues that they try
to find wherever a common basis is possible. It would be a different
thing altogether if you always met 26 different colleagues. You simply
would not have that crucial element of personal trust that everybody
is doing their utmost, whatever is possible to find the best compro-
mise. That is the main element which helps. (Interview with senior
PSC ambassador, August 2007)
It is often sufficient for one of the group to be replaced by his or her

deputy for the trust-based group dynamics to break down and for
consensus to be more difficult to achieve.
In many instances, the majority of member states are unlikely to have
a very strongly held national position on a given proposal (say, to mount
an ESDP mission in Indonesia or in Congo). In that case, they see it as
their function to assist those who do have strongly held positions to
reconcile their differences. But the quality of the ideas being defended
and of the arguments being deployed is also crucial. Ambassadors know
that they have to convince their peers and that it is no use simply laying
down a fixed line from a national minister of foreign affairs. And in this
veritable crucible of new ideas, a genuine discussion can take place and
member states which previously held reservations can be persuaded to
join the consensus. This is so for several reasons. First, although member
states retain their long-standing autonomy in national foreign policy-
making, they all know that they have a strong vested interest in making
CFSP and CSDP work. In these policy areas above all, there is recogni-
tion that, most often, the whole will prove to be greater than the sum of
the parts. Secondly, there is a strong collective desire to achieve results.
For this reason, it is rare for a proposal to come up to the PSC which is
clearly going to run up against some strongly entrenched national inter-
est on the part of one or more member states. What the PSC is in effect
doing is writing on a blank sheet of paper the limits of the possible in
CFSP/CSDP (and, by the same token, the profile of the impossible). It is,
in a sense, creating an entire policy area from scratch. It is a kind of
script-writer for the CSDP narrative. Debates thus tend to turn around
proposals that have a realistic chance of success. In this context, knowing
intimately the sense of the prevalent collective mindset, ambassadors will
sometimes pitch their initial bargaining positions slightly closer to what
they feel would be a consensual position than might have been the case
in, say, the PoCo. Thereafter, as they feel their way through the ensuing
discussion, they know rapidly what margin of manoeuvre exists and are
in a good position to contact the national capital with a suggestion as to
how best to progress business. In this way, although the PSC ambas-
sadors remain under the hierarchical control of their respective Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, their capacity to influence thinking and opinion both
at home and in Brussels is considerable. Mai’a Cross (2011, Chapter 4)
has also studied the PSC in considerable detail and, although she is some-
what less convinced than other analysts about the extent to which the
members of the Committee are deeply socialized into adopting a conver-
gent mindset, she has no doubt whatever that the ‘PSC has the potential
to be enormously powerful, especially as CSDP grows in scope and
range’ (Cross 2011: 142). I have focused at some length on this body
because it has now enjoyed over ten years of existence, has embraced
four or five generations of fresh ambassadors and is arguably the key
institution in CSDP decision-making. It works closely with the three

other institutions which emerged out of the post-Saint-Malo period.
EU Military Committee and EU Military Staff

The European Union Military Committee (EUMC) is the highest EU
military body. It is established within the Council and is formally
composed of the Chiefs of the Defence Staff (CHODs) of the member
states meeting at least biannually, but is normally attended by their mili-
tary representatives (MILREPs) who, in most cases, are double-hatted
with each nation’s NATO representative. France is the significant excep-
tion to this practice. This Committee rapidly imposed itself as a vital
mechanism in the policy-making process. Its ultimate function is to
deliver to the European Council, via the PSC, the unanimous advice of
the 28 CHODs on all matters with a military dimension, as well as
recommendations for action. Such unanimity is essential to the commit-
ment of EU forces to any military operation. Research has been carried
out on the EUMC – largely by Mai’a Cross (Cross 2010; Cross 2011).
This work has been based very largely on interviews. Her analysis is
influenced by sociological institutionalism and tentatively concludes that
‘the group dynamics, shared norms and evolving world-views within
these committees at least in part contribute to whether consensus is possi-
ble and play a part in determining what that consensus will be’ (Cross
2010: 9). Her overall judgement with respect to the EUMC is neverthe-
less unequivocal. This is a committee where the role of expertise, the
impact of a pre-existing common recruitment pattern and common
culture, the intensity and sustained periodicity of meetings (especially
informal meetings), shared professional norms and the ability to
persuade capitals of the wisdom of EU consensus is exceptional. Citing
evidence from the decision-shaping in the run-up to two important mili-
tary missions (EUFOR Chad and NAVFOR Atalanta), she demonstrates
how the esprit de corps of the military representatives in EUMC enables
them ‘to find military solutions that contribute to overcoming political
obstacles stemming from the capitals’. The importance of the permanent
presence of these military representatives (MILREPs) in Brussels also
comes home when, once a year, they are temporarily replaced by the
Chiefs of the Defence Staff (CHODs). Their superior officers, immersed
in national debates, are highly dependent on the MILREPs to brief them
on the niceties and potentialities of EU cooperation. Cross concludes that
‘since their primary goal is to execute successful CSDP operations, and
provide for the common security of EU citizens, they realise that working
together will be necessary for the EU to have efficient and effective plan-
ning and procurement, particularly in the light of declining populations
and defence budgets’. In the longer study (Cross 2011), she notes that
‘The common background and culture of the military epistemic commu-
nity are part of what makes the EUMC more than simply a Council
committee. A natural allegiance exists before the generals arrive in
Brussels, paving the way for them to exercise agency beyond their
instructions, to act as more than the sum of their parts and to go beyond
simple calculations of rationalist bargaining’ (Cross 2011: 171). There is
no doubt that this key military committee of experts plays a fundamental
role in the shaping of policy options on CSDP. Its intergovernmental
structure in no way impedes its capacity to deliberate in objectively
supranational ways. The Chairman of the EUMC is a four-star flag offi-
cer, normally a former Chief of Defence of a member state.
The European Union Military Staff (EUMS) comprises some 150
senior officers from the 27 member states. It provides military expertise
and capacity, including during the conduct of EU-led military opera-
tions. The EUMS works under the political direction of the European
Council (through the PSC) and under the military direction of the
EUMC. Although the EUMS does not act as an operational HQ, it
performs the operational functions of early warning, situation assess-
ment and strategic planning and provides in-house military expertise for
the High Representative. The EUMS is in fact a General Directorate
within the Council General Secretariat and is the only permanent inte-
grated military structure of the European Union.
Initially, all three of these new post-Saint-Malo institutions used to be
housed in the Council building, Justus Lipsius, near Rond-Point
Schuman in Brussels. However, for many civilian officials, the shock to
the system created by the sight of uniformed military officers in that inner
sanctum of civilian power, added to the rapid discovery on the part of the
military officers themselves that, in terms of security, Justus Lipsius was,
to quote Javier Solana, ‘as full of holes as Swiss cheese’, led to the whole-
sale relocation, in 2002, of all ESDP bodies and activities to highly
secured purpose-built accommodation in the nearby Rue Cortenberg.
Committee for Civilian Crisis Management

CIVCOM, the civilian equivalent of EUMC, offers a somewhat different
picture, for a number of reasons. First, the members of this committee are
drawn from a wide range of civilian and diplomatic backgrounds and
lack the cohesive recruitment patterns and culture which characterizes
the diplomatic corps or the military. Second, they meet more frequently
in formal settings and less frequently in informal settings (where social-
ization theory argues that bonding works best – Puetter 2003; Lewis
2010). Third, by its very nature, the work of CIVCOM is relatively new
and experimental and little can be taken for granted about the outcome
of Committee discussions. However, Cross has demonstrated that
CIVCOM representatives nevertheless succeed, just like their EUMC
counterparts, in focusing on the achievement of consensus rather than on
the defence of national red-lines. The socialization processes work in a

variety of ways. First, CIVCOM members (like the initial cohort of PSC
ambassadors) are conscious that they are breaking important new
politico-diplomatic ground. This helps considerably in the forging of an
esprit de corps. Second, there is ‘a common desire to move the EU
forward’ which contributes in important ways to the generation of a
shared mindset. Third, representatives on CIVCOM tend to be younger
than those on the other (more senior) committees and consider it an
exciting opportunity to create something new together. All in all, despite
the obstacles to socialization outlined above, the workings of CIVCOM
also tend to gravitate towards consensus-seeking rather than red-line
defending. Cross even reports delegates ‘text messaging each other across
the table to informally resolve conflicts before they are formally aired in
the negotiation room’. They have all developed appropriate strategies for
handling their respective national capitals, which, in any case, given the
relative newness of this policy field, tend to have fewer red-lines than in
other more sensitive or complex areas of negotiation. Cross nevertheless
details various ways in which the Committee as a group navigated
around the complexities of the EULEX mission in Kosovo (see below,
Chapter 5) which was rendered especially sensitive given the deep divi-
sions within national capitals over the issue of recognition of Kosovo.
Her conclusions are that there is ‘a common expectation that some type
of consensus should be found by the end of the proceedings’ and that
they ‘are driven to leave the meeting room with a completed paper in
hand’. The bottom line is that ‘their advice is rarely rejected by the PSC,
and in that sense they are able to carve out compromise solutions against
the backdrop of competing interests’ (Cross 2010: 30–5). Here again, the
distinction between intergovernmental negotiating and supranational
consensus-building becomes blurred to the point of being virtually mean-
ingless.
The Post-Lisbon Institutions
The Treaty of Lisbon introduced what many assumed were to be the final
institutional adjustments to the EU’s foreign, security and defence policy
procedures (Kurpas et al. 2007; Missiroli 2008; Quille 2008; Cardot
2008; Whitman and Juncos 2009; Laursen 2012). Lisbon came into
being because it was seen by the member states as necessary in order to
increase the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of the EU itself. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the field of CFSP/CSDP. Of the 62 amend-
ments to the previous Treaties introduced by Lisbon, no fewer than 25
concern CFSP/CSDP. Moreover, with the exception of the confusion in
Ireland over that country’s traditional neutrality, the national debates
over these foreign and security aspects of the Treaty gave rise in no
member state to any particular issues of concern. Of course, as is custom-

ary in EU Treaties, the Lisbon Treaty carries two ‘Declarations’ (#s 13
and 14) to the effect that nothing in the Treaty text can ‘prejudice the
specific character of the security and defence policy of the Member
States’. This is a rather casuistic way of saying that if the member states
wish to disregard the Treaty for their own national purposes they are
entitled to do so. The CFSP/CSDP changes introduced by Lisbon can be
analysed under the headings of legal personality, institutional innovation
and new procedures.
Legal Personality
A new Article 46A appears in the Lisbon Treaty and states, succinctly
and seemingly innocuously, that ‘The Union shall have legal personal-
ity’. Although hardly earth-shattering in its implications, this article
nevertheless represents a breakthrough. During the 2002–4 discussions
on the Constitutional Treaty, proposals to give the EU legal personality
had been vigorously opposed by several member states, including – most
vociferously – the UK. The objections were somewhat recondite – not to
say disingenuous – in view of the fact that under the two previous
Treaties (Rome and Nice – and indeed the Euratom Treaty of 1957), the
entity covered by the treaty text had already enjoyed legal personality.
Apparently, for some, the fact of conferring on a single actor – the newly
empowered EU, which the Maastricht Treaty had enjoined ‘to assert its
identity on the international scene in particular through the implemen-
tation of a common foreign and security policy’ – the status of ‘legal
personality’ seemed like one abandonment of sovereignty too many.
However, discussions at the highest level in the run-up to the drafting of
what was to become the Lisbon Treaty led to agreement – including
with London – on the attribution of this key juridical status. In part,
consensus arose because, in practice, as the EU engaged in ESDP opera-
tions, the Council was concluding treaties with sovereign states –
notably in the Balkans – thereby conferring upon the EU de facto legal
personality.
What this implies in international law is that the entity in question
(here, the EU) acquires the capacity to act in the international arena, but
not necessarily the competence – which continues to depend on the agree-
ment of the member states. Nevertheless, the acquisition by the EU of
legal personality henceforth gives it a status in international law which
can only enhance its capacity to act with a single voice. This is particu-
larly the case with respect to treaty-making powers and with respect to
diplomatic representation. In addition, it opens the door for formal EU
membership in bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and
others. These developments do not, of course, undermine the sovereignty
of the EU’s member states, but they do mean that, increasingly, the EU
will be in a position, in parallel with its member states, to be seen and

heard on the international stage (De Schoutheete and Andoura 2007).
Institutional Developments
In the aftermath of the Cold War, as the world became more complex
and less stable, it seemed self-evident that if the EU as a whole was to
exercise influence in an emerging multipolar world, it could only be
through the formulation and implementation of a common approach to
the major issues of international relations. Throughout the 1990s, we
witnessed a constant process of ‘Brusselsization’: the birth of the Council
Secretariat as the necessary corollary to the Single Market; the creation
of the original post of High Representative as the inevitable consequence
of CFSP itself; the creation of the Political and Security Committee (PSC)
as the logical successor to the inefficient, peripatetic and politically inad-
equate Political Committee. The Lisbon Treaty is replete with further
moves in the same direction. However, Brusselsization is not synony-
mous with executive unity. Nor does it signify a concomitant reduction
in the global impulses of national foreign ministries. Everybody knew
that Lisbon would be the start, rather than the culmination, of a process
of political horse-trading and institutional jostling in which the job
profiles, the procedures, the mechanisms and the personnel of these new
positions would be the prey of a host of individuals and agencies.
Throughout the decade-long process of EU Treaty Review, most
commentators were agreed that the key institutional innovation of what
eventually became Lisbon would be the introduction of the double-
hatted post of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy and Vice-President of the Commission (HR-VP). At the same time,
the new position of President of the European Council was intended to
provide longevity, stability, coherence and visibility for the Union’s high-
est agency. Many analysts foresaw early turf battles between these two
high profile positions, but most assumed that those battles would help
define and refine the job descriptions of the two post-holders which, in
the text of the Treaty, remain overly vague.
The appointments, in November 2009, of Herman Van Rompuy as
President of the Council and of Catherine Ashton as High Representative
and Vice-President of the Comission were controversial and even some-
what accidental. They have been analysed in some depth elsewhere and
there is little point in rehearsing the procedure here (Barber 2010; Rüger
2011; Howorth 2011). Both appointees were, by the very nature of the
positions they assumed, new to the job and nobody imagined that carry-
ing out their functions would be easy. Many analysts had nevertheless
believed that these positions were designed to foster much-needed EU
leadership from the heart of Brussels. Many candidates of serious stature
and leadership potential had been mentioned as appropriate choices. But
the two individuals chosen were markedly lacking in any experience of

international leadership and neither had any significant political stature.
It was the signal conveyed by these appointments which was received
with such bewilderment around the world. That signal – from the heads
of state and government of the EU’s 27 member states – appeared to
amount to a message that the Union per se would not be setting any agen-
das or taking any initiatives on the world stage. There would be no new
telephone number for Henry Kissinger – or for Barack Obama. The
German press even invented a word for the phenomenon,
Selbstverzwergung, indicating the determination to remain a dwarf
(Graw 2009). EU foreign and security policy, the message appeared to
read, would stay firmly in the hands of the member states (meaning, for
all practical purposes, Germany, France and the UK). What might one
reasonably have expected of the performance of Europe’s new top post-
holders during their first term? First, they both needed to carve out a
clear remit for their respective responsibilities. They needed to stamp
their mark on their function in relation to other players and stakeholders.
But second, they needed to show clear results which could be directly
attributed to their specific input(s). These might be considered to be mini-
mal expectations for a successful start.
The President of the Council

Article 9B(6) of the Treaty of Lisbon states (somewhat parsimoniously)
that the President of the Council is expected to:
chair [the Council] and drive forward its work; ensure the preparation
and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation
with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of
the General Affairs Council; endeavour to facilitate cohesion and
consensus within the European Council; present a report to the
European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European
Council; and, at his level and in that capacity (my stress), ensure the
external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common
foreign and security policy.
Some of these functions (preparation and reports) are essentially secretar-

ial. The only potentially executive tasks are: driving forward Council
work; and facilitating cohesion and consensus. Van Rompuy made a
valiant effort to ‘drive forward’ the work of the Council. He himself may
have appeared mild-mannered, but his dynamic chef de cabinet, the senior
Belgian ambassador Frans van Daele, was anything but. Van Daele
reportedly announced in February 2010 that the European Council would
henceforth enjoy ‘policy initiative’, and suggested that the meetings of
heads of state and government should become monthly rather than
trimestrial. Van Rompuy himself came up with some new policy initia-
tives even before taking up his position. In a speech in Brussels on 15
November 2009, he announced a plan to institute EU-wide taxes to be
paid directly to the Union. Not surprisingly, since such innovations would
inevitably be opposed by powerful forces across the Union (and particu-
larly by the member states), none of this was in fact to happen.
Van Rompuy’s task of demonstrating that he had ‘taken over’ the
rotating presidency of the Union was not assisted by the Spanish prime
minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who in January 2010, in a brazen
demonstration of political showmanship, launched the Spanish
Presidency of the EU with even greater razzamatazz than is normally the
case with these events. Most observers could be forgiven for having been
under the impression that the rotating Presidency was one of the main
victims of Lisbon. Not so. While the rotating Presidency of the European
Council has been replaced by the permanent President of the Council
(Herman van Rompuy) and while the rotating Presidency of the Foreign
Affairs Council has been abolished in favour of a permanent representa-
tive of the HR-VP – all other Council formations will continue to rotate,
on a semestrial basis, as in the past. Nevertheless, this should have led
Spain (the first member state to experience this form of presidential
‘demotion’) to adopt an appropriately modest profile for the inaugura-
tion of the EU’s first post-Lisbon presidency. But Zapatero valued the
electorally precious high-profile status which the Presidency offered.
Hence the rather comical January 2010 event in Madrid at which the six-
month ‘Spanish Presidency of the EU’ was launched – in the presence not
only of (rotating) ‘President’ Zapatero, but also of the President of the
European Commission, and of the new (authentic?) President Herman
van Rompuy. How many Presidents does it take to run the EU? Lisbon
was becoming confusing. The Belgian Presidency of the EU (July to
December 2010) was a much lower profile event, in part dictated by the
fact that Belgium actually lacked a government at the time. When
Hungary, with even greater modesty, took over the rotating EU
Presidency in January 2011, commentators noted that, finally, this relic
of the original Treaty was being brought down to size.
As far as ‘assuring external representation’ was concerned, the
Council President also initially stumbled. The meaning of the phrase in
Article 9B(6) ‘at his level and in that capacity’ is that the post-holder
would expect to interact with third country heads of state or government.
It therefore came as a blow to van Rompuy when Barack Obama
cancelled the scheduled EU–US summit in spring 2010 partially on the
grounds that it remained unclear in Washington who really represented
the Union. Van Rompuy had to wait until November 2010 before
formally having the opportunity to act ‘at his level’ in meeting Obama, at
the (two-hour) EU–US ‘summit’ which was hastily tacked onto the end of
the NATO summit in Lisbon.
In terms of meeting minimal expectations, therefore, everything

hinged on van Rompuy’s ability to fulfil the critical task of ‘facilitating
cohesion and consensus in the Council’. His first year in office was
massively dominated by unforeseen ‘events’, in particular the European
(particularly the Greek) sovereign debt crisis. In March 2010, at the
height of the crisis, the European Council set up a task force in order to
devise proposals for better budgetary discipline and an improved crisis
resolution framework. Van Rompuy was asked to chair it. As if that task
were not difficult enough in and of itself, van Rompuy also found himself
in direct competition with the European Commission, which had estab-
lished its own task force on economic governance. There ensued an
unseemly battle over ‘policy initiative’, the Commission arguing that it
alone had the authority to introduce new legislation, van Rompuy ripost-
ing that his remit derived directly from the Council. In the event, the task
proved to be one of jointly discovering the limits of member state toler-
ance and of treading a fine line between the drivers of the new policy
(Germany and France) and the resisters. In this task, van Rompuy proved
highly effective. The agreed measures were adopted by the European
Council on 29 October 2010.
However, the President of the European Council’s task remains a
complex balancing act in which he enjoys little margin of manoeuvre.
The policy area at the heart of van Rompuy’s work through 2013 was the
eurozone economy, an area for which, as a specialist on the Belgian
budget crisis, he was well prepared. But this also proved to be an area in
which the fundamental interests of the member states were both on the
front line and in conflict. Van Rompuy was never completely in the
driving seat. This reality came home with full force on 4 February 2011
when the German Chancellor and the French President bulldozed onto
the agenda of the special Council summit their new plans for a
‘Competitiveness Pact’ – without even informing the Council President in
advance. Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy had recently squared
their long-standing differences over economic governance when Merkel
decided to become the lead designer of what was essentially a French
project to end wage indexation, raise retirement ages and lock debt limits
into national constitutions (Guérot 2010). Van Rompuy found himself
caught between a rock and a hard place. As a citizen of a small state, he
was well-placed to understand the outrage expressed by several smaller
nations after the Merkel–Sarkozy diktat. But as a realist, he knew that he
had no alternative but to pay close attention to the leaders of the EU’s
two most powerful states. Eventually his keen sense of political reality,
his managerial skills and his negotiating tenacity paid off. Van Rompuy
proved central in coordinating the inputs of the European Commission,
the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank to the ground-breaking
December 2012 proposals of the ‘four presidents’ on a genuine economic
and monetary union (Van Rompuy 2012).
Unlike Catherine Ashton, van Rompuy enjoyed a relatively benign

press. Summing up his first year in office, one noted correspondent gave
a guarded thumbs-up: ‘In difficult times, he did what was expected of
him, even though it required non-stop improvisation. He didn’t mess
anything up and he is respected by the Europe-watchers’ (Kramer 2010).
Others, more critical, argued that van Rompuy had failed to act as a
‘President’ and had elected to act as a ‘Secretary General’, in effect prov-
ing to be largely at the beck and call of the member states (Cohn-Bendit
2010). Ironically, one of van Rompuy’s expected functions was to
embody the ‘single voice’ with which the EU might speak to the world.
On addressing the Munich Security Conference in February 2011,
however, he overtly denied that very objective: ‘A common foreign policy
is not about speaking with a single voice, but about giving the same key
messages. Like we did last week on Egypt: many voices, one coherent
message’ (Van Rompuy 2011). This was an unfortunate choice of words
since there could scarcely be a more telling example of the EU’s basic
disunity and lack of common vision than in the cacophony which arose
from the Northern shores of the Mediterranean to respond to events on
its Southern shores in early 2011 (IISS 2011). Nevertheless, as van
Rompuy prepared to retire from the Presidency in 2014, scholars and
commentators were agreed that he had acquitted himself remarkably
well and had in fact defined and shaped an important institutional posi-
tion on which his successors would be able to build (Closa 2012).
Member states had been concerned in the early discussions about this
post that it would attract a ‘mover and shaker’ like Tony Blair. Van
Rompuy demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to be effective with a
much lower profile. Against all initial expectations, van Rompuy could
turn out to be a hard act to follow.
The High Representative-Vice President

The institutional position which was invested with the greatest signifi-
cance during the entire period of institutional reform which stretched
from the Treaty of Nice to the Treaty of Lisbon was the enhanced post of
High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, double-
hatted as the Vice President of the Commission. The Consolidated
Version of the Lisbon Treaty (2012) details a number of specific tasks for
the HR-VP:
Article 18 states that:
The European Council, acting by a qualified majority, with the agree-

ment of the President of the Commission, shall appoint the High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
The European Council may end his term of office by the same proce-
dure.
The High Representative shall conduct the Union’s common foreign

and security policy. He shall contribute by his proposals to the devel-
opment of that policy, which he shall carry out as mandated by the
Council. The same shall apply to the common security and defence
policy.
The High Representative shall preside over the Foreign Affairs

Council.
The High Representative shall be one of the Vice-Presidents of the

Commission. He shall ensure the consistency of the Union’s external
action. He shall be responsible within the Commission for responsi-
bilities incumbent on it in external relations and for coordinating
other aspects of the Union’s external action.
Article 27 states that:
The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy, who shall chair the Foreign Affairs Council, shall contribute
through his proposals to the development of the common foreign and
security policy and shall ensure implementation of the decisions
adopted by the European Council and the Council.
The High Representative shall represent the Union for matters relating
to the common foreign and security policy. He shall conduct political
dialogue with third parties on the Union’s behalf and shall express the
Union’s position in international organisations and at international
conferences.
In fulfilling his mandate, the High Representative shall be assisted by

a European External Action Service.
This amounts to an enormous remit. The logic behind this institutional

innovation was twofold. The first driver was the perceived necessity to
draw the lessons of the constitutional reform process with respect to
foreign and security policy as they had become apparent during the
decade-long discussions from Nice to Lisbon. These focused on much-
needed improvements to both the coherence and the visibility of
CFSP/CSDP. There were three main reasons for this. The first was polit-
ical: the widely perceived desirability of ever greater coordination of the
foreign and security policies of the EU’s member states. The second was
operational: the need for synergies, on the ground, between the main
thrusts of CFSP and CSDP: trade, development aid, humanitarian assis-
tance and crisis management. The third was institutional: the growing
recognition by member states that effective international action on the

part of the EU required the existence, in Brussels, of centralized decision-
shaping agencies. These were not reasons dreamed up in Brussels by
starry-eyed Europhiles. They reflect the collective wisdom of the EU’s 27
member states, as it emerged from the 2002–4 Constitutional
Convention and its sequel. It was, after all, the member states which
unanimously authorized the new institutional arrangements.
The second driver was the increasing recognition that, in a Union of
28, the rotating Presidency of the European Council no longer made
sense as far as foreign and security policy were concerned. Initially
conceived as both a statement of membership equality between the orig-
inal Six, and an empirical form of apprenticeship in leadership, the
arrangement had become internally dysfunctional and externally mysti-
fying (Jesien 2013). It detracted markedly from the visibility of
CFSP/CSDP. By deciding that the High Representative post-holder
should have one foot in the Council and one foot in the Commission, the
architects of what finally became the Treaty of Lisbon attempted to
square the circle of decision-making in foreign and security policy which
had hitherto been rooted both in the supranational mode of communi-
tarian procedures epitomized by the Commission and in the intergovern-
mental mode of unanimity dear to the Council. In short, they wished to
put an end to the parallel existences of the original High Representative
and the Commissioner for External Relations. Since the member states
would never have countenanced the simple ‘communitarization’ of
foreign and security policy (i.e. agreeing that it could be decided by
QMV) – thereby ruling out the merging of the two positions within the
Commission – and since the Commission would never have agreed to
hand over its responsibilities for overseas trade, enlargement, develop-
ment aid, etc. to the Council, the only logical course of action was
double-hatting. It should be noted immediately that neither Javier Solana
nor Chris Patten (the post-holders whose posts were to be merged) was
in favour of this policy, each arguing that their respective portfolio was
real enough, distinct enough and full enough to occupy a full-time offi-
cial. Solana himself believed that the double-hatted position would prove
almost impossible to fill. Nevertheless, Europe’s leaders were determined
to fill it.
However, instead of attempting to identify the most appropriate (i.e.
the most qualified) person for the job, the member states introduced
arcane criteria such as citizenship of a small state or a large state, a
Northern state or a Southern state, right- or left-wing political affiliation,
and even gender. Since the Presidency of the Commission had already
gone to José Manuel Barroso (a right-of-centre male from a small
Southern state), EU ‘logic’ dictated that one of the two remaining top
jobs had to go to a left-of-centre politician from a large Northern state –
if possible a woman. In the months prior to the appointment, many
names were thrown into the ring, including those of several high-profile
women. Potential appointees included the former Swedish prime minis-
ter and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt; the former Governor of Hong Kong
and European Commissioner for External Affairs, Chris Patten; the
former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer; the former
German foreign minister Joschka Fischer; the then serving German
foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier; the about-to-become Greek
prime minister George Papandreou; the high-flying French Foreign
Minister Bernard Kouchner; the long-serving Finnish European
Commissioner Olli Rehn; the former Italian prime minister and foreign
minister Massimo d’Alema. Among high profile potential female
appointees in the conversation were Greek foreign minister and former
Mayor of Athens Dora Bakoyannis; the former President of Ireland,
Mary Robinson; the former President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga.
All of these individuals were considered to be serious players on the inter-
national stage, internationally well-known and respected foreign policy
heavyweights. Instead, the EU chose Catherine Ashton, a virtually
unknown British politician who had been given a life peerage in 1999
when she was Chair of the Health Authority of the UK county of
Hertfordshire. She had subsequently held three minor ministerial posi-
tions before being appointed in October 2008 to replace Peter
Mandelson as the EU Trade Commissioner. She had barely been in that
job one year when she was catapulted to the post of HR-VP. The
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle commented thus: ‘Never elected by
anyone, anywhere, totally unqualified for almost every job she has done,
she has risen to her current position presumably through a combination
of down-the-line Stalinist political correctness and the fact that she has
the charisma of a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey’ (Liddle 2009). This
turned out to be one of the kinder comments on the first HR-VP
postholder.
What conclusions can one draw from this regarding the calculations
(or absence thereof) of Europe’s leaders? Was the appointment of
Catherine Ashton little other than a cynical backroom stitch-up between
three or four European leaders who appeared not to consider the job as
being of any particular importance? Was it an exercise in Realpolitik
whose primary objective was to appoint somebody who would be read-
ily subordinated to the power dictates of a handful of executives? Was it
an inspired choice involving a hitherto little-known official with hidden
talents who (her backers were nevertheless confident) would surprise
everybody by her personal qualities and political acumen? Was it merely
an experiment – to see how this post would pan out? Was it a mistake?
‘Euro-realist’ commentators had a field day explaining to those who had
hoped for more high-profile appointees that no single individual –
however technically qualified or politically astute – could possibly have
made any difference to the EU’s position on the world stage since ‘no
amount of institutional tinkering can circumvent the need for national

governments to agree in order that policies be adopted’ (Menon 2009).
This is true, but only partially true. Of course, the adoption of common
foreign policy preferences requires agreement among the member states.
But that agreement can be considerably facilitated by having in post, in
Brussels, individuals of genuine stature, with a deep knowledge of the
issues, possessed of strategic vision, who are able clearly to formulate the
available options, and persuasively to indicate a way forward. The job
description itself remained largely to be written by the incumbent. It is
significant that the original 2004 title, emerging from the Constitutional
Convention, had been Union Minister for Foreign Affairs and that this
had been deliberately watered down (largely under British pressure) in
the Lisbon Treaty text to High Representative. Everybody knows what
the word Minister means, even if the notion of a ‘Union Minister’ was an
innovation. But nobody was (or is) quite sure what a High
Representative is supposed to do. There was, from the outset, no matter
who the incumbent was, a choice to be made, between, on the one hand,
a secretary, and on the other hand, a general, between a follower and a
leader, between reactive and proactive instincts, between a coordinator
and a doer, between a tactician and a strategist.
It cannot be concluded that those involved in the appointments proce-
dure (the heads of state or government convening as the European
Council) undervalued the position. The European Council had, for the
better part of a decade, believed that the appointment was both politi-
cally essential and institutionally unavoidable. Nor can it be concluded
that the Ashton appointment reflected nervousness or reluctance on the
part of Europe’s leaders to appoint heavyweights to key positions. It has
been argued that ‘the Heads of State and Government wanted exactly
her’ since she fit the criteria and could be ‘kept on a short leash’ (Rüger
2011: 218). But that is too cynical a view. After all, most Presidents of the
European Commission (an agency viewed with suspicion by most major
European leaders) have been major high profile political actors. The orig-
inal appointee to the High Representative position, Javier Solana, had
been Spanish foreign minister and Secretary General of NATO. Although
Solana’s legacy is still to be written, most impartial observers concluded
that he performed remarkably well within the political constraints of the
position (Müller-Brandeck-Boquet and Rüger 2011a).
In the case of the Ashton appointment, there is precious little evidence
that it was a consciously inspired choice on the part of Europe’s leaders.
Some of them may have envisaged it as an experiment. However, all
things considered, it has to be concluded that it was mostly something of
an accident. It was in large part a media management crisis confronting
Gordon Brown which dictated the outcome. Brown had long hoped he
could deliver the Presidency of the Council appointment for Tony Blair.
The fact that he had failed to realize, until far too late, that Blair had no
backers anywhere else in the EU spoke volumes about the feebleness of

Brown’s European antennae. Brown’s next pitch was to try to secure for
Britain a top economics/commerce job: the post of Commissioner for the
Internal Market. But he had also left that too late. Sarkozy, whose
European antennae are finely tuned, had already secured that job for
France’s Michel Barnier. In desperation, and with the connivance of
fellow ‘big state’ leaders Merkel and Sarkozy, Brown agreed to try to find
a British candidate for the HR-VP job. But all his credible candidates
proved to be either uninterested (David Miliband, Geoffrey Hoon, John
Hutton) or unacceptable to both Paris and Berlin (Peter Mandelson). On
the very eve of the ‘appointments summit’ in November 2009, it seemed
that the UK would leave the meeting with empty hands – a political disas-
ter for the beleaguered Brown. In the event, it was José Manuel Barroso
who suggested Ashton. Did she not meet all the criteria – a left-of-centre
female from a large Northern state? The fact that she was totally
unknown in Europe (and virtually unknown in Britain), that she had zero
foreign policy experience, and had never been elected to anything, were
less important in this process than the fact that Brown could claim a
minor triumph and that Barroso would wind up with a colleague as Vice
President of the Commission who, to put it diplomatically, would be
unlikely to cause him sleepless nights. Thus was the appointment sealed
– and nobody was more surprised than Catherine Ashton herself
(Charlemagne 2009).
The record of Ashton’s five years in office (2009–14) must await the
judgement of history. I offered my own initial verdict when she had been
in the job two years (Howorth 2011) and three years later I maintain that
negative opinion. I believe that a large majority of commentators and
analysts share that view. At its most generous, scholarship on Ashton’s
tenure concludes with ambivalence (Rüger 2012). It would be tedious to
dredge up the endless barrage of mud-slinging which accompanied her
brief career as ‘the EU’s foreign policy chief’ – as she was regularly
dubbed by the media. The big question raised by Ashton’s tenure is not
so much that of discovering why she was so ineffective, but that of decid-
ing whether the job is in fact doable. Unlike, for example, the US
Secretary of State (to which position that of HR-VP is often compared),
there are major problems with the EU post. The HR-VP is not working
‘for’ or ‘with’ a powerful executive President, so there is no clear politi-
cal programme or direction to follow. Moreover, the member states (and
particularly the large and powerful ones) have little intention of letting
the HR-VP assume an automatic lead on policy issues, particularly sensi-
tive ones. So s/he is unlikely to be allowed to create her/his own political
direction, especially if it is proactive and robust. This structural reality
was compounded in Ashton’s case by inexperience in the field of diplo-
macy and security. The record during the Arab Spring was extremely
telling. Ashton hesitated to draft any statement until she had cleared it
with all 27 foreign ministers. In the words of the Economist, ‘is this
admirable respect for smaller member states or worrying timidity?’
(Charlemagne 2011).
This inability to exercise leadership is not an absolute impossibility in
the HR-VP position. Most EU member states have no problem with the
notion that somebody needs to steer the ship. During her confirmation
hearings, Ashton told the European Parliament that she saw herself as a
‘facilitator rather than a doer’. ‘Her vision’, remarked one EU diplomat,
‘is inferior to the mandate she was given.’ Franziska Brantner, of the
German Green Party, echoed this sentiment by insisting that ‘Mrs Ashton
does not have to wait for consensus among the 27. She could take her
own initiatives, but she chooses not to’ (EU Business 2011). There in fact,
is the rub. The HR-VP post-holder is caught somewhere between a
responsibility to coordinate and a responsibility to exercise some
measure of leadership. In addition, she shuns the limelight and seems ill-
at-ease with the Brussels media-pack who consistently accuse her of
‘invisibility’.
Another problem with the position is precisely its ‘double-hatted’ or
even ‘triple-hatted’ responsibilities. The objective of replacing the rotat-
ing Presidency in foreign and security policy with a permanent position
was laudable. The logic behind locating the position in both the Council
and the Commission – in order to defuse turf battles and foster coherence
– was commendable. But in practice the incompatible physical demands
of the post produce two problems. One is that it is literally impossible to
discharge all the responsibilities that befall the post-holder. To be
expected to attend meetings of the European Council, to chair the
Foreign Affairs Council, to attend meetings of the College of
Commissioners as well as special Commission meetings in the areas of
Enlargement, Neighbourhood, Development and Humanitarian
Assistance (all of which dossiers were denied the HR by the machinations
of the Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso) (Gros-Verheyde
2010; Charlemagne 2010), to chair the European Defence Agency, plus
ad hoc meetings of the EU defence ministers, as well as to run the EEAS
and to represent the EU at summit meetings and other events around the
world – all of this is wildly unrealistic. Ashton found herself very often
expected to be in several places – indeed in several countries – at the same
time. This left her vulnerable to criticism from all those venues she had to
neglect. In 2013, she recalled ‘a very sad day when I went to five coun-
tries in one day and was still criticized for not going to the United States’
(Rettman 2013). At the same time, this multiple institutional belonging
does not, in fact, help foster coherence. Interagency competition is a fact
of life in governmental and intergovernmental organizations and to place
one individual directly in the firing line is hardly a wise move. It is a little
like sending unarmed peacekeepers into a civil war zone where there is no
peace to be kept. The fact of belonging to the Council and the
Commission succeeded in making her enemies in both bodies, and this

was exacerbated by the personal animosities between some members in
her cabinet and senior officials in both the Council and the Commission
(Interviews in Brussels 2010). On her appointment, Ashton faced four
main challenges. First, at an institutional level, she needed to demon-
strate a serious capacity to calm the debilitating turf wars between the
Council and the Commission. Second, she needed gently to nudge the EU
into exercising some leverage over the major security policy challenges of
the coming years. Third, she needed to develop strategic vision. Finally,
she needed to preside over the creation of a functional and smooth-
running External Action Service. Of these, she was successful in one only:
the creation of the EEAS. It is to this final institutional innovation that we
now turn.
The European External Action Service

The Treaty of Lisbon has relatively little to say about the EEAS. Article
27(3) states:
In fulfilling his mandate, the High Representative shall be assisted by

a European External Action Service. This service shall work in coop-
eration with the diplomatic services of the Member States and shall
comprise officials from relevant departments of the General
Secretariat of the Council and of the Commission as well as staff
seconded from national diplomatic services of the Member States. The
organisation and functioning of the European External Action Service
shall be established by a decision of the Council. The Council shall act
on a proposal from the High Representative after consulting the
European Parliament and after obtaining the consent of the
Commission.
The launch of the Service was Catherine Ashton’s first and main priority
in the 12 months after her appointment. In this, she had to do battle with
the European Parliament, with the Commission (particularly with José
Manuel Barroso), with the member states and with the media. On 18
March 2010, two heavyweight MEPs, Elmar Brok and Guy Verhofstadt,
generated a ‘non-paper’ arguing that the Service should be an agency of
the European Commission, that the European Parliament should have
oversight of the service’s budget, personnel, aid policy and ratification
procedures, and that there should be public parliamentary hearings for
the top positions. One week later, Ashton issued her counter-proposal:
that the EEAS should be an autonomous agency reporting directly to the
HR-VP, that it should be equally answerable to the Council, the
Commission and the member states, and that it should have a pyramidal
hierarchy headed by a powerful Secretary General. There then ensued a
battle royal between the two sides, the MEPs threatening to veto the
entire project unless she made concessions to their approach. On 26 April
2010, she won the unanimous support of the Foreign Affairs Council.
The stand-off with the EP was eventually resolved in bilateral discussions
and a compromise adopted in mid-June 2010. The compromise revolved
around three main issues. First, the EEAS, as Ashton had proposed,
became an autonomous body (and not an agency of the Commission),
but it works ‘in close coordination’ with the Commission. Secondly, the
hierarchical structure was relaxed through the appointment of a number
of co-equal Directors General. Thirdly, where the MEPs wanted Senate-
style powers to vet top jobs, they had to settle for closed-door hearings
but no veto. Establishing this Service within one year, and seeing off the
rival claims of the Commission and the Parliament was no mean accom-
plishment and must be largely credited to Ashton’s perseverance and
bargaining skills – although it must be recognized that she enjoyed the
full backing of the member states, a crucial component in any victory in
today’s EU institutional maze (Missiroli 2010; Keukeleire et al. 2010;
Hannay 2011; Graesli 2011; Barysch et al. 2011).
The Service opened with little fanfare on 1 December 2010 while its
staff members were still located in eight separate buildings close to the
Rond-Point Schuman in Brussels. Throughout 2011, they were progres-
sively centralized in the newly constructed Triangle Building, mid-way
between the Council and the Commission buildings at the apex of the
Rue de la Loi. The staff is roughly drawn in equal thirds from the Council
Secretariat, the Commission and the member states. The EEAS is
intended to act as a unified diplomatic corps for the EU, in the service of
both CFSP and CSDP. It comprises 3,400 staff and 139 Delegations
around the world. A glance at the Service’s organigramme suggests that
it has developed into an immensely complex organization (http://eeas.
europa.eu/background/docs/organisation_en.pdf).
Headed directly by the HR-VP, it has two executives, the veteran
French diplomat Pierre Vimont as Executive Secretary General, and the
long-time Brussels insider David O’Sullivan as Chief Operating Officer.
Although the original idea was that Vimont would deal with external
affairs and O’Sullivan with the internal management of the Service (this
partly in response to the Parliament’s concern about centralized author-
ity), in practice things worked out rather differently. The two executives
informally took charge of different parts of the world. It is likely that
these two posts will be merged after the mid-term review. Below them are
two deputy secretaries general, Helga Schmid and Maciej Popowski.
These five top post-holders constitute the Corporate Board. There are
then eight managing directors, five of them geographic (covering
Asia/Pacific, Africa, Europe and Central Asia, North Africa and the
Middle East, and the Americas – North and South) and three of them
functional (Administration and Finance, Global and Multilateral Issues,
and Crisis Response and Operational Coordination). There is an entirely

separate structure covering security policy and CSDP, and another deal-
ing with political affairs. The organigramme also claims responsibility
for four somewhat autonomous agencies, the Satellite Centre, the
Defence Agency, the Institute for Security Studies, and the Security and
Defence College, although these are not strictly part of the Service, but do
report directly to the HR.
The ‘crown jewels’ of the Service (Balfour and Raik 2013: 62) are the
136 worldwide Delegations, which took over from the previous
Commission representations. These are progressively being upgraded to
formal embassy status and their heads enjoy full ambassadorial status.
These envoys consider themselves as the representatives not only of both
the Council and the Commission, but also of the member states – to the
extent to which there is a common EU position. They do not duplicate
the bilateral relationship between EU member states and third coun-
tries. While it is likely that a number of the smaller EU member states
will progressively merge their own embassies into the EU Delegations,
this will not happen in the case of the larger member states with exten-
sive diplomatic presence abroad (Comelli and Matarazzo 2011;
Drieskens 2012). This poses immediately the major issue confronting
the EEAS: its relationship to the foreign ministries of the member states
– particularly the large ones. How is the Service expected to cope with
what some have seen as its ‘contradictory mandates’. On the one hand,
it is expected to coordinate the diplomatic activities of the member
states, to generate new – collective – ideas and approaches, indeed to
exercise some measure of diplomatic leadership. Yet on the other hand,
it must not ‘step on the toes of national diplomacies, or interfere with
national priorities and interests’ (Balfour and Raik 2013: 13). In the
run-up to the EEAS’s own internal review in 2013, several think-tanks
produced their own suggestions for the Service going forward. The
European Policy Centre and the Finnish Institute of International
Affairs focused strongly in their joint recommendations on the challenge
of relations between the EEAS and the member state MFAs. Their
proposals, for the former, included making the political reporting from
the EU delegations essential reading in the national capitals; building
shared ownership through enhanced and regular consultation; encour-
aging Brussels officials to work in the Delegations; developing an EEAS
‘right of initiative’ which would enhance the Service’s role as the key
policy entrepreneur in the EU; and creating a distinctive esprit de corps.
As for the member state MFAs, the report recommended sharing more
information with the EEAS in order to generate a two-way flow; offer-
ing foreign ministers to deputize for the overstretched HR; implement-
ing budget cuts and downsizing in tight liaison with the EEAS; and
making a career in the EEAS the voie royale for aspiring European
diplomats (Balfour and Raik 2013: 63–4). These are all great ideas, but
true synergies between the collective Service and the member states will
only come over time as positions converge.
Another set of constructive proposals was formulated by the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in London. The authors of that report
concluded that the EEAS faced three major challenges: ‘a strategy chal-
lenge, a leadership challenge and a delivery challenge’ (Hemra et al.
2011: vi). These are not insignificant issues. There has been little evidence
of any attempt on the part of the HR-VP to deliver on the promise of her
Athens speech on ‘Europe and the World’ in July 2010 in which she
spoke of the need to frame CSDP missions ‘in a strategy that makes sense,
a strategy that gives us a Foreign Policy fit for the European Union of the
21st century’ (Ashton 2010). We will deal with the issue of the EU’s (lack
of) strategic vision or grand strategy in Chapter 7. Suffice it to say that,
in the EEAS’s own mid-term Review in July 2013, strategy had somehow
been overlooked (EEAS 2013). On leadership, another area where most
commentators see a need for massive improvement, the Chatham House
report called for intellectual leadership, a sense of risk-taking and
creative foreign policy execution as well as dividing up leadership roles
according to competence and expertise. Finally, the report made a
number of recommendations on delivering the EEAS strategy (once it
had been generated). These included greater focus on priority areas such
as the EU’s strategic partners, sub-regional hubs, fragile states and the
neighbourhood. Similar recommendations were forthcoming from the
papers issued by the Centre for European Policy Studies (Helwig et al.
2013) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Lehne
2011). Stefan Lehne’s measured but wide-ranging criticism of the EEAS
was all the more devastating coming from a soft-spoken former Austrian
diplomat with a strong sense of nuance. Focusing on the fact that the
Commission retained control of policy areas such as Enlargement and
Development, and noting that Ashton is largely absent from meetings of
these former Relex Commissioners, he concluded that ‘the post-Lisbon
arrangements actually represent a step backward. The gap between
foreign policy in a narrow sense and Community competences has thus
widened. The EU finds it even more difficult than before to integrate the
various components into an integrated strategy’ (Lehne 2011: 9). The
CEPS report, like that of the EEAS itself, focused initially on the inter-
institutional niceties of the Service’s relations with the remainder of the
Brussels CFSP/CSDP machinery. While this is clearly of interest to those
professionals who need to make sense of how (or whether) policy is actu-
ally being developed, that dimension is probably of less interest to the
readers of this book. Specific recommendations from CEPS included
enhanced leadership (again, with an emphasis on focus and priorities),
coordination (with a proposal to strengthen the role of the HR-VP) and
acting as an information hub (under which the EEAS would become a
‘one-stop-shop’ for foreign policy expertise. There is, clearly, a long way
to go before we get to that point. The most comprehensive set of recom-

mendations for the Service came from the report issued by the European
Parliament (Brok and Gualtieri 2013). I shall subsume its findings into an
assessment of the Service’s own self-criticism.
In July 2013, the EEAS issued its own internal mid-term Review (EEAS
2013), as had been required on its establishment. The Review is 18 pages
long (un-numbered), which makes it by far the shortest of all the docu-
ments generated about the EEAS’s future. It shows every sign of having
been written by a word-processor since there are several instances of repe-
tition of entire sections of a paragraph which have been re-positioned but
not rationalized. The Review is very long on process and very short on
substance. It contains virtually nothing about strategic objectives – other
than to list the types of policy papers its drafts. It is silent about its own
raison d’être or ambition, policy-making or methodology in the EU’s
approach to the outside world. It says very little about its interaction with
its international partners and all too little about the key issue of relations
with the member states. By repeatedly insisting that most relationships
with the other Brussels-based institutions, particularly the Commission,
are ‘working well’, it might be accused of struthiousness (a delightfully
appropriate word which I invite readers to look up). Most analysts
consider that relations between the Service and the Commission are
dreadful, with each seeking to grab outposts of the other’s empire. The
lion’s share of the Review consists of a series of sections detailing relations
with the other institutions (Commission, Council, Parliament), each of
which is a study in understatement. A section on ‘Performance against
targets’ focuses exclusively on staffing policy (geographical balance,
gender balance and equality of opportunities). A series of 26 short-term
recommendations and nine medium-term recommendations revolve
almost exclusively around the internal working of the Service – to such an
extent that one is led to wonder about the externality of the service. Some
proposals pushed by the European Parliament (rationalization and reduc-
tion of top appointments, and the reform of financial procedures), are
taken on board. But the main thrust of the EP’s critique – which also
focused on the need for strategy and which made very concrete proposals
for CSDP, including the launch of an EU OHQ, and the assignment of
defence attachés to each of the Delegations – was simply ignored. In a two
page personal introduction to the Review, Ashton struck a resigned note
in observing that ‘the absence of political will or of agreement among the
member states [sets] limits to what the service can deliver’. Much
comment on the Review, which one senior diplomat was quoted as saying
was ‘very much Cathy’s personal document’ (Norman 2013), stressed her
obvious reluctance to continue tilting at member state windmills. In effect,
she appeared to have abandoned most of the constructive ‘big ideas’
which had been put forward by those offering suggestions for the
improvement of the Service (Rettman 2013).
Academic analysts have highlighted the lack of foundational princi-

ples behind the EEAS’s awkward positioning mid-way between – but
independent from – both the Commission and the Council (Hadfield and
Fiott 2013). One scholar portrays it as an ‘interstitial organization’
which inevitably results in conflicting principles and practices which
effectively rule out coherence (Bátora 2013). This may be so, and it
certainly helps explain the Service’s incestuous internal gaze when evalu-
ating its role. Yet the challenge for the EEAS under whoever succeeds
Ashton will be not so much to find internal adjustments to improve coor-
dination and coherence, but to ensure that the rest of the world pays
attention. Rosa Balfour raised this question frontally in a survey of
expert opinion on the EEAS: ‘What difference does improved EU foreign
policy make?’ (Dempsey 2013). The inability of the EU as an entity to
formulate any discernible policy on issues as crucial in 2013 as Syria,
Russia, Egypt and the Middle East Peace Process (Witney 2013) is a
measure not so much of its lack of coherence on the world stage but of its
lack of existence. The Economist, not known for pulling its punches on
controversial issues, nevertheless cut to the quick when its Brussels corre-
spondent, Anton La Guardia, wrote: ‘The EEAS is simply irrelevant. I
have stopped reading the endless statements that the service puts out. I
had breakfast this morning with a former American diplomat and I asked
him what Washington was saying about the EEAS: “Nothing”, he
replied’ (Charlemagne 2012). My own contacts in the US capital concur
with that stark judgement. If the institution is to have any future at all,
that will have to change.
Conclusion
George Robertson’s quip about ‘wiring diagrams’, with which we began

this chapter, carried two messages. The first was that, despite the impor-
tance of institutions as such, what mattered in European security and
defence was political will and military might. If the EU was going to get
into the defence business at all, it needed to have clear objectives, strong
leadership and first-rate military capacity. This message was in fact
somewhat contradicted by the second one, which was that the EU should
avoid using institutional discussions as a means of accelerating integra-
tion: do not attempt to turn the EU into a powerful form of centralized
political leadership. As we have seen, these tensions have lain at the heart
of the institutional debates at the heart of the CSDP story. The member
states – even the biggest and most powerful of them – have clearly recog-
nized the need to intensify cooperation and thereby accelerate the advent
of an EU which is more capable of intervening on the international stage.
At the same time, they have been reluctant to sacrifice or even downgrade
agencies and mechanisms of national control and have consciously
sought to perpetuate the tense balance between the supranational func-

tions of the Commission and the intergovernmental functions of the
Council – while constantly tipping the balance of real power further and
further in the direction of the latter.
What all this tells us is that member states have attempted to sail a
perilous course between the Scylla of centralized EU coherence and the
Charybdis of uncoordinated national unilateralism. Collective decision-
making is complex and time-consuming, particularly where the stakes
involve high-value assets and issues of life and death. How is it possible,
given the complex institutional nexus we have just outlined, for policy
decisions to be shaped – and actually taken – at all? The answer is that
what emerges is a largely unplanned synthesis of multiple inputs at mani-
fold levels, involving constant negotiation and compromise. The chal-
lenge is almost overwhelming. As this chapter has demonstrated, the
picture is one whose complexity is such not only as to render rational
design problematic at best, but also as to cast wholesale doubt on ‘heroic’
claims regarding the nature and ambitions of CSDP. The notion, often
advanced by adversaries of CSDP, that somehow the Union might be
creating a military monster over which it will have no control, is another
empty scarecrow. The shaping and taking of decisions in CSDP is seri-
ously constrained by three institutional processes.
The first is interagency competition. Although, as we have seen, the
member states formally set policy, many different agencies are involved
both upstream and downstream in shaping and moulding it. Thereafter,
implementation is often skewed by turf wars – particularly between the
Commission and the Council Secretariat. This has been aggravated by
the creation of that ‘interstitial’ body, the EEAS, which formally has
oversight over CSDP, even though, under Catherine Ashton, CSDP has
been a neglected area. The second problem derives from the complex
politico-institutional relations between the member states and the EU
itself. Some of the theoretical literature tends to treat the EU – wrongly –
as a nation-state or at least as an actor with the attributes of a nation-
state. Yet even in those areas where it enjoys competence, it is more like
a system of ‘governance without government’ characterized by a striking
dispersion of power between and among its various institutions (Sbragia
2007). In the area of foreign and security policy, competence rests – polit-
ically – with the member states. Unlike in federal systems such as the
United States, the ultimate bases of political authority and legitimacy in
this multi-tiered system of governance are the parts, not the centre. This
places real limits on the scope for an EU security and defence policy. It
generates a tension between, on the one hand, the need increasingly
recognized by all member states for the EU to be more effective, and, on
the other, the fundamental problems involved in achieving greater coher-
ence when the centre remains – at their insistence – so weak. We saw this
repeatedly with member states deciding that a central institutional organ-
ism was unavoidable (the post of HR-CFSP, the PSC or the EEAS) and
then worrying that the new body would escape their control.
The process is therefore one in which a policy initiative may be
proposed by a variety of different agencies (governments, the PSC, the
Council Secretariat, the Commission), examined by all member states,
filtered through recommendations and nuances generated by specialist
working groups, COREPER, PSC or a variety of other bodies, sent up to
the PSC for general discussion, forwarded to the FAC and eventually
approved by the European Council. Along the way, the policy initiative
is likely to be modified substantially. In any case, it will only be accepted
if it is couched in a form that makes it acceptable to all member states,
even if sometimes they may need to be persuaded in roundabout ways.
This process I have referred to above as ‘supranational intergovernmen-
talism’. This is not a policy area in which an individual, a single country
or a specific type of approach can impose its view. European security
policy – unlike traditional ‘heroic’ notions of defence and security policy
– is in a very real way leaderless (Menon 2008). And even if there were
such actors, with such a clear blueprint for their strategy, for it to emerge
intact out of the EU’s institutional labyrinth would be nothing short of
miraculous.
To conclude that the EU is heavily over-institutionalized would be a
case of litotes. At each key moment, instead of taking the opportunity to
rationalize this institutional labyrinth, political leaders have taken the
easy way out and simply added on another layer of institutions.
Progressively, these have gravitated towards Brussels in a process known
as ‘Brusselsization’. The result, far from fostering a sense of collective
endeavour or unity, has been growing interagency turf-wars and dimin-
ishing levels of coherence in the delivery of an effective security and
defence policy. One is forced to conclude that the degree of ‘actorness’
which is demonstrated in the field of CSDP is achieved despite this insti-
tutional structure as much as because of it. Yet the prospects for ratio-
nalization are remote. Vast bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to
change. Some of the institutions work well – particularly those which
were introduced ex nihilo after Saint-Malo, such as the Political and
Security Committee. But overall, the weight of bureaucratic statsis and
the inevitability of inter-institutional rivalry, when added to the tensions
between ‘Brussels’ and the member states, have brought CSDP to an
institutional fork in the road. CSDP is increasingly faced with a choice
between collapse and a bold move forward. My own feeling is that that
decision will be taken in response to external events rather than as the
result of a conscious internal decision. Watch this space.
Chapter 3
The Instruments of Intervention:

Generating Military and Civilian
Capacity
‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ – Stalin
While the creation of institutions through which to manage a foreign,

security and, eventually, defence policy is necessary, the procurement
and delivery of the instruments of that policy – military and civilian
capacity – is indispensable. Had anybody predicted, as 1998 drew to a
close, that within five years the European Union would be engaging in
autonomous military and policing missions in ‘non-permissive’
theatres, under a European command chain and the European flag, s/he
would have been regarded by most serious analysts as a wild-eyed
dreamer. The late 1990s represented a low point in European hopes of
establishing a military capacity which would allow the Union to engage
in peacekeeping and crisis management missions independently of the
US (Gnesotto 1998; Gordon 1997–8). Already, the limitations of ESDI
had become apparent. In 1999, the brief campaign in Kosovo demon-
strated unequivocally that, compared with the US military, European
forces could hope to do little more than play a very subordinate back-
up role (Brawley and Martin 2000; Bozo 2003). Yet in December 2001,
the European Council declared its objective of being able to field oper-
ational combat-ready troops by 2003 (Rutten 2002: 131). The reaction
from strategic experts around the world was one of extreme scepticism
(CDS 2001; IISS 2001). Nevertheless, the 2003 deadline was techni-
cally met and within three years the EU had engaged in 16 missions in
as many countries on three continents. By 2013, over 30 overseas
missions had been launched. We shall analyse these missions in detail
in Chapter 5.
The current chapter charts the transformation of the EU’s instru-
ments of intervention from the end of the Cold War to the present day.
There were two major strands to this transformation, the first military
and the second civilian. We shall deal with these sequentially, even
though it should be stressed that the fundamental distinctiveness of
CSDP is its effort to coordinate and synergize its military and civilian
instruments. This synergy is known as the ‘comprehensive approach’
70
The Instruments of Intervention 71
and is the subject of an extensive empirical and theoretical literature

which we shall briefly assess at the end of this chapter. Javier Solana
always insisted that there was no such thing as a ‘military mission’ or a
‘civilian mission’. All EU missions, he argued, combined both elements.
Indeed, while much attention has been focused on the EU’s devel-
opment of military muscle, it is a mistake to see this as the more
important component of CSDP. As the European project has taken
shape, the US armed forces have intervened massively in Iraq and in
Afghanistan. Those interventions, by a military power that spends
more than the next 15 or so military powers combined, whose navy is
larger than the rest of the world’s navies combined, and whose
mastery of real-time digitized warfare is without parallel, have never-
theless demonstrated that the usefulness of military force alone has
serious limits (Kaldor 2005; Bacevich 2008; Smith 2007; Van Creveld
2007). Military power – however massive – cannot solve complex
political and human problems. Some have mocked the EU’s soft power
and argued that, without hard power to back it up, little can be
achieved (Freedman 2004). While this is true, the reverse is equally
true. As we have seen in the Western Balkans, in the Middle East and
in Afghanistan, without the complementary deployment of civilian
instruments of crisis management, the application of naked military
power can often lead to failure. Intervention in the internal affairs of
sovereign states – which is essentially a post-Cold War phenomenon –
even with the judicious application of military and civilian resources,
remains a very blunt instrument, with no guarantee of long-term
success (Howorth 2013).
Civilian crisis management (CCM) is a concept which has only
recently entered the political lexicon. It refers to the entire range of
non-military instruments which are called for in crisis situations –
whether pre-conflict or post-conflict. Police forces, state-building
capacity, trained judges, lawyers, civil administrators, customs offi-
cials, civil protection and disaster relief agents, demobilization and
reintegration specialists, security sector reform instruments: all these
and other capacities are subsumed under the generic title of CCM. It
covers a much broader range of instruments than the military compo-
nent of CSDP and involves a much greater degree of institutional flexi-
bility, since it calls on agencies from all three of the ‘pillars’ of the TEU.
This is at least as important a component of CSDP as the strictly mili-
tary element – and many would argue that it is ultimately more impor-
tant (Behrendt 2011; Giegerich 2011). Yet its emergence has gone
largely unheralded. The EU’s achievement in assembling these instru-
ments, however relative and inadequate, is nevertheless remarkable.
Much has been done, even though, as this chapter will argue, a great
deal more remains to be accomplished.
72
Table 3.1 World military expenditure, 2012
Country Expend.$millions $ per capita % of GDP
1. United States 645,700 2,057 3.81

2. China 102,436 76 2.44
3. UK 64,080 1,061 2.63
4. Russia 59,851 420 3.06
5. Japan 59,443 467 0.99
6. Saudi Arabia 52,510 1,979 7.99
7. France 48,121 733 1.86
8. Germany 40,356 496 1.20
9. India 38,538 32 1.98
10. Brazil 35,266 177 1.45
11. South Korea 28,978 593 2.52
12. Australia 25,093 1,140 1.63
13. Italy 23,631 386 1.19
14. Iran 23,932 303 4.95
15. Israel 19,366 2,551 7.85
16. Canada 18,355 535 1.04
17. Turkey 16,954 213 2.17
18. Iraq 14,727 473 11.28
19. Spain 11,782 250 0.88
20. Netherlands 10,439 624 1.36
21. Taiwan 10,316 444 2.21
22. Poland 8,640 225 1.84
23. Greece 7,616 707 2.99
24. Norway 6,850 1,455 1.37
NATO 924,212 n/a n/a
[NATO ex-USA] 260,157 n/a n/a
[EU 28] 250,109 n/a n/a
Asia 314,937 n/a n/a
ME & N.Africa 166,379 n/a n/a
Russia/Eurasia 69,272 n/a n/a
Latin Am + Car 68,848 n/a n/a
Sub-Sah. Africa 19,162 n/a n/a
Global Total 1,582,794 n/a n/a
NB: The US ($645,700) spends more than the next 15 countries on this list combined
($639,956). Eleven of those 15 are formal allies and of the other four only Iran can be
considered an adversary. The US alone spends 41 per cent of the total global expenditure
on ‘defence’ (almost as much as the rest of the world combined). NATO alone accounts
for almost 59 per cent of the world’s military expenditure.
Source: The Military Balance 2013, pp. 548–54.

Transforming EU Military Capabilities
Emerging from the Cold War

After the Cold War, all European nations were compelled to transform
their militaries. The type of military forces and other instruments
required for the territorial defence objectives of the Cold War were quite
inappropriate for the new crisis management and peacekeeping missions
of the post-Cold War world. In 1988, as the Cold War was ending, the
NATO alliance, with only 13 European members, had almost 5.4 million
active-duty service personnel, backed up by over 7 million reservists. Of
these, the European members contributed the vast bulk, with 3.1 million
active-duty service members and 5.5 million reservists. Against these
forces were ranged over 5 million active-duty troops from the Warsaw
Pact, backed by 6.2 million reservists. However, within three years, both
the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had disappeared and a decade
later the numbers of armed forces in the NATO alliance had been radi-
cally reduced. By 2012, total troop numbers from the – by now 24 –
European members of NATO numbered only 1.54 million. Thus, as the
number of member states doubled, the overall troop levels declined by
over 50 per cent. The paradoxical reality about these forces, however,
was that substantial numbers of the almost 12 million men and women
under arms at the height of Cold War tensions virtually never saw action,
whereas by 2013 their counterparts – from both the United States and the
European Union (EU) – were seriously overstretched, large numbers of
them being at one stage or another of the three-stage cycle of deploying,
resting, or preparing to deploy. Moreover, whereas in 1989 the ‘peace’
was kept essentially by mass divisions of conscripts dug-in across the
Iron Curtain and backed by a nuclear deterrent, in 2013 crisis manage-
ment operations were being carried out by highly mobile professional
soldiers using sophisticated conventional equipment demanding high
levels of technical skills and ongoing training.
The fundamental shift was from quantity to quality. As the United
Kingdom’s 1998 ‘Strategic Defence Review’ stated: ‘defence is a highly
professional, increasingly high technology, vocation’. The challenge was
to recruit highly motivated people, to train them appropriately and to a
very high standard, to equip them properly, and to retain both their moti-
vation and their services (UK MOD 1998). This chapter will examine the
process whereby the EU member states, both individually and collectively,
shifted their military thinking away from the fixed ‘legacy’ weapons and
systems of the Cold War years and towards the power-projection and
crisis-management ‘enablers’ of the present day. The professional soldier
of 2013 and beyond will require a range of skills – not just military skills,
but also political, social, and even cultural and linguistic skills –
undreamed of only two decades earlier. We are witnessing a wholesale
transformation of the EU’s plans, structures, weapons systems and

equipment: indeed, its entire military mindset.
The challenge of transformation was especially acute for Europe.
During the Cold War, European forces were rarely deployed far from
home (indeed almost never, if ‘home’ is taken to mean Europe); they
spent most of their time on exercises and virtually none of it on active
combat duty. General de Gaulle, justifying France’s decision to spend
around 40 per cent of its defence budget on nuclear weapons, had coined
the formula ‘nuclear weapons mean the absence of battle’. As a result,
when the Gulf War overtook them in 1991, French forces, although
among the most robustly trained and experienced in Europe, were
shocked to discover that very few were actually deployable: just 15,000
out of a total armed force of 289,000. Their vaunted AMX-300 combat
tanks were badly in need of servicing; only 40 were combat-ready out of
a notional 1,300 in service. When the lightly armed Daguet division
finally arrived in Saudi Arabia, it found that its AMX-10RC light
armoured vehicles were quite literally blind to the topography of the
desert theatre until equipped with American global positioning (GPS)
guidance systems. When, less than six months later, the Europeans were
again caught off guard with the outbreak of the Balkan wars, it came as
an even harsher revelation to many – even within the security community
– that the Europeans were far from able, as Luxembourg’s Foreign
Minister Jacques Poos had imprudently implied they were, to take over
from the Americans responsibility for the stabilization of their own
neighbourhood. Lacking strategic transport systems, they were unable
even to project forces to a region which lay, technically, within the
geographical bounds of the EU itself. Had they been able to get there,
they would have discovered that most of the military equipment they
possessed was useless.
The basic explanation for this state of affairs is simple. Whereas US
forces, throughout the twentieth century, devoted massive effort – finan-
cial, technological, and logistical – to a capacity for ‘force projection’
across both the world’s great oceans, European forces since 1945 had
been configured for line-defence across the great European plain. The
West German armed forces in 1989, for instance, boasted almost
500,000 active troops, with a further 850,000 reservists. Their main
equipment featured 5,000 main battle tanks, 2,136 armoured infantry
fighting vehicles, 3,500 armoured personnel carriers, 2,500 artillery
pieces, 2,700 anti-tank guided weapons, almost 5,000 air-defence guns,
and 800 surface-to-air missiles. Very little of this matériel was of much
use for the new tasks of distant crisis management facing the EU at the
turn of the century.
Although NATO, in its new Strategic Concept of November 1991,
drew attention to the need to shift focus away from massed tank and
artillery battles in Central Europe to the new and more diverse crisis
management challenges of the post-Cold War world, the initial emphasis

was doctrinal rather than programmatic (NATO 1991). New military
procurement projects have lead-times of around 15 years, but few
European governments were able to imagine, let alone to anticipate, the
new force-projection challenges that would be facing them in the twenty-
first century. All were keen to cash in on the post-1989 ‘peace dividend’.
On average, European defence budgets fell by more than 20 per cent
during the 1990s. The budgets of France, Germany and the UK fell by,
respectively 12 per cent, 24 per cent and 28 per cent over that decade
(SIPRI 1999). The UK immediately embarked on a series of defence
reviews culminating in the 1998 ‘Strategic Defence Review’ (UK MOD
1994, 1995). France moved rapidly from a defence policy of rigorous
national autonomy towards one geared towards integrated European
operations (Ministère de la Défense 1994; Howorth 1998). The majority
of European militaries, however (with the notable exceptions of Belgium
and the Netherlands), remained unreformed and unchanged for the
greater part of the decade. Europe, in short, revealed a dual ‘capabilities
gap’. There was a growing gap between the advanced weapons systems
available to the United States military and the increasingly antiquated
systems of the EU member states, and there was also an emerging gap
between those existing EU systems and the real military requirements of
the European Union in the post-Cold War world (Hill 1993).
ESDI, Conscripts and Professional Forces

In the early 1990s, defence planners began to address the problem of
developing a serious EU military capacity that would allow the Union to
assume responsibility for the new crisis management tasks of the post-
Cold War world. At a meeting at Petersberg (near Bonn) in June 1992,
the Western European Union (WEU) had defined three such tasks, corre-
sponding to three levels of combat intensity: ‘humanitarian and rescue
tasks; peacekeeping tasks; tasks of combat forces in crisis management,
including peacemaking’ (Ortega 2005). These ‘Petersberg Tasks’, as they
came to be known, implied radical transformation of the EU’s existing
capacity to provide deployable, professional intervention forces geared
to ‘out of area’ crisis management. But where were these forces to be
found?
The first task was to end conscription and to move towards all-volun-
teer forces (AVFs) (King 2011). Conscripts, it was generally recognized,
tended to have limited training and skills and, largely for political and
juridical reasons, were un-deployable outside of their home countries. At
the end of the Cold War, only four of today’s EU member states had all-
volunteer forces: United Kingdom, Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.
Belgium announced the abolition of conscription in 1992 and ended it in
1994; the Netherlands followed suit in 1993 and 1996. France and Spain
decided to abolish conscription in 1996 after agonizing debates about

the connection between military service and democracy. In both coun-
tries, the last conscripts left the armed forces in 2001. Since that date, a
further 17 EU member states have abolished conscription (see Table
3.2). In 2010, Sweden ‘suspended’ the draft during peacetime, which
means, in effect, that Sweden has moved to an AVF. The motivations for
abolishing conscription varied from country to country. Most, such as
Belgium, Spain, and many Central and Eastern European states, sought
to focus on downsizing and reduction of the military budget; others,
including the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland and Italy, were
intent on transforming their militaries into deployable forces for over-
seas crisis management (Gilroy and Williams 2006; Joenniemi 2006). In
2013, only six EU member states out of 28 retained the draft. Greece
and Cyprus are concerned about Turkey. Finland and Estonia remain
concerned about Russia. Denmark has discussed ending conscription,
but in reality, of the 20,000 18-year-olds deemed fit for service, only
5,000 are required for duty. Danish ‘conscripts’ generally serve only
four months basic training. The retention of the practice, as in Austria
where, in January 2013, a referendum retained it by 56 per cent, is
largely to do with identity. To all intents and purposes, Europe now has
fully professional armed forces.
The next step was to arrange for these new professional forces to be
equipped to tackle crisis management missions. Such a transformational
process would clearly take time, but crises – in the Balkans and elsewhere
– would not wait. As a stop-gap measure, the procedures known as
‘Berlin Plus’ were devised to allow the EU to bridge the capabilities gap
by borrowing necessary assets such as strategic lift, C4I (command,
control, communications, computers, and intelligence), and logistics
from the United States (Box 3.1). EU-only units could be put together
from inside NATO by generating European Combined Joint Task Forces
(CJTFs) (Barry 1996; Bensahel 1999; Terriff 2003). A European Security
and Defence Identity (ESDI) was thus to be forged, ‘separable but not
separate’ from NATO and overseen politically by the WEU.
In the event, these rather awkward procedures proved unsatisfactory
to both sides. The US military proved far less enthusiastic than the
politicians to loan their hard-won high-tech assets to ill-prepared and
ill-trained Europeans with little experience in the field. Moreover, the
proposals that EU forces be ‘double-hatted’ – available either to a
NATO/US commander or to a hypothetical EU commander – caused
disquiet within the European officer corps. Furthermore, the Berlin Plus
proposals were, to some extent, predicated on a parallel reform of
NATO’s overall command structure, with a view to giving more
command posts to European officers. The US government’s reluctance
to confer on a European officer the command of NATO’s southern HQ
(AFSouth) in Naples effectively sank that agreement (Brenner and
Table 3.2 European armed forces, 2013
Country Prof/Consc Army Navy Air Force Total Reserves

+ date
Austria Conscript 11,500 – 2,750 23,250 76,450

Belgium Prof 1994 11,950 1,500 5,450 32,650 1,400
Bulgaria Prof 2007 16,300 3,450 6,700 32,300 303,500
Croatia Prof 2007 11,400 1,850 3,500 18,600 21,000
Cyprus Conscript 12,000 [numbers subsumed] 12,000 50,000
Czech. Rep. Prof 2005 14,000 – 4,800 23,650 –
Denmark Conscript 7,950 3,000 3,050 16,450 53,500
Estonia Conscript 5,300 200 250 4,750 30,000
Finland Conscript 16,000 3,500 2,700 22,200 354,000
France Prof 2001 122,500 38,650 49,850 228,850 29,650
Germany Prof 2011 70,050 15,850 33,450 196,000 40,320
Greece Conscript 86,150 20,000 26,600 144,350 216,650
Hungary Prof 2004 10,300 – 5,900 26,500 44,000
Ireland Prof 1923 7,200 950 750 8,900 4,950
Italy Prof 2005 105,900 33,000 42,550 181,450 18,300
Latvia Prof 2006 1,400 550 300 5,350 7,800
Lithuania Prof 2008 7,350 650 1,100 11,800 6,700
Luxembourg Prof 1967 900 – [subsumed] 900 –
Malta Prof 1970 1,950 [numbers subsumed] 1,954 170
Netherlands Prof 1996 20,850 8,500 8,050 46,882 3,200
Poland Prof 2009 45,600 7,600 7,200 96,000 22,050
Portugal Prof 2003 25,700 9,700 7,100 42,600 211,950
Romania Prof 2006 42,600 6,900 8,400 71,400 45,000
Slovakia Prof 2006 6,250 – 3,950 15,850 –
Slovenia Prof 2004 7,600 – [subsumed] 7,600 1,700
Spain Prof 2001 70,800 22,200 21,200 135,500 32,000
Sweden Prof 2010 5,550 3,000 3,300 20,500 –
UK Prof 1964 96,850 32,000 36,800 165,650 80,550
EU TOTALS 841,900 213,050 285,700 1,593,886 3,454,670
Norway Consc. 8,900 3,900 3,650 24,450 45,250

Turkey Consc. 402,000 48,600 60,000 510,000 378,700
Grand Totals 1,252,800 265,550 349,350 2,128,336 3,878,620
Parmentier 2002). It also became clear to most policy-makers that the

WEU was too inconsequential a body to assume responsibility for polit-
ical oversight of EU military missions. Thus, the real challenge of
improving military capacity in Europe remained essentially unaddressed
throughout the 1990s. The project of generating a European security
and defence identity from inside NATO had proved to be a false start.
Box 3.1 Berlin Plus
The ‘Berlin Plus’ arrangements refer to the agreed framework for

NATO–EU cooperation in crisis management operations. Under these
arrangements, the EU enjoys ‘assured access to NATO planning’,
‘presumed access to NATO assets and capabilities’, and a pre-designated
Europeans-only chain of command under the Deputy Supreme
Commander Europe (DSACEUR), a European general. The initial
arrangements were discussed between NATO and the WEU at a minister-
ial meeting in Berlin in June 1996. The devil proved to be in the detail and
it took six years of hard bargaining (the ‘Berlin Plus negotiations’) to nail
down the specifics. At NATO’s Washington Summit in April 1999, nego-
tiations on the Berlin Plus mechanisms were stepped up, but the existence
of ESDP called for a shift in negotiating partner away from the WEU and
in favour of the EU.
In January 2001, the talks entered a new phase involving the EU and
NATO directly. After two years of hard bargaining, this led, in December
2002, to the NATO–EU Declaration on ESDP (16 December 2002) and
the Berlin Plus Arrangements (17 March 2003). The details of these
arrangements are to be found on pp. 131–3 in Chapter 4.
From Identity to Policy: ESDI to CSDP

The decision taken in 1998 by incoming UK Prime Minister Tony Blair,
to move resolutely towards improved European capacity, broke the log-
jam that ESDI had been unable to shift. The Saint-Malo Declaration of 4
December 1998 represented a triple crossing of the Rubicon which had
major consequences for European military capacity. First, as we saw in
Chapter 2, it conferred on the EU directly the political and institutional
decision-making capacity for crisis-management missions that the WEU
had manifestly been ill-equipped to assume. Second, it insisted that ‘the
Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by cred-
ible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to
do so, in order to respond to international crises’. The quest for
autonomous EU military capacity has proceeded ever since. Third, the
Declaration posited a new relationship between the EU and NATO,
contributing to the ‘vitality of a modernized Atlantic Alliance’, the
precise definition of which has preoccupied analysts and policy-makers
to this day. We shall assess the EU–NATO relationship in detail in
Chapter 4. There is little doubt that Blair’s gamble was primarily moti-
vated by a sense that, unless the European members of NATO made a
concerted effort to improve their military capacity, the Alliance itself
would begin to unravel. The shift from a relatively fruitless quest for a
European military identity (ESDI) towards the delivery of a common
security and defence policy (CSDP) was a major leap forward. The
acronym ESDP was coined by the European Council in June 1999 to
distinguish this relatively ambitious – and autonomous – EU project from
the NATO-dependent mechanisms of ESDI. It was not insignificant that
the initiative came from the only two EU countries with power-projec-
tion capacity. The other European countries were summoned to follow
the Franco-British lead.
The British Ministry of Defence took a major role in driving forward
the debate on European military transformation. The decisions taken at
the EU Council in Helsinki in December 1999, leading to the establish-
ment of a Helsinki Headline Goal (HHG), were inspired by a series of
papers drafted in Whitehall, as were subsequent CSDP military initiatives
in the years that followed (Rutten 2001: 82–91). The HHG was
conceived as a rough ‘Force Catalogue’ from which would be drawn
appropriate resources for a range of hypothetical European missions,
including the three main ‘Petersberg Tasks’ (humanitarian assistance,
peacekeeping and peacemaking). The main elements of the Force
Catalogue were to be 60,000 troops, 100 ships and 400 aircraft, deploy-
able within 60 days and sustainable for one year. These figures tended to
be taken literally by commentators. In reality, the HHG was essentially
‘a statement of a level of military ambition intended to galvanize political
interest in the subject of force and capability development’ (Lee 2005).
Process, alas, soon became more significant than substance. Via a series
of ‘Capabilities Pledging Conferences’ in the first half of the 2000s, this
pool of resources was progressively refined and reassessed. EU defence
officials and military planners in the Headline Goal Task Force (HGTF)
sought to ensure at least minimal compliance with the stated objective of
operational status by December 2003.
However, there were several major problems with the Helsinki
Headline Goal, with the result that, by the mid-2000s, it had effectively
been replaced by more modest ambitions. The first problem was the way
forces were to be built up. Voluntary, bottom-up contributions might –
possibly – secure the raw numbers, but they could not guarantee the
delivery, still less the mobilization, of a coherent fighting force. Instead,
the key concept had to be usability. In 2005, there were still almost 1.7
million troops in uniform in Europe. Of that number, only about 10 per
cent were adequately trained even for serious peacekeeping operations,
let alone for peacemaking, still less for war-fighting. Of those 170,000,
probably at most 50,000 could carry out the type of military operation
needed in high-intensity combat. Rotation requirements reduce the
number still further, leaving just 15,000 to 20,000 troops genuinely
usable at any given time in serious military missions (Venusberg 2004:
27). Simply increasing quantities of troops was rapidly recognized as not
only insufficient but inappropriate. What were required were troops of
much higher quality. The second problem with the HHG had to do with
the procurement of a new generation of strategic systems. If the EU were

to engage seriously in potentially distant crisis management operations,
it needed the tools of modern force projection. The Union had rapidly
identified the main areas of strategic deficiency as being: air-to-air refu-
elling; combat search and rescue; headquarters; nuclear, biological and
chemical defences; special operations forces; theatre ballistic missile
defence; unmanned aerial vehicles; strategic air lift; space; and interoper-
ability (Missiroli 2003: 94). But in order to generate an effective EU
capacity in such areas, it was not enough to rely on voluntary efforts, or
even to appoint a lead nation to chair a working group. There had to be
collective political agreement to drive the process forward towards
agreed targets. That implied top-down leadership, pooling, and special-
ization. Such processes touched on sensitive issues of national sover-
eignty.
The third – and potentially biggest – problem with the HHG process
was the absence of any clear debate about the nature of the military oper-
ations the EU might expect (or even aim) to mount. In other words, there
was no strategic plan or vision. The original thinking behind the headline
goal derived from experiences in Kosovo. What EU military planners had
in mind – especially in the context of the reference in the Saint-Malo
Declaration to the notion of autonomous forces – was the ability to carry
out a Kosovo-type operation with minimal reliance on US inputs. This
could be achieved in two ways. A Kosovo operation could have been
mounted in 1999 with the EU’s existing military assets, but unlike the
US-led operation, which depended largely on air power, it would have
involved substantial numbers of ground troops and would have resulted
in many casualties. Alternately, the EU could aim to develop a US-style
capacity to fight high-level network-centric warfare (Mitchell 2009).
This would require significantly higher defence spending and a massive
human resources challenge. Would the price be politically acceptable? If
not, would something less than a fully integrated system – what has been
called a ‘network-enabled’ capacity – be affordable? A European
Network Enabling Capability (ENEC) would enable linkages between
European forces rather than provide a single advanced network. It would
allow EU forces to ‘plug in’ to certain limited aspects of the US’s
advanced system (Venusberg 2004: 12). Would such a system work?
Answers remained elusive.
To complicate capabilities planning even further, the EU decided in
2004 that it should plan for a more extensive range of missions than
those initially defined at Petersberg. The (ultimately aborted) 2004
Constitutional Treaty, succeeded by the 2007 Lisbon Treaty (Article
28b) extended the Petersberg tasks to include ‘joint disarmament opera-
tions, humanitarian and rescue tasks, military advice and assistance
tasks, conflict prevention and peacekeeping tasks, [and] tasks of combat
forces undertaken for crisis management, including peacemaking and
post-conflict stabilization’ (italics denote the ‘new’ tasks). The new

emphasis was firmly on those missions with both a military and a politi-
cal–civilian component. The Treaty texts added the need to ‘contribute
to the fight against terrorism’. Yet that fight would require very different
instruments from those needed to drive the Serbian army out of Kosovo.
How could Europe afford both when at the time it seemed unable to
afford either (De Wijk 2002)? While key decisions under the HHG
framework were taken on certain ‘strategic enablers’ such as the heavy
lift transport aircraft A400-M, many strategic procurement targets went
unaddressed. In the view of the first CEO of the European Defence
Agency, ten years after Helsinki, ‘procrastination, weak coordination
and persistent absenteeism by some member states have hobbled the
Union’s ability to tackle the real threats to its citizens’ security and to
make a significant contribution to maintaining international peace’
(Witney 2008).
From HHG to HG2010: A Qualitative Breakthrough?

By 2004, it was clear to EU defence chiefs that the HHG targets were
misconstrued. At the European Council on 17 June 2004, a new target –
Headline Goal 2010 (HG 2010) – was adopted. Building on the HHG,
the HG 2010 committed the Union ‘to be able by 2010 to respond to a
crisis with rapid and decisive action applying a fully coherent approach
to the whole spectrum of crisis management operations covered by the
Treaty on the European Union’. Interoperability, deployability and
sustainability were at the heart of the project and the member states iden-
tified an indicative list of specific milestones within the 2010 horizon,
including the establishment of the European Defence Agency (EDA) by
the end of 2004; the implementation of an EU strategic lift joint coordi-
nation by 2005; the ability by 2007 to deploy force packages at high
readiness broadly based on the EU ‘battle-groups’ concept; the availabil-
ity of an EU aircraft carrier group by 2008; and ‘appropriate compatibil-
ity and network linkage of all communications equipment and assets’ by
2010. HG 2010, by focusing on small, rapidly deployable ‘battle-group’
units of around 2,000 soldiers (see below), capable of high intensity
warfare in desert, jungle or mountain environments, shifted the objective
from quantity to quality (Lindstrom 2007). The EU also moved towards
the recognition of ‘coordination responsibility’ for key procurement
projects: Germany took the lead on strategic air lift; Spain on air-to-air
refuelling; the UK on Headquarters; and the Netherlands on PGMs
(precision guided munitions) for delivery by European F-16s. Despite the
bold articulation of these ambitions, progress towards the development
of robust military capacity was marking time. France determined, under
its Presidency of the Union in the second half of 2008, to accelerate
matters.
One of the top priorities for the French Presidency was to give a signif-
icant boost to European capacity-building. Yet, as global financial
markets approached meltdown and as entire nations began to face bank-
ruptcy, the time was hardly ideal to persuade EU member states to pony
up significant additional resources for CSDP. France nevertheless
devoted considerable energy to the delivery, by the European Council
meeting in December 2008, of a package of agreements on new military
and civilian capacity. Several key meetings of the EU defence ministers
and several high-level expert seminars were organized, leading to a
‘Declaration on Strengthening Capacities’ adopted by the December
2008 Council (European Council 2008). The level of ambition was
considerably in excess of any serious expectations of delivery (see Box
3.2), but the document was based on signed agreements between member
states. While many of these agreements remained cast in ‘letter of intent’
mode, progress was nevertheless made towards identifying specific
member states’ involvement in capacity-generating projects.
• Improvements in operational force projection: modernization of heli-

copters and an EDA-driven helicopter crew training programme;
blueprint for a future transport helicopter; establishment of a
European strategic air transport fleet (12 countries) involving a
multinational unit of A400M aircraft, and early establishment of a
European airlift command; a European Carrier Group
Interoperability Initiative (nine countries) involving an aircraft
carrier, carrier air groups and escort vessels; development of a
concept for the projection of an airbase for a European force.
• Strengthening information-gathering and space-based intelligence:
provision of Cosmo Skymed (Italy) and Helios 2 (France) satellite
images to the European Union Satellite Centre and letter of intent to
that effect for the SAR-Lupe satellite (Germany); preparation of the
new generation of observation satellites – Multiple Space-Based
Imaging System (MUSIS) programme (Germany, Belgium, France,
Greece and Italy); audit of military requirements in space surveil-
lance.
• Increased force protection assets: launch of a new EDA-driven
programme of maritime mine clearance (11 countries); EDA-
launched future surveillance drone project (seven countries);
networking of maritime surveillance systems; development of an EU
special operations concept, including cooperation between special
forces; plans for the mobilization of military assets for emergency
evacuation of European nationals.
• Strengthening interoperability: exchanges of young officers,
modelled on the Erasmus scheme; improved functioning of the
European Security and Defence College; creation of European teams
of experts to deliver security sector reform.
Box 3.2 The 2008 Declaration on Strengthening Capabilities
‘In order to rise to current security challenges and respond to new threats,
in the years ahead Europe should actually be capable, in the framework of
the level of ambition established, inter alia, of deploying 60 000 troops
within 60 days for a major operation, within the range of operations envis-
aged in the Headline Goal 2010 and in the Civilian Headline Goal 2010,
of planning and conducting simultaneously a series of operations and
missions, of varying scope: two major stabilization and reconstruction
operations, with a suitable civilian component, supported by up to 10 000
troops for at least two years; two rapid-response operations of limited
duration using inter alia EU battle groups; an emergency operation for the
evacuation of European nationals (in less than ten days), bearing in mind
the primary role of each Member State as regards its nationals and making
use of the consular lead State concept; a maritime or air surveillance/inter-
diction mission; a civilian-military humanitarian assistance operation last-
ing up to 90 days; around a dozen ESDP civilian missions (inter alia police,
rule-of-law, civilian administration, civil protection, security sector
reform, and observation missions) of varying formats, including in rapid-
response situations, together with a major mission (possibly up to 3000
experts) which could last several years. For its operations and missions, the
European Union uses, in an appropriate manner and in accordance with its
procedures, the resources and capabilities of Member States, of the
European Union and, if appropriate for its military operations, of NATO.’
From Headline Goal 2010 to Pooling, Sharing and

Specialization?
Battle Groups
Headline Goal 2010, by focusing on small, rapidly deployable units
capable of high-intensity warfare, successfully shifted the objective from
quantity to quality. It also resolved, at least partially, the contradiction
between a Kosovo-style capability and the requirements of more limited
crisis management operations. Battle-groups (BG) are units of 1,500 to
2,500 troops prepared for combat in jungle, desert, or mountain condi-
tions, deployable within 15 days and sustainable in the field for up to 30
days with potential extension to 120 days. They are defined as ‘the mini-
mum military [sic] effective, credible, rapidly deployable, coherent force
package capable of stand-alone operations or for the initial phase of
larger operations’. The battle-group is based on a combined-arms battal-
ion-size force. It is associated with a force headquarters and with desig-
nated operational and strategic enablers such as strategic lift and logistics
(EU-ISS 2005: 296–8). BGs may be formed by a single framework nation
or may involve several member states. In addition to offering rapid reac-

tion capacity for EU missions, they are also intended to help member
states transform their militaries through the adoption of multinational
best practice (Heise 2005; Boyer 2007; Jacoby and Jones 2008;
Lindstrom 2007; Henrion 2010; Major and Mölling 2011). However,
while the concept of the BGs can be considered a relative political success
(all member states except Denmark and Malta signed up, as did Turkey,
Norway, Croatia and Macedonia), at the military level, there are still
significant shortfalls (Major and Mölling 2011). The extent to which the
BGs’ creation has assisted in the transformation of Europe’s military
forces is limited, and there are considerable differences across the EU-28
in terms of the compatibility between participation in a BG and broader
national security objectives, or indeed in the extent to which participa-
tion in a BG has assisted military transformation in a given country
(Jacoby and Jones 2008).
Although the battle-group formations (many of them multinational)
were indeed drawn up and, since 2007, have been constantly on stand-by
for their six month rotation, by 2013 it had become impossible to acti-
vate two BGs each semester. Moreover, at the time of writing (autumn
2013), none had ever been deployed on a single mission. This reflects a
serious inability among the EU’s member states to agree on sending
soldiers into combat missions (Henrion 2010). There have been several
regional crises in which the deployment of a BG has been mooted (Chad-
CAR in 2007/8; DRC in 2008; Libya in 2011; Mali in 2013), but politi-
cal agreement to deploy has proved impossible. Given that there is
consensus among the member states that the costs of a BG mission
should fall on the participating state(s), one partial explanation is the
generalized reluctance to pay for an overseas mission which just happens
to fall during a specific six-month window. The apparent stasis in the BG
deployment mechanism has led to calls to ‘use them or lose them’ (IISS
2009). Yet member states remain wedded to the BG concept and policy
recommendations abound as to how to improve the prospects of deploy-
ment (Major and Mölling 2011). One major contribution to the
unblocking of the situation could be an acceleration of the increasingly
crucial process known as ‘pooling and sharing’.
Pooling and Sharing

The pooling and sharing of military capacity has been practised for
decades, either bilaterally or multilaterally (Maulny and Liberti 2008:
11–12). The Belgian and Dutch navies formed a single integrated
command in the 1990s. Some of the most notable examples of recent
practice involve air assets. The European Airlift Coordination Centre
(EACC) was established in 2002 to provide coordination for the airlift
capacities of France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the
Netherlands and Norway. In 2010, the European Air Transport

Command (EATC) was established at Eindhoven Airbase in the
Netherlands. It offers a joint set of assets to the air transport fleets of
France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. With the onset of the
global (2008) and European (2010) financial crises, pooling and sharing
became a kind of buzz concept for the entire CSDP community. The crisis
itself and its attendant budget cuts and austerity measures led to signifi-
cant reductions in the defence budgets of the member states.
Between 2009 and 2010, 20 EU member states reduced their defence
spending (many of them significantly), while only seven increased it
slightly (the only state to have increased spending by a significant amount
was Poland – from $7,297m to $8,273m). Between 2010 and 2012, only
five of the EU member states increased defence spending (the UK, Poland,
Austria, Ireland and Estonia). The net result was a reduction in the
combined EU defence spending from $276,784m in 2009 to $250,108m
in 2012. At the same time, virtually all other major military powers
increased their defence spending, especially in the Middle East and Asia.
In 2009, the EU-27 spent 42 per cent of the US defence budget. In 2012,
they spent only 38 per cent as much as the Americans, whose budget
began to decrease from 2011. In 2009, the EU expenditure on defence
amounted to the same sum as that of the next seven military powers
outside of NATO combined (China, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India,
Brazil and South Korea). In 2012, the EU spent much less than the next
four players (China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia – $274,240). These are
still enormous sums of money, equivalent to the US defence budget prior
to 9/11 (see Table 3.3).
The problem is that much of it is wasted in fruitless duplication across
28 armies, 24 air forces and 21 navies. Moreover, three countries alone
(France, the UK and Germany) spend over 61 per cent of the total. If the
next three powers (Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) are included, those
countries cover 80 per cent of the collective EU ‘defence budget’. The
remaining 22 EU member states average out at just over $2,350m each.
That is equivalent to the defence budget of New Zealand. Authoritative
voices have been raised warning that the EU was approaching a crisis of
‘demilitarization’ which could well prevent it from being an actor at all
in the security field (Witney 2011; Mölling 2011). A major rationaliza-
tion of the EU’s defence spending is overdue (Giegerich and Nicoll 2008;
Giegerich and Nicoll 2012; CSIS 2012; Marrone 2012). The duplication
of infrastructure and support services for these separate armed forces
amounts to a huge waste of resources. Alone, most EU member states
would be in no position even to defend their own territory from a serious
existential threat. Only once the EU has clearly established what it hopes
to achieve, with what force levels and with what state of equipment, can
it have any clear idea about how much money is needed. Until then, its
military force transformation programmes will remain incomplete.
86
Table 3.3 EU member states defence expenditure (2012)
Country US$m US$ per capita % of GDP
USA 645,700 2,057 4.12
1. UK 64,080 1,016 2.63

2. France 48,121 733 1.86
3. Germany 40,356 496 1.20
4. Italy 23,631 386 1.19
5. Spain 11,782 250 0.88
6. Netherlands 10,439 624 1.36
7. Poland 8,640 225 1.84
8. Greece 7,616 707 2.99
9. Sweden 5,788 636 1.11
10. Belgium 4,771 457 1.00
11. Denmark 4,371 789 1.41
12. Finland 3,596 683 1.45
13. Austria 3,160 384 0.81
14. Portugal 2,599 241 1.23
15. Czech Rep. 2,177 214 1.12
16. Romania 2,176 100 1.27
17. Ireland 1,131 239 0.55
18. Hungary 1,029 103 0.80
19. Slovakia 1,012 185 1.11
20. Croatia 816 182 1.42
21. Bulgaria 666 95 1.31
22. Slovenia 568 284 1.25
23. Estonia 434 340 2.03
24. Lithuania 322 91 0.78
25. Latvia 259 118 0.95
26. Cyprus 258 227 1.15
27. Luxemb.g 258 508 0.47
28. Malta 52 52 0.62
EU-28 Totals 250,108
Norway 6,850 1,455 1.37

Turkey 16,954 213 2.17
Country highlighted: defense budget increased 2010–2012. All others decreased.

In this context, the notion of pooling and sharing came to be widely

perceived as unavoidable – indeed it rapidly became a case of making a
virtue out of necessity (Faleg and Giovannini 2012). During the Belgian
presidency of the EU in late 2010, two key meetings of defence ministers
led to what became known as the ‘Ghent Framework’ for rationalizing
and maximizing EU military capacity. An informal meeting, in Ghent, on
23–24 September, led to the adoption, at a formal meeting of the same
ministers on 9 December 2010, of a procedure suggested by the then
German defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, and formulated
in a German–Swedish ‘food for thought’ paper in November (Pooling
2010). Member states agreed to categorize their defence assets into three
baskets: those which, for whatever reason, would have to remain strictly
national (an obvious example would be the French and UK nuclear deter-
rent); those which could be pooled (for example, the EATC); and those
which might lend themselves to role and task sharing (Andries 2011;
Biscop and Coelmont 2011; Deneys 2011). The latter, which involved
specialization and a de facto abandonment of sovereignty over one
aspect of military capabilities, was – and remains – the most sensitive.
One example would be the Netherlands’ decision not to purchase the EU
military transport plane, the A400M, but to agree a leasing option on it
with Germany. Another, drawn from NATO, is the allied decision to
share control of the Baltic airspace, thereby sparing the Baltic member
states the cost of purchasing their own air forces. The Ghent Framework
was widely praised as a breakthrough, and it was followed in May 2012
by a NATO decision to promote ‘smart defence’ along very much the
same lines (NATO 2012; Major and Mölling 2013).
On 19 November 2012, the EU defence ministers adopted an EDA
proposal for a systematic approach to pooling and sharing, involving ten
principles (EDA 2012). This comprises a series of actions aimed at main-
streaming pooling and sharing in the planning and decision-making
procedures of the member states. There are four main planks in this code
of conduct. First, member states agreed systematically to consider coop-
eration throughout the life cycle of a given capability, including in
research and technology (R&T). Second, they agreed to take advantage
of synergies with wider European policies, including regulatory frame-
works, standards and certification. Third, the EDA was accepted as a
platform for information exchange to avoid gaps or duplication, to share
expertise and best practices and to increase transparency. Finally, the
EDA agreed to submit to defence ministers an annual report on pooling
and sharing, outlining ongoing initiatives, new opportunities and an
analysis of the capability situation in Europe. However, while a majority
of member states seems determined seriously to embrace the spirit of
pooling and sharing, a sizeable minority (including, by one account, the
UK, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states) pays little more than lip
service to the notion (Gros-Verheyde 2012).
There remain several major problems in implementing the Ghent

Framework. In the words of the Director of Capabilities at the EDA,
‘pooling and sharing is an art, not a science’, and member states remain
artistic in the defence of their sovereignty (Mullin 2012). The first is that
defence cuts by almost all member states have been conducted at purely
national level without any reference to what others were doing. When, in
2011, the Netherlands decided to do away altogether with battle tanks,
it effectively turned Germany and France into the main countries left in
Europe with a significant tank provision. This may in fact prove to be a
workable arrangement, but, if so, luck will have prevailed over judge-
ment. When, in its 2013 Defence White Paper, France decided to reduce
the number of its first class frigates from 18 to 15 and its multipurpose
frigates from 17 to eight, these decisions were taken with no reference to
the provision of frigates in other European navies. If all EU member
states managed their cuts in this way, it is entirely conceivable that the
Union could find itself lacking one entire category of essential military
equipment. Second, pooling and especially sharing require a considerable
degree of trust between states. The lack of trust, which derives from over-
valuation of sovereignty, is a major factor inhibiting rationalization of
Europe’s military capacity. When the former German defence minister,
Volker Rühe, suggested that the Czech Republic did not really need an
air force because Germany’s Luftwaffe could protect Czech airspace, he
may well have been making an objective statement. But for Czechs to
entrust their country’s fate to their former occupier and overlord would
require an uncommon measure of trust. Third, it is notoriously difficult
to put a credible price-tag on military expenditure and even more diffi-
cult to demonstrate precisely what savings can be derived from coopera-
tion. If the primary driver of pooling and sharing is financial, then
ministers will want to have reliable figures for real costs, opportunity
costs and savings. Finally, it must be stressed that to pool and share exist-
ing assets does not provide additional assets. The list of absentees from
the EU’s capabilities inventory is long and significant.
Several proposals have been put forward to give impetus to the Ghent
Framework (Mölling 2012; Biscop and Coelmont 2011). The first is the
insistence on the top-down approach. Christian Mölling has suggested
the creation of a permanent European Council on Defence Affairs at
which heads of state and government would set concrete targets and
monitor progress on an annual basis. Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont
launched the idea of a Permanent Capability Conference in order to
‘create a durable strategic-level framework for systematic exchange of
information on national defence planning, as a basis for consultation and
top-down coordination’. Neither of these proposals aims to transfer
defence planning from the national to the European level but, on the
contrary, to ensure that, at the national level, there is an awareness of the
European context. A second trend is to focus on regional clusters of
proximate and equivalent states with similar approaches to security and

defence.
The ‘Clusters’ Approach

There are several reasons why groups of like-minded countries come
together to cooperate on defence procurement and policy: to save money,
to accelerate European integration, to bind accession states to the EU, to
generate trust among formerly rival nations (Valasek 2011: 22). It is
important, if the initiative is to be successful, for them to be clear about
why they are engaging with each other. Tomas Valasek has theorized a
number of ‘bottom-line requirements’ for cross-border defence coopera-
tion to thrive. The first is a measure of commonality in strategic culture.
France and the UK, which share an extrovert imperial past, understand
one another in hard military terms. France and Germany do not. The
second is an important degree of trust. Every participant to a cooperative
venture fears either entrapment (being sucked into a conflict it would not
have chosen) or abandonment (being jilted at a critical moment) – this
has been the reality in NATO since 1949. Trust can only be built with
time and experience. The third factor is that the cooperating nations
should be of roughly the same size and quality. Fourthly, there needs to
be a level playing field for defence industries, since cooperation will
suffer if one partner is perceived to be protecting his national champions
at the expense of the other(s). Seriousness of intent is a fifth requirement
and the absence of corruption in the procurement process is a sixth
(Valasek 2011: 21–7). These elements have tended to come into play in
the growing number of cooperative clusters which have appeared in
recent years.
On 2 November 2010, France and the United Kingdom concluded a
Treaty on Defence and Security Cooperation which underscored recog-
nition in both London and Paris that these two would-be global players
and permanent members of the UN Security Council could only continue
to aspire to global player status if they combined their military efforts in
a number of highly strategic sectors: aircraft carriers, transport aircraft,
nuclear submarines, military satellite technology, UAVs, expeditionary
forces, and eventually combat systems (Jones 2011; Menon 2011). The
fundamental question sparked by this development among experts was:
would this Franco-British cooperation act as a complement to CSDP or
as an alternative? Would those member states less keen to play a military
role (either through CSDP or through NATO) see this as an incentive to
continue to free ride, or would they be inspired to emulate the Franco-
British lead? There were a number of early hiccups in the Franco-British
project, such as the UK decision to use vertical take-off aircraft on its
aircraft carriers (thereby preventing French aircraft from landing on the
vessels, which seriously undermines the objective of a ‘joint carrier
capacity’). Despite these problems, there has subsequently been intense

cooperation between the two countries, from the highest level down to
everyday working groups. This has forced the two countries to pay
appropriate attention to four sets of issues: the scope and nature of polit-
ical involvement; the organizational structure of cooperation; a cognitive
dimension, including cultural understanding, personal ties and shared
norms; and a material dimension in the form of an individual, material
interest to cooperate (Pannier 2014). Other groups of countries have
followed suit.
In recent years, there has been intensive cooperation between
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, five countries with
very different relations to NATO and the EU (Bailes 2006). Norway and
Iceland are members of NATO but not of the EU; Sweden and Finland
are members of the EU, but not of NATO; Denmark is a member of both
organizations, but has an opt-out from CSDP. Nordic Defence
Cooperation (NORDEFCO) does not aim for new military or political
alliances between the partners, but considers that ‘mutually reinforcing
cooperation in capability development can be achieved without negative
influence on participating countries’ different foreign and security policy
orientation and membership obligations in NATO, the EU and the UN’
(NORDEFCO 2013). In many ways, the Nordic countries have trail-
blazed a new approach to pooling and sharing (Götz and Haggren 2009).
This is also being extended to the three Baltic countries, which are
increasingly involved with the Nordic BG, have created an integrated
naval mine-sweeping force, Baltron, and which are dependent on allied
support for the control of their airspace (Mölder 2011). Estonia is also
cooperating with Finland on the development of long-range radar (Gros-
Verheyde 2012a).
A third example is offered by the Benelux countries which have a long
tradition of cross-border cooperation. The Belgian and Dutch navies
share an integrated command and feature common training and mainte-
nance operations. This model is seen by the partners as offering scope for
other, similar endeavours, although attempts to develop a common
regime for NH-90 helicopters ran up against encrusted national interests.
But at the level of governance, education, training, control of the Benelux
airspace and other matters, cooperation has been successful. Work is
ongoing to extend this cooperation to transport aircraft, defence plan-
ning, force deployment, maritime air patrols and the launch of the
Benelux battle-group in 2014. This particular cluster of countries is also
deeply interested in extending cooperation to both France and Germany
(Biscop et al. 2013).
A fourth example of a cooperative cluster is that of the Visegrad coun-
tries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia). While the driver
of this experiment is probably as much NATO as the EU (these countries
wish to demonstrate their loyalty as US allies), the range and variety of
cooperation projects is encouraging. A 2012 report, however, highlights

the extent to which different constituencies within the four countries
have differing approaches to cooperation. Politicians are more
favourably disposed than bureaucrats and the military. While the four
countries share a common threat perception (largely perceived as deriv-
ing from Russia), they vary considerably in their approach to the
embrace of risk. Moreover, they vary considerably in size, Poland having
a defence budget twice the size of the other three combined. Nevertheless,
the potential for pooling and sharing is felt to be considerable (CEPI
2012). In June 2012, a broader grouping of Austria, Croatia, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia formed the Central European
Defence Cooperation (CEDC) initiative (Kurowska and Németh 2013;
Onderco 2013). It is unclear how coherent this grouping might prove to
be given the rather different agendas of the Czech Republic, which
focuses massively on NATO, and Austria, which clings to its neutrality.
Finally, there is much ongoing cooperation between France, Germany
and Poland in the context of the ‘Weimar Triangle’ (Adebahr 2011) and
also, increasingly, between Portugal and Spain (Joint Statement 2013). In
all of these examples, one key element is the necessity to find incentives
for governments to embrace pooling and sharing. Member states are
ferociously attached to sovereignty and will only be prepared to share (or
pool) it if it can be demonstrated with hard statistics that there is a clear
national interest in doing so. In this regard, the role of the European
Defence Agency has become more and more significant.
The European Defence Agency
A European Defence Agency (EDA), subject to the authority of the

European Council, was called for as early as 2002 in the drafts for a
Constitutional Treaty. Armaments cooperation had hitherto taken place
outside the EU framework. Two main reasons lay behind the change. The
first was the relative failure of previous attempts to coordinate procure-
ment and armaments cooperation. The second was the accelerating real-
ity of CSDP and the associated need to link capabilities to armaments
production. The urgency of these drivers was reflected in the fact that, in
June 2003, the EU agreed not to await ratification of the Treaty in order
to launch the EDA but to create it immediately. The stated objectives of
the EDA were to:
• contribute to identifying the Member States’ military capability objec-

tives and evaluating observance of the capability commitments given
by the Member States;
• promote harmonization of operational needs and adoption of effec-
tive, compatible procurement methods;
• propose multilateral projects to fulfil the objectives in terms of military

capabilities, ensure coordination of the programmes implemented by
the Member States and management of specific cooperation
programmes;
• support defence technology research, and coordinate and plan joint
research activities and the study of technical solutions meeting future
operational needs;
• contribute to identifying and, if necessary, implementing any useful
measure for strengthening the industrial and technological base of the
defence sector and for improving the effectiveness of military expendi-
ture. (Schmitt 2004)
The EDA (www.eda.eu.int), which was created in summer 2004, is

guided by a Steering Board formally meeting at the level of Defence
Ministers, but occasionally in the format of National Armaments
Directors or Research and Technology Directors. The Steering Board is
headed by the High Representative and managed by a Chief Executive.
After a fierce turf battle between France and the UK, Nick Witney, the
former head of the UK MOD’s International Security Policy Division,
was named as the first Chief Executive. The current CEO (since 2011) is
France’s Claude France Arnould, formerly Head of the Crisis
Management and Planning Directorate in the Council General
Secretariat. The Board has five Directorates: Capabilities; R&T;
Armaments; Industry and market; Corporate Services. It also features a
Policy Planning Unit and a Media and Communications Unit (see Figure
3.1).
The Agency offers the first real opportunity for the EU to bring its
defence planning, military capability objectives, and armaments coordi-
nation in line with the urgent tasks it faces on the ground. The EU
governments are thus poised to move towards more rational armaments
and defence planning and an integrated European defence market. All
these agendas are interconnected: ‘Like it or not, governments and
defence industries are roped together in a common endeavour’ (Witney
2005). However, the Agency has occasionally found itself caught in the
fierce political, financial and industrial tensions between the member
states and the EU itself and has had to develop a highly cautious
approach to the task of harmonizing the interests of all parties. It is a
decidedly intergovernmental organization – very much at the service of
the member states – but one which is attempting to devise a consensual
approach to defence cooperation.
In a pioneering early study, Martin Trybus (2006) contrasted the
supranational aspirations of the European Defence Community’s 1950s
approach to weapons procurement, with the determinedly intergovern-
mental approaches adopted ever since – including in the case of the EDA.
Noting that defence procurement is recognized by member states as a
Figure 3.1 European Defence Agency, 2014
Chief Executive Corporate Services

Deputy Chief Executive • Human Resources
• Finance
Strategy and Policy
• Contracting
Media and Comm • Information Technology
• Security
Audit • Infrastructure
Cooperation Planning Capability, Armament European Synergies

and Support – CPS and Technology – CAT and Innovation – ESI
Cooperation Planning Informaton superiority Innovative Research

Military Airworthyness, Intervention and Protection Market and Industry policy
Standard and Certification • Air domain
• Land domain • Horizon 2020
Defence and Industry Analysis • Maritime domain • ESF
• Joint and Ammunition • Space
Operations Support
RPAS SESAR
Education, Training and
Exercises AAR/Airlift Energy and Environment
Cooperation Planning Cyber Defence
policy area where European cooperation is essential if the EU is to avoid

sub-contractor status to the US industry, he concludes that the resolutely
intergovernmental terms of reference of the EDA are likely to clash fairly
constantly with the requirements of procurement rationalization. ‘For
many of the policy fields the new agency is intended to cover,
Community law offers an alternative model with clear advantages over
the current inter-governmental approach.’ Trybus argues that the
Agency ‘represents a paradox’ in that its explicit objective is to make
Community progress, but its method bespeaks stagnation. Trybus’s
bottom line is that if the member states see the EDA as a way of ring-fenc-
ing intergovernmentalism, then they are really wasting their time in
creating the agency in the first place.
In a more recent assessment of the ‘clash of institutional logics’
involved in the EDA’s existence and work, Jozef Bátora (2009) seeks
clues as to how the Agency will impact on the eventual political direction
taken by CSDP. Echoing Trybus’s frustrations with the logical contra-
dictions between the determinedly intergovernmental structures of the
EDA and its cooperative and even integrationist ambitions, Bátora
detects three additional clashes of institutional or functional logic within
the EDA. First, he detects clear evidence that the EDA has been making
significant efforts to transcend the logic of defence sovereignty by intro-
ducing a raft of procedures and rules into the Code of Conduct on
Defence Procurement which will, in effect, facilitate cooperation and
even integration in the procurement process. Second, concerning the
appropriateness of partners, the Agency has found itself unable to resolve
the tensions between the Europeanist and the Euro-Atlanticist proclivi-
ties of its member states, the more so in that these are in a state of
constant flux within the member states depending on the electoral
fortunes of political parties with contrasting approaches to this
dichotomy. Third, concerning liberalization versus European preference,
the EDA has denounced the maintenance of national tendering for
national contracts as ‘no longer economically sustainable … and opera-
tionally unacceptable’ (EDA 2007: 1). Yet, the logic of liberalization runs
up immediately against the logic of European preference, and here the
EDA has hitherto been unable to resolve the contradiction.
Bátora’s conclusions remain tentative, but they also suggest that the
resolution of these conflicting logics will either lead to the disbandment
of the EDA or to the triumph of integrationist dynamics. In other words,
the intergovernmental approach is something of a non-starter. He
concludes that ‘the rules and norms set up by the EDA in its effort to
bring about greater coordination and cohesion in the field of defence
provide a framework for trans-governmental regulation and socialisa-
tion among participating member states and thereby possibly a transcen-
dence of the inter-governmental nature of second pillar agencification
(my stress)’ (Bátora 2009: 1092–4). These developments suggest at the
very least recognition that the sovereignty of the nation-state, even in this
last bastion of sovereignty, is reaching its sell-by date. These tentative
conclusions are confirmed in discussions and correspondence between
myself and Nick Witney, the first CEO of the Agency. Witney notes that
the ‘agency itself is/was definitely supranational in spirit, i.e. its staff were
genuinely committed to the common cause and ready to resist attempts
by national capitals to use them as inside agents’. However, he bitterly
went on to note that a key issue was ‘whether whatever was under discus-
sion risked resulting in action or incurring cost, or was just hot air. In the
latter case – e.g. agreeing strategies – then pretty much all member states
… cooperated dutifully to find the middle ground, the European answer.
But were there a risk of anybody being required to do anything, or pay
for anything, then national interest was unashamedly to the fore.’ These
comments concur with the findings of the academics cited above. Witney
has himself proposed a number of essential steps to be taken by defence
ministers in order to capitalize on the entire investment in the EDA
(Witney 2008: 32–5). A new book (De Neve 2010) examines what it
considers to be the remarkable successes of the EDA in pushing forward
defence industrial integration in the context of such intergovernmental
ring-fencing. A similar conclusion is reached by Kaija Schilde in a 2010

PhD dissertation. She notes that the EDA has been reasonably successful
at breaking out of the intergovernmental straitjacket imposed upon it by
member states, especially as a result of the direct input of industry and
the common mindset linking industrial lobbyists to the EDA officials
(Schilde 2010: 324).
Since Claude France Arnould took over the Agency in 2011, there
have been many positive developments. We have already noted the code
of conduct on pooling and sharing. In December 2011, the 26 defence
ministers (Denmark has an opt-out) agreed on 11 priority projects for
collaboration, all of which will take time to mature, but some of which
represent a step change forward in interstate cooperation. In particular,
on air-to-air refuelling, the EDA is helping meet the critical European
capability requirement in three ways: increasing overall capacity, reduc-
ing fragmentation of the fleet, and optimizing the use of existing assets.
In addition, progress was made in countering IEDs (improvised explosive
devices) via a laboratory based in Afghanistan; helicopter training; air
transport interoperability; multinational modular medical units which
can be deployed in crisis management missions as well as for disaster
relief; logistics; satellite communications; military airworthiness and
maritime surveillance. In all of these projects, the EDA has demonstrated
its ability to act as an interface between government, industry and the
European institutions to push forward the cause of rationalization. It
also generated a proposal, in summer 2013, on two pioneer projects, one
on drones and the other on cyber-defence. Given the mounting contro-
versy over the US use of drones for targeted killings, the European
Commission came up with the seemingly anodyne acronym RPAS
(remotely piloted aircraft systems) as an alternative. The need for RPAS
in a wide variety of military and civil capacities has been widely recog-
nized. The major EU industries long ago prepared feasibility studies for a
variety of what were originally called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
The EDA has been working closely with all parties not only on the devel-
opment of a European RPAS (seemingly to be constructed by a consor-
tium of EDAs, Dassault and Finmeccanica), but also on air traffic
insertion, specifications and future longer-term programmes, at least in
part to ensure that the EU avoids being dependent on either US or Israeli
systems (interviews at EDA).
Beyond these concrete programmes, the EDA’s most important added-
value is undoubtedly the facility it offers for regular discussions between
the defence ministers, who meet as the Agency’s Steering Board as often
as four times a year. When one considers that, prior to 2002, there was
simply no possibility of defence ministers meeting in a special format, this
is a huge step forward. For the ministers to be in a position to compare
their national red lines and find ways of harmonizing them, and also to
be able to contextualize national requirements by setting them in a
European framework is a massive step forward. Obviously, the Agency,

as an intergovernmental body, cannot force any member state to adopt a
proposal against its will. But the degree of consensus that has been
achieved in less than a decade is remarkable.
The Contentious Issue of Operational Headquarters
One of the stumbling blocks for the development of a full-fledged EU

military capacity is the vexed question of operational planning. This is a
contentious issue which has, for over a decade, pitted the UK against
France. Paris has always been keen to develop autonomous EU opera-
tional planning capabilities, but London has resisted, arguing that this is
an expensive duplication of an existing NATO capability. The UK posi-
tion was that, in the event of an ‘EU-only’ operation (that is, without
reference to NATO and without the support of NATO planning via
Berlin Plus), such missions should have recourse to the national opera-
tional planning facilities of the UK (Northwood), of France (Creil) and,
to a lesser extent, those of Germany (Potsdam), Italy, and Greece.
However, at a contentious defence summit among France, Germany,
Belgium and Luxembourg on 29 April 2003, at the height of the Iraq
crisis, the summiteers decided to forge ahead and create an ‘EU’ opera-
tional planning cell at a Belgian army base in Tervuren, a suburb of
Brussels. This provoked outrage in Washington and London and, for a
moment, seemed destined to derail the entire CSDP project (IISS 2003).
However, later that summer, Tony Blair sought to mend fences with his
European partners, and a compromise was reached involving three
distinct operational planning facilities. For EU operations under Berlin
Plus, a dedicated EU unit was attached to NATO at SHAPE
Headquarters in Mons, Belgium. For most ‘EU-only’ operations, includ-
ing most battle-group missions, an appropriate national headquarters
will be adapted to planning for multinational operations. For certain EU-
only operations, particularly those involving combined civil and military
dimensions, a dedicated and autonomous EU Civil–Military Planning
Cell (CMPC) had been developed at CSDP headquarters in Brussels
(Kohl 2008; Norheim-Martinsen 2010). This facility has grown to
around 120 EU military personnel.
However, the need for a dedicated EU OHQ refused to go away
(Hynek 2011). During the lengthy deliberations over the EU’s planned
mission to Chad and the Central African Republic in 2007, it became
clear that the lack of an EU-only OHQ imposed severe limitations on the
size of the mission. Since NATO was not involved, the availability of
SHAPE was out of the question. Yet a force of close to 8,000 troops – the
size initially envisaged – was beyond the scope of any of the national
HQs. In the event, it was largely the absence of the European OHQ
which dictated the relatively small size of the mission (3,000) (Seibert
2010). The OHQ idea was therefore relaunched at the end of the French
Presidency in late 2008. In February 2009, the European Parliament
approved a report establishing an EU OHQ and the issue continued to
fuel controversy over the following two years. By this time, the UK had
emerged as the only serious obstacle, since the US position, initially scep-
tical, had shifted to one which had no objections in principle to the
project as long as it proved effective (Biava 2009). In the context of the
‘Weimar Triangle’ of cooperation between France, Germany and Poland,
a proposal was formulated in December 2010 and backed by a majority
of member states at the Foreign Affairs Council in January 2011.
It was, once again, the lack of such a facility which, in part, made it
impossible for CSDP to assume ownership of the Libyan mission in
spring 2011. By early summer 2011, a significant majority of EU member
states was determined to forge ahead. A ‘status report’ on CSDP,
containing a proposal on the OHQ, was put by the HR to the FAC on 18
July, but the measure was angrily vetoed by UK Foreign Secretary
William Hague (Malhère 2011; Meade 2011). In September, the Weimar
foreign ministers were joined by those of Italy and Spain in writing a
letter to EU High Representative Catherine Ashton urging her to renew
work on an EU OHQ. This again had the effect of a red rag to a bull in
London (Castle 2011; Korski 2011). A year later, a group of 11 foreign
ministers, including those from all the large countries except the UK,
issued a report in which, alluding darkly to the OHQ issue, they called
openly for ‘more majority decisions in the CFSP sphere […] to prevent
one single member state from being able to obstruct initiatives’ (Future of
Europe Group 2012). In mid-November 2012, the ‘Weimar Five’, citing
the launch of several new CSDP missions in Africa, including one
planned for Mali, wrote ‘We are convinced that the EU must set up […]
true civilian–military structures to plan and conduct missions and opera-
tions’ (Waterfield 2012). It was even reported that Catherine Ashton had
promised the group that she would back them in a showdown with the
UK at the planned European Council on defence in December 2013
(Samuel and Waterfield 2012). Another work in progress…
Civilian Crisis Management: The Continuation of Politics

by Other Means?
While much has been written about the military aspects of CSDP’s crisis
management capabilities, the civilian dimension has been relatively
neglected. Almost all the books or monographs published on CSDP to
date – with the notable exceptions of Duke (2002), Nowak (2006),
Korski and Gowan (2009), Grevi et al. (2009), Chivvis (2010), and
Greco et al. (2010) – tend to overlook this dimension. Nevertheless, there
is by now a considerable body of literature on Civilian Crisis

Management (CCM) in the academic journals and think-tank reports to
which I shall refer in the following pages. One important point needs
immediate clarification. There is virtually no relationship between the
concept of and the literature on CCM and the substantial body of work
about the EU as a ‘civilian power’ or a ‘normative power’ (Duchêne
1973; Telo 2007; Manners 2002; Whitman 2011). This latter body of
literature essentially argues that the EU exercises influence around the
world as a result of the assertion and promotion of its principles and
values. It is attractive to other actors, the argument goes, because of what
it is rather than because of what it does. The concept and practice of
CCM, while by no means incompatible with the promotion of the EU as
a ‘civilian power’ (Fayler 2011), are in practice very far removed from
this body of theory.
The concept of CCM did not make its mark until the Helsinki
European Council meeting in December 1999, when the term was first
used in the Presidency Report. In particular, in the Annexes to that
Report, there were specific recommendations on the ‘non-military crisis-
management’ of the EU. This somewhat negative framing of the concept
set the tone for discussions on civilian capabilities over the next two
years. These were clearly seen as a complement to or as subordinate to
the military capacities to which Helsinki gave its name. To this extent, as
Menon and Sedelmeier (2010) have demonstrated, the unintended conse-
quences of the introduction of specific CCM policy instruments, under
the impetus of the EU’s less militarily-inclined member states, have
resulted in an overall mix of civilian and military aspects to CSDP which
is undoubtedly very far removed from what Blair and Chirac had in mind
at Saint-Malo (see also Jacobsen 2009). In terms of numbers of missions,
if not in terms of the effort devoted to it, CCM has largely outdistanced
its military progenitor. Work was started following the Cologne Council
in June 1999 on inventories listing the civilian tools available to the
Union which, at Helsinki, it was noted, ‘clearly show that the Member
States, the Union, or both have accumulated considerable experience or
have considerable resources in a number of areas such as civilian police,
humanitarian assistance, administrative and legal rehabilitation, search
and rescue, electoral and human rights monitoring etc.’ (Rutten 2001:
89). Such a list of instruments immediately highlights one of the trickiest
aspects of CCM: coordination between the European Council and the
European Commission. Although the Council, through CSDP, was
beginning to establish CCM capabilities, the bulk of these already existed
in some form or other of the various activities of the Commission. In
particular, the lion’s share of funding for these activities was to be found
in the latter, which covers not only CFSP (€2 billion for the period
2007–13), but also Neighbourhood and Partnership funds, Development
and Cooperation budgets, the Instrument for Stability (a dedicated
further sum of over €2 billion for crisis response and trans-regional

threat management in the period 2007–13) and humanitarian aid. All in
all, for the years 2007–13, the Commission disposed of funds in excess of
€56 billion for a range of activities with relevance to CCM (Grevi et al.
2009: 91). On the other hand, then funding of CSDP missions, whether
military or civilian, was largely the responsibility of the member states
through the European Council. From the outset, the trickiest issue was –
and in many ways still remains – that of coordinating, and indeed de-
conflicting, the work of the Commission and of the Council in this area
(Marquina and Ruiz 2005; Juergenliemk 2011).
At Helsinki, an Action Plan was established which aimed to compile
an inventory of available resources, a database of capabilities and exper-
tise and the establishment of concrete targets for CCM (Rutten 2001:
90). It was agreed to establish a ‘coordinating mechanism’ to this effect.
At the Lisbon Council in March 2000, it was decided to create a
Committee for Civilian Crisis Management (Rutten 2001: 108) and, in
Brussels, Javier Solana also established a mechanism within the Council
Secretariat to enable coordination with the Commission. It was the
Portuguese Presidency which gave the first real impulsion to CCM. The
Feira European Council meeting in June 2000 established a distinctive
sub-section of CSDP devoted to CCM and adopted four priority areas:
police; strengthening the rule of law; strengthening civilian administra-
tion and civil protection (Rutten 2001: 134). Training and rapid deploy-
ment were seen as crucial. The main emphasis initially was on the
development of a police reaction capacity and a target figure of 5,000
deployable officers by 2003 was agreed, with the further proviso that
1,000 should be rapidly deployable (within 30 days). The other three
priority areas were tackled at the Goteborg European Council in June
2001. As had been the case with the Helsinki Headline Goal, the initial
methodology was to establish targets and then, via a series of pledging
conferences, to strive to meet them (Nowak 2006: 19).
It was the Swedish Presidency in early 2001 which made the first real
conceptual and programmatic breakthrough in CCM with a lengthy
report on CSDP which, without ignoring the military dimension, was
overwhelmingly concerned with civilian aspects (Rutten 2002: 30–61).
Concerning the rule of law, member states were invited to ‘contribute up
to 200 officials adequately prepared for crisis management operations’
by 2003 (Rutten 2002: 46). As for civil administration, the aim was to
create a ‘pool of experts’ capable of covering a broad spectrum of func-
tions under three categories: general administrative functions; social
functions; and infrastructure functions. The final priority, civil protec-
tion (including search and rescue in disaster relief operations) envisaged
the creation of a pool of 100 expert assessors and 2,000 members of civil
intervention teams (Rutten 2002: 46–51). The Göteborg European
Council also generated the first major CSDP report on ‘The Prevention of
Violent Conflicts’ (Rutten: 64–8). Göteborg introduced a Police Action

Plan intended to allow the EU to deploy police officers rapidly in inter-
national operations led by the UN or OSCE as well as in autonomous
operations. Emphasis was placed on planning at political–strategic level;
command and control of police operations; the legal framework for such
operations; cross-EU police interoperability; and training and financing
mechanisms. Methodologically, the police capabilities were to be
demand-driven and a Police Unit was established within the Council
Secretariat. Guiding principles were also established for the participation
in EU Police Missions of non-EU member states (Rutten 2002: 41–2).
The first Police Capabilities Commitment Conference took place on 19
November 2001 at which further progress was made on all the Göteborg
objectives – especially numbers.
The first Rule of Law Commitment Conference was held in Brussels
on 16 May 2002 and both quantitative and qualitative steps forward
were identified. Member states committed 282 officials for crisis
management operations, of whom up to 60 could (in theory) be deployed
within 30 days, and 43 officials were earmarked for fact-finding missions
(a development which was to have genuine significance later). On the
qualitative side, the raw numbers were broken down proportionately to
tasks and needs (72 judges, 48 prosecutors, 38 administrative service
personnel, 72 penitentiary officials and 34 others), training modules for
participants were devised, guidelines for criminal procedures in CCM
operations were discussed, and progress was made towards a compre-
hensive concept for the rule of law which differentiated between
strengthening pre-existing local forces, and substitution of EU forces
(Haine 2003: 82–4). In the two other priority areas of civil administra-
tion and civil protection, progress was less visible, although by May
2002 the Council Secretariat had generated some Basic Guidelines for
crisis management in the area of civil administration, including proce-
dures for generating a pool of experts in such areas as registration of
property, elections, taxation, social and medical services and infrastruc-
ture, all geared to helping establish a transitional functional administra-
tive framework. As Agnieszka Nowak has recorded, in the field of civil
protection, there was initial resistance from the Commission to the very
notion of Council involvement, but by 2002 targets had been established
and met: ‘two to three assessment and/or coordination teams of ten
experts capable of dispatching within 3–7 hours, as well as intervention
teams of 2,000 personnel and some specialised services to be dispatched
within a week’. In addition, synergies with the Commission’s resources
were maximized through the establishment in January 2002, under
Council initiative, of a Community Civilian Protection Mechanism
allowing the EU to intervene either via member states’ own resources or
via Community mechanisms (Nowak 2006a: 22–3). During the Spanish
Presidency (January to June 2002), a further report was issued outlining
the necessary stages for progress in this area (Haine 2003: 89–90). The
stage was set for another qualitative move forward towards implementa-
tion and deployability. The Laeken Council, in December 2001, had
declared that the EU’s crisis management resources – both military and
civilian – would be operational by 2003.
On 19 November 2002 EU ministers convened in a first Civilian Crisis
Management Capability Conference to take stock of progress to date.
They welcomed the fact that the quantitative targets set at Göteborg for
2003 had already been met and noted that the first ever EU civilian crisis
management mission – the EUPM in BiH – was fully prepared to deploy
in January 2003. Much of the year 2003 was tied up with two major
issues – the war in Iraq and the launch of the EU’s first missions, includ-
ing EUPM (see Chapter 5). In December 2003, the European Security
Strategy, which attached significant importance to CCM, was adopted.
In 2004, the EU enlarged to the ten new members, giving a considerable
quantitative and qualitative boost to the potential of CCM, a process
from which most of these countries had themselves only recently
emerged. In 2003–4, under the Greek, Italian, Irish and Dutch rotating
Presidencies, significant expansion of the concept and operational reality
of CCM was achieved. Progress was made on developing monitoring
missions, on generating expertise in security sector reform (SSR) and
disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), and cooperation
intensified with the OSCE on conflict prevention. Advances were made
in the tailoring of CCM ‘packages’ to the specific circumstances of each
crisis, with a heightened emphasis on the quality of the personnel trained
and selected for CCM missions. The range of expertise was to be broad-
ened to cover human rights, political affairs, gender issues mediation,
border control and media policy (Haine 2003: 145–6; Missiroli 2003:
156–9; EU-ISS 2005: 121–8). On paper, at any rate, the EU appeared to
be making real progress. Yet, there is a repetitive element to the many
official documents on CCM – which never fail to stress that ‘greater
efforts’ and ‘greater coherence’ will be required.
The oversight agency giving political direction to all this activity, the
Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management (CIVCOM), was
established in May 2000. This key committee, comprising national repre-
sentatives and officials from the Commission and the Council
Secretariat, is designed to facilitate interagency cooperation as well as
coordination between member states and the EU. It also advises the PSC
about issues of coherence and comprehensiveness in CCM (Nowak
2006a: 23). As we saw in Chapter 2 (above, p. 45) the members of this
body have succeeded to a considerable degree in harmonizing the atti-
tudes towards CCM on the part of the member states. The Civilian
Capabilities Commitment Conference of 22 November 2004 was the
occasion for a ministerial stock-taking of general progress in CCM. With
the advent of ten new member states, new commitments of personnel
generated figures well in excess of the targets for experts in: police
(5,761), rule of law (631), civilian administration (562) and civil protec-
tion (4,968). However, the stress was placed once again on qualitative
criteria for recruitment and training. The ministers expressed general
satisfaction that the different objectives of the June 2004 Action Plan
were being vigorously pursued and once again drew attention to the
shortcomings indicated by experience in the field (EU-ISS 2005: 288–90).
Great hopes were placed in the elaboration of a Civilian Headline Goal
2008 (CHG 2008) which was finalized by the Council in December
2004. A CHG Project Team was established in the Council Secretariat,
with the full involvement of the Commission. The CHG 2008 process,
tightly linked to the military HG 2010, was overseen by the PSC and
supported by CIVCOM. As with the HG 2010, a number of key steps
were identified:
• Elaboration of key planning assumptions and illustrative scenarios for

stabilization and reconstruction (including substitution missions),
conflict prevention, the targeted strengthening of institutions and civil-
ian support for humanitarian operations. This was successfully
concluded by April 2005.
• Elaboration of Capabilities Requirements List (July 2005).
• Assessment of national contributions to the Capabilities Requirements
List and identification of shortfalls (end 2005).
• CHG follow-up and review process.
Cooperation between the EU and the UN was highlighted, in line with

the European Security Strategy’s insistence that the UN has the ‘primary
responsibility for the maintenance of peace and international security’.
(EU-ISS 2005: 363–70). The first concrete decision under the CHG 2008
process was to establish rapidly deployable Civilian Response Teams
(CRTs) and work on developing such teams continued throughout the
year (Nowak 2006a: 32).
On 21 November 2005, a Civilian Capabilities Improvement
Conference was convened at foreign ministerial level in the context of the
multiplication of CCM missions launched in the course of that year (see
Chapter 5). Further capability areas were identified, including specialists
in border policing, sexual and violent crime, human trafficking and
human rights; and a number of shortfalls were recorded (forensic special-
ists, judges and administrative staff with financial expertise). A Civilian
Capability Improvement Plan stressed several key objectives, most of
which derived from sorry experience in the field of making do with inap-
propriate personnel and ill-adapted mission support instruments such as
equipment procurement and disposal and logistics (EU-ISS 2006:
346–9). In August 2007, a new structure was established in Brussels, the
Civilian Planning and Conduct Capability (CPCC) with 60 staff
seconded from the Council and the member states and with overall
responsibility for the planning and conduct of civilian missions, under a
civilian operations commander, initially the Dutch diplomat Kees
Klompenhouwer, succeeded in 2011 by the German Hansjörg Haber.
The CPCC has been in overall charge of the 20 essentially civilian
missions undertaken under CSDP since its inception. In November 2007,
a new Civilian Headline Goal 2010 was drafted and subsequently
adopted by the Council (European Council 2008). The key propositions,
to be achieved by 2010, were: improvement of the quality of trained
personnel deployed; enhancing the availability of secondable civilian
personnel; the refinement of the available instruments; a lessons-learned
process; the improvement of mission security; and the enhancement of
synergies.
By the mid-2000s, in response from massive demand from all around
the world, the EU expanded its CCM activities from the Western Balkans
to the South Caucasus, from Africa to the Middle East and even Asia. In
2008, it launched its biggest ever mission, the EULEX rule of law mission
in Kosovo. As I write (August 2013), there are 12 ongoing CCM
missions. We will evaluate the success or otherwise of these missions in
Chapter 5. But how can all this effort to develop civilian capacity be
appraised and evaluated? It took several years before analysts began the
process of evaluation. When they did, the verdicts varied. A premonitory
assessment in 2006 had already warned that there was a serious discon-
nect between the ambitions of the texts and the reality on the ground
(Hansen 2006). The semi-insider verdict from the EU’s own Institute for
Security Studies in 2009 was balanced and measured. Coherence and
synergy, the key variable noted from the outset, were judged to ‘have left
much to be desired’. The specification of capabilities was considered to
have made some progress, as was the development of integrated pack-
ages for rapid deployment and mission support (although more as a
result of ad hoc arrangements than as a result of enhanced structures.
The key argument made in this assessment is that, by 2009, the problem
of delivering qualified personnel to CCM missions lay at the feet of the
member states, which were simply not generating the human capital
required (Grevi et al. 2009: 104–11). According to one study, there are as
many as 1.6 million appropriate civilian personnel available across the
EU (Gya 2009). Although 10,000 were pledged in 2004, by 2009 only
2,334 had been deployed (Grevi et al. 2009: 415) of which 1,800 were
attached to the EULEX mission in Kosovo. This was widely considered
to be the most the EU could manage. The issue of seconding civilian
experts to CSDP missions had rapidly become a major Achilles heel for
CCM (Juergenliemk 2011; Jacobs 2011; Behrendt 2011).
The most systematic and comprehensive assessment of CCM (Korski
and Gowan 2009: 11) concluded gloomily that ‘ten years after the
creation of CSDP, most EU missions remain small, lacking in ambition
and strategically irrelevant’ and that such missions are ‘woefully ill-
prepared to deal with threats to their own security’. The disparities
between member state capacity and willingness to recruit civilian experts
(judges, accountants, auditors, customs officials, penitentiary officers,
etc.) was portrayed as enormous and the EU deemed to suffer from
chaotically divergent recruitment practices. Turf wars between the EU
Council and the Commission and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures
in Brussels were all deemed to have exacerbated the problem. However,
another comprehensive analysis concluded, on a more positive note, that
‘the EU has managed to make valuable civilian contributions in conflict
and post-conflict environments, especially when they are close to Europe.
Although the EU has often fallen short of its own goals, especially when
it comes to staffing, and has encountered frequent logistical and planning
problems, the general trend is positive. Provided that European states
continue to invest in developing civilian capabilities, the EU can be
expected to make a growing contribution in years ahead’ (Chivvis 2010).
That final sentence involves a very considerable proviso…
Is the glass half empty or half full? There is little doubt that the general
field of ‘nation-building’ is set to expand over the coming decades and
the EU has its work cut out to rationalize and streamline its civilian
capacity to meet the growing demand for this type of international exper-
tise (Dobbins et al. 2008a). But the challenges are massive. The missions
embarked on to date have all revealed serious problems of interagency
rivalry. In particular, the lack of any significant agreement on a natural
division of labour between the Commission’s many responsibilities for
CCM (Gourlay 2006) and those recently embraced by the Council
remains an obvious failure which demands urgent attention (Gourlay
2006a). Despite constant repetition of the need to establish a viable fund-
ing method for CCM missions (and indeed for military missions), this
crucial enabler ‘has largely been improvised; does not provide a sustain-
able and coherent framework for future actions; and could indeed
threaten the overall credibility of EU foreign policy’ (Missiroli 2006: 45).
The situation with regard to training is chaotic, with very little synergy
between the (very different) activities carried out by the member states
and those carried out by the EU itself (Jacob 2011). Moreover, it is far
more difficult to deploy overseas policemen, judges, tax lawyers, audi-
tors, customs officers and the like, all of whom are invariably volunteers.
The key reason why the EU had such difficulty meeting its own (very
modest) targets for police trainers in Afghanistan is that there is little
incentive for European police officers to spend a perilous year in Kabul.
It is even more difficult to persuade judges to go overseas. They are
understandably unwilling to take themselves out of their national
systems, out of the promotion circuit. Yet these civilian experts are in
many ways more indispensable than soldiers. General David Leakey
noted in a conversation with the author that, as commander of the
EUFOR Althea mission in Bosnia in 2005, 200 auditors would have been
of more use to him in building state capacity than 2,000 soldiers.
Summing up the state of play in CCM in 2009, two officials from the
European Commission highlighted four ongoing challenges: the provi-
sion of adequate funding; the shortfall between stated targets and actual
commitments in terms of human resources; the creation of a single
command structure; strategic planning and vision (Wright and Auvinen
2009).
The ‘Comprehensive Approach’

As CSDP has developed, so too has the increasingly all-encompassing
concept of the ‘comprehensive approach’ (Major and Schöndorf 2011;
Pirozzi 2013). Initially intended as a signal that there needed to be maxi-
mum coordination between the military and civilian aspects of the EU’s
security and defence policy (Ioannides 2010), thereby allowing the Union
to muster and deploy the entire range of policy instruments at its
disposal, the concept has, over the past decade, been extended in all sorts
of directions. Within the EU, it has been applied to the need to embrace
and integrate into a holistic strategy new threats such as climate change
(Zwolski 2012), piracy (Ehrhart and Petretto 2012) and terrorism
(Kaunert and Léonard 2013), as well as being analysed as a synonym for
strategic culture (Drent 2011; Norheim-Martinsen 2013). The notion
has also been taken over by NATO, not only to facilitate the Alliance’s
own efforts to integrate a civilian and diplomatic dimension into its tradi-
tional military mindset (NATO 2010), but also to mesh with the fash-
ionable emphasis on the so-called ‘effects based approach to operations’
(EBAO) (Smith-Windsor 2008; NDC 2008). It has also been embraced
by the United Nations in recognition of the fact that ‘in a complex and
interdependent international conflict-management system […] the scope
of the crisis faced by the international community is often of such a scale
that no single agency, government or international organization can
manage it on its own’ (de Coning 2008). At its most extensive, it is used
in a section of US international relations literature to indicate that the
major lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq are that, unless inter-
vening governments have a coherent and long-term plan for a civilian
follow-up to an initial military ‘entry’, leading to a comprehensive
nation-building project, it may well be better not to go in at all (Barnett
2004; Dobbins et al. 2008a; McChrystal 2013).
This volume is not the place to enter into a lengthy discussion of the
complexities, ambiguities, inadequacies and ultimately relative failure of
the EU’s various attempts to develop a viable comprehensive concept.
Rare are the studies that suggest, as does Michael E. Smith (2012; 2013),
that ‘institutional learning’ can significantly assist in the generation of a
viable measure of comprehensiveness, although Mai’a Cross (2011), in a
rather different context, argues along similar lines. Under General David
Leakey, a team within the European Union Military Staff devoted two
years to the task of finding an institutional and instrumental matrix
which would allow for truly joined-up civil–military planning, deploy-
ment, mission activation and follow-up, and produced an excellent plan
on paper – which fell foul of conflicting cultures between the military and
the NGOs (it may not have been the most tactful approach to ‘compre-
hensiveness’ to attempt to situate it exclusively within the military staff)
and also of rival approaches from the member states (EUMS 2009).
Radek Kohl, from the General Secretariat of the Council, has offered his
insights into the challenge of making Civil–Military Coordination
(CMCO) work and has stressed the absolute need (but also ferocious
difficulty) of creating a ‘culture of coordination’ (Kohl 2008). This is also
the approach adopted by political scientist Margriet Drent, who notes
that CSDP started life as tightly focused on the military dimension and,
although progressively adding the civilian dimension, has never success-
fully corrected for the initial separation (Drent 2011). In 2008, the hith-
erto separate directorates within the Council Secretariat for civilian and
military crisis management were merged into one Crisis Management
Planning Department (CMPD) but the creation of the CPCC and the fact
that operational planning for military missions remains within the
EUMS, effectively undermined the effect of the merger. Several proposals
have been made to merge all of these bodies into one vast Brussels-based
Civil–Military Headquarters (Drent and Zandee 2010; Ioannides 2010)
but resistance to such a move (not just from the UK) is ferocious.
Per Martin Norheim-Martinsen has compared the EU’s ‘model’ for
the generation of a comprehensive civil–military approach with other
leading political science models – notably Samuel Huntington’s ‘normal’
or separated model (Huntington 1957) and Morris Janowitz’s ‘constab-
ulary’ or integrated model (Janowitz 1960). This comparison suggests
that the EU, despite elevating the mantra of the comprehensive approach
to a kind of EU raison d’état, and despite the wholesale profiling of CSDP
as a postmodern way of doing crisis management differently (Norheim-
Martinsen 2013: 49), has in reality sustained the de facto separation of
the civilian and military sides of CSDP (Norheim-Martinsen 2010). Most
other studies concur with this judgement, arguing that a step shift
towards a more meaningful and viable coordination of the military and
civilian dimensions of CSDP is both essential (Keohane 2011; Biscop et
al. 2011; Tagarev and Ratchev 2011), and horrendously difficult –
almost certainly containing inherent limits (De Coning and Fris 2011;
Mattelaer 2013). Various analysts have identified a range of necessary
steps forward: strengthening the links between CFSP and CSDP; cross-
cutting training; developing dual-use capabilities; streamlining CSDP
funding; developing crisis-specific approaches; ensuring cooperation
from the very start of the conflict cycle (Ioannides 2010; Major and
Scöndorf 2011; Keohane and Grant 2013). The challenge of forging a

genuinely comprehensive approach is yet another – major – work in
progress.
Conclusion
In 2003, the European Security Strategy spoke of the EU’s intention to be

a ‘global player’ and to ‘share in the responsibility for global security and
in building a better world’ (ESS 2003: 4). After reviewing the main
threats to the EU and the wider world (terrorism, proliferation of WMD,
regional conflicts, state failure and organized crime), the document states
that: ‘none of the new threats is purely military; nor can any be tackled
by purely military means. Each requires a mix of instruments’ (ibid.: 12).
Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has acquired
considerable experience – most of it through the United Nations – in
crisis management, humanitarian intervention, post-conflict reconstruc-
tion and nation-building. At the same time, the limits of naked military
power, unaccompanied by significant civilian-driven post-conflict recon-
struction plans, have been clearly demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The ‘mix of instruments’ referred to in the ESS, is, almost literally, limit-
less, covering the entire range of policy tools at the disposal of states and
the international community. The ESS defines two strategic objectives:
building security in the EU’s own neighbourhood; and creating an inter-
national order based on effective multilateralism. While both objectives
require a range of instruments, the former is more likely to involve mili-
tary power and the latter civilian power. Yet, only five years before the
drafting of the ESS, the EU per se had no vestige of military power and
only the first glimmerings of civilian crisis management capabilities. In a
very short time, since the dawn of the new century, the Union has begun
to address both of those deficiencies, as well as the relationship between
them.
A 2013 study carried out by the EU-ISS on behalf of the EU Military
Committee addressed the challenge of generating the appropriate mili-
tary capacity for the world of 2025. This involves getting to grips, in
Donald Rumsfeld’s much derided dictum, with ‘known knowns, known
unknowns and unknown unknowns’. For military planners, this is a
daunting prospect. The world is entering a period of power transition,
popularly envisaged as involving the decline of the West and the rise of
the rest. Certainly, it is in the West that defence budgets are falling and in
Asia that they are climbing. 2012 saw the first year for centuries in which
Asian states spent more on their militaries than European states. Does
this matter? For many of the EU’s citizens, clearly it does not. Europe is
at peace and there are no obvious threats to that peace. But military plan-
ners cannot work on the basis of best-case scenarios. They can only
address known and unknown capabilities and intentions – and plan

accordingly. The analysts at the EU-ISS therefore came up with five
priority ‘avenues’ to be explored by those whose responsibility it is to
ensure that the EU achieves the objectives it set out in the ESS. The first
is consolidation of the military assets available to the Union through
rationalization and a targeted EU Military Review. The second is opti-
mization of procurement and interservice cooperation. The third is inno-
vation to enhance military technology. The fourth is regionalization – the
maximization of the ‘clusters’ approach discussed above. Finally, inte-
gration of EU armed forces under a single structure (Missiroli 2013). The
latter objective may sound, to some readers, like a call for that ‘European
army’ whose intent we dismissed in Chapter 1. While I remain certain
that the objective of creating a ‘European army’ was far from the minds
of those who launched CSDP at the turn of the century, there is no doubt
that, as a result of a decade and a half of experience in trying to coordi-
nate military assets, planners are increasingly converging on the notion
that some form of integrated EU armed force is unavoidable. In recent
years, leaders from Poland (Cienski and Wagstyl 2006), Germany
(Spiegel 2007; Earth Times 2008), Italy (Gulf Times 2009) and even the
UK (Oakeshott 2008), among others, have called overtly for a ‘European
army’. What is certain is that the Europeans, collectively, need to reach
agreement on the role armed force will play in their external policy in the
coming decades. At present, there is no such agreement. This is why the
five ‘avenues’ proposed by the EU-ISS are so important.
Some will interpret this package as inappropriately focused on mili-
tary instruments, to the detriment of civilian assets, and there may be
some truth in that. Almost all of those who write about CCM insist that
coordination of the military and civilian dimensions of an overseas
mission should begin at first base and cover the entire life cycle of that
mission. This is undoubtedly true. But the fact remains that Europeans
are relatively agreed on which civilian assets they wish to deploy in the
cause of security and stability. While posing challenges in terms of deliv-
ering target numbers and of coordinating institutional mechanisms,
CCM does not ask tough questions about what type of civilian assets are
required. But as long as there is no consensus across the EU about the
function, scale and type of military assets required and/or desired for a
viable CFSP/CSDP, the ‘comprehensive approach’ will remain a distant
dream. It is for this reason that we must now turn to the EU’s compli-
cated relations with its one-time protector and hegemon, the most
powerful military actor the world has ever known: the United States of
America. For the basis of CSDP, at Saint-Malo, it will be recalled, was
‘autonomy’. The problem is that nobody yet has any clear idea of what
that word means.
Chapter 4
Selling it to Uncle Sam… CSDP

and Transatlantic Relations
‘If your ultimate aim is to provide for your own defence, then the time
to tell us is today!’ – President George H. W. Bush to his European
allies, NATO summit, Rome, October 1991
The presence, in the 1998 Saint-Malo Declaration, of the ominous-

sounding word ‘autonomous’ immediately sparked a series of reactions
to the CSDP project among US policy-makers and analysts. In 2013, the
ripples from the ‘a’-word continue to complicate both intra-European
and transatlantic relations. This chapter will analyse three sets of issues
opened up by Saint-Malo and the advent of CSDP. These issues need to
be considered within the broader framework of the evolution of transat-
lantic relations generally since the end of the Cold War. Under four
successive US Presidents, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush and Barack Obama, transatlantic relations have been on a roller-
coaster ride which is far from over. With the post-2012 American ‘rebal-
ancing’ or ‘tilt’ to Asia, the relationship has entered a new and critical
phase. The first issue to be addressed concerns the different types of reac-
tions to the CSDP project which have been forthcoming from within the
American political class. Initially cautious if not downright sniffy
(Albright 1998; Gordon 2000), the official US position has shifted signif-
icantly over a 15-year period to one of overt encouragement for the
European defence project (Nuland 2008; Obama 2009). At the same
time, there is growing concern in the US about the Europeans’ capacity to
deliver (Gates 2011), or even increasing disinterest in Europe as a partner
(Moïsi 2013). The second issue to be addressed in this chapter concerns
the ways in which CSDP has impacted the basic division among the EU
member states between ‘Atlanticists’ and ‘Europeanists’ (Stahl et al.
2004). Donald Rumsfeld’s mischievous categorization of Europeans into
‘old’ and ‘new’ in 2003 reflected a real division within the EU over the
Iraq War. Was that division structural and lasting or contingent and
fleeting? For the countries of the former Soviet bloc, NATO membership
proved much easier to secure than membership of the EU. Most of these
countries have tended to see in their relationship with the US (via NATO)
their surest passage to a secure future (Michta 1999; Krupnick 2003;
Quinlan 2001). For this reason, they have tended to interpret NATO in
109
a different way from other Europeans (Vasconcelos 2010). However, it

was always more likely that, in the long run, structured stability and
security would actually derive from their membership of the European
Union (Jacoby 2006; Vachudova 2005). And indeed, many of these
countries (particularly Poland) have gradually switched the balance of
their Atlanticist/Europeanist allegiance in favour of the latter (O’Donnell
2009; Wojciechowski 2009).
The third issue, and in many ways the most complex, has to do with
the tortuous – and constantly shifting – relations between this new secu-
rity kid-on-the-bloc and its staid and older cousin NATO. In December
2002, the EU and NATO signed a formal Declaration on CSDP setting
out their joint and seemingly consensual views on the nature of their
ongoing partnership. Nevertheless, relations have continued to be tense,
if not actually dysfunctional, in large part because of the asymmetries
and imbalances between the nature and objectives of the two organiza-
tions, themselves a reflection of the shifting world order since 1989.
Cooperation has proven to be almost impossible. In 2013, both CSDP
and NATO are undergoing profound self-interrogation. Some even
speak of existential crises. After the Libyan operation in 2011, which saw
CSDP sidelined and a newly configured NATO featuring American ‘lead-
ership from behind’, there has been an outpouring of literature bent on
re-thinking the relationship between the two entities. Practically every-
body – including, perhaps especially, the French government (Védrine
2012; Livre Blanc 2013) – sees the solution in ever greater cooperation
between CSDP and NATO. Quite what form that might assume is the
question at the heart of the debate.
US Reactions to CSDP
Transatlantic relations within the NATO Alliance have never been plain-
sailing (Schmidt 2001; Freedman 1983). Disputes over burden-sharing
remained a quasi-permanent feature of the relationship throughout the
Cold War and beyond (Gnesotto et al. 1999; Lindstrom 2005). Every
decade, a major crisis rattled the Alliance (1950s: Suez; 1960s: flexible
response; 1970s: Yom Kippur War; 1980s: INF crisis; 1990s: Balkans;
2000s: Iraq). NATO, thus far, has always managed to emerge from the
crisis intact. However, in the early twenty-first century, the advent of
CSDP and the concurrent quarrels between a number of EU governments
and the administration of George W. Bush shook the Alliance to its core
(Gordon and Shapiro 2004; Anderson et al. 2008; Lundestad 2008). This
new dispute arose from two interconnecting trends. The first was the
gradual and inevitable re-prioritization of ‘European affairs’ in US grand
strategy after the Cold War. As the tectonic plates shifted, US interests
and focus moved away from Europe towards the Pacific and the Gulf.
CSDP and Transatlantic Relations 111
This was inevitable from the day the Berlin Wall fell, but has gathered
pace ever since and, in January 2012, was consecrated with the publica-
tion of the Strategic Guidance Paper which formally announced the
much discussed ‘tilt to Asia’ (DoD 2012). The place of Europe in US
foreign and security policy has remained in a state of considerable uncer-
tainty – deeply unsettling for both partners. Secondly, and concurrently,
as the EU emerged as an international actor – one which was actively
seeking greater ‘autonomy’ – the future of the transatlantic relationship
seemed clouded in obscurity. Both sides revealed elements of schizophre-
nia as a result of this dual transition. The United States formally
welcomed the EU’s shift towards greater self-reliance … but remained
fearful of potential EU challenges to US leadership. The European Union
exulted in its new-found freedom of manoeuvre … but remained fearful
of US abandonment.
Any hard and fast categorization of the various US reactions to CSDP
in terms of ‘schools of thought’ would be tantamount to conferring on
the ‘debate’ more coherence and more visibility than it warrants.
Furthermore, it would have to control for the evolution of the various
positions over time. There is no doubt that US attitudes towards Europe
in general and to CSDP in particular shifted from being dominated by
sceptics and critics in 1999–2000 to being increasingly characterized by
proposals for partnership by about 2006. At the most basic level, US
reactions can be divided into two: those who believe (however much or
however little) that CSDP will benefit the US and the transatlantic rela-
tionship; and those who believe it will harm them.
The formal position of both the Clinton administration and the
George W. Bush administration has been characterized by Stanley Sloan
as ‘Yes, but…’. It should be recalled that, in the early months after the
end of the Cold War, the administration of President George H. W.
Bush remained deeply suspicious of European intentions. At the critical
NATO summit in Rome, in October 1991, when the Allies met to adopt
a ‘New Strategic Concept’, Bush opened the meeting by facing up
squarely to his European partners with the ominous words: ‘If your ulti-
mate aim is to provide for your own defence, then the time to tell us is
today!’ Nobody blinked (Kelleher 1995: 58). President Clinton proved,
in general, to be far more open-minded about a new European contri-
bution (Sloan 2000: 10–14). Throughout the 1990s, and in particular
during the protracted saga of ESDI, the objective in both the US and the
EU was to find a formula which would retain the US commitment to
Europe, respect US leadership, and also allow the Europeans greater
autonomy (Howorth 2003a). After the Saint-Malo Declaration, official
Washington reacted cautiously. On 7 December 1998, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright penned the first formulation of the ‘Yes, but…’
reaction in the Financial Times (Albright 1998). She began on a positive
note:
We welcome the call from Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, for
Europeans to consider ways they can take more responsibility for their
own security and defence. Our interest is clear: we want a Europe that
can act. We want a Europe with modern, flexible military forces that
are capable of putting out fires in Europe’s backyard and working
with us through the alliance to defend our common interests.
European efforts to do more for Europe’s own defence make it easier,
not harder, for us to remain engaged.
But, as we saw in Chapter 1, she immediately coupled this enthusiasm

with three caveats, subsequently know as the ‘3 Ds’: there should be no
decoupling, no duplication and no discrimination. On decoupling,
Albright insisted that European decision-making should not be
‘unhooked from broader Alliance decision-making’. The unfortunate
symbolism of this stricture was more significant than its practical reality.
To state, on behalf of a politico-military alliance, that it should not be
allowed to fall apart bears comparison with one partner in a marriage
authorizing the other to explore other relationships on condition that it
not lead to divorce. Alliances, like marriages, are based on trust. The
warning about decoupling, which suggests a fundamental lack of trust,
had two equally unfortunate connotations. The first was the implication
that the EU allies were actively seeking to ‘unhook’ the Alliance, an accu-
sation which had little basis in fact. The second connotation was that the
US would not allow decoupling, which was even more offensive to the
extent to which it appeared to involve some measure of threat (Schake
2003).
Albright’s second concern was that CSDP should not duplicate
resources and assets which already existed in the Alliance. US fears,
immediately after Saint-Malo, focused on the EU’s potential to rival the
US in military hardware. This fear was not unconnected with the other
ambition expressed in the Saint-Malo Declaration: ‘a strong and compet-
itive European defence industry and technology’. If read as a stricture
aimed at avoiding wasteful policies on procurement, the no duplication
caveat made sense. As a warning to the Europeans not to try to enter into
competition with US defence firms, it was disingenuous. As a suggestion
that the US had military assets to spare, it was – as 9/11 was rapidly to
demonstrate – just plain wrong. 9/11 also underlined the obvious truth
that, if there was Alliance scarcity, particularly in strategic systems –
long-range transport, logistics, command and control, etc. – it made
good sense to fill those gaps. This led to new theses on ‘constructive
duplication’ (Schake 2003).
Albright’s third caveat concerned fears of CSDP discrimination
against European members of NATO outside the EU. In particular, this
concern focused on the contribution of Turkey and Norway to European
security. Under the post-1992 arrangements for European defence coop-
eration inaugurated by the WEU, these countries were designated ‘asso-

ciate members’ of the WEU and were, to all intents and purposes, treated
as full members of the club (Van Eekelen 1998: 135–9). However, under
the impending institutional arrangements for CSDP, these two important
NATO allies suddenly found themselves excluded from discussions on
European security – just as four non-NATO ‘neutrals’ (Ireland, Austria,
Sweden and Finland) were ushered into the security policy chamber with
a full seat at the table. The US exerted enormous pressure on the EU to
devise some means of including non-EU NATO allies in the CSDP proce-
dures. This problem, which we shall analyse in some detail below (pp.
177ff) was to pose a major conundrum for NATO–CSDP relations over
the following four years.
What is noteworthy in this initial US reaction to Saint-Malo, however,
is the refusal fully to accept the implications of a shift from an ESDI-type
capacity forged from within NATO (‘separable but not separate’) to the
autonomous aspirations of CSDP itself. US and NATO officials were to
continue for years inaccurately (or disingenuously?) to use the acronym
ESDI when referring to CSDP. Albright’s ‘3 Ds’ articulated the first offi-
cial expression of conditionality on the part of the Clinton administra-
tion. But as officials in Washington pored over the implications of the
CSDP project, they gradually added further conditions to the list, condi-
tions which continued to confuse ESDI with CSDP. The signals were very
mixed. US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, in an important
speech in London in October 1999, after insisting that the administration
supported ‘ESDI’, proceeded to add that ‘our support will be guided by
the answers to two questions: first, will it work? … Second, will it help
keep the Alliance together?’ These were (and remain) important ques-
tions, but they hardly came across as a ringing endorsement. A few weeks
later, Talbott attempted to dispel the impression created by his earlier
speech with the unambiguous statement that: ‘We are not against; we are
not ambivalent; we are not anxious; we are for it’ (Kupchan 2000: 17).
But doubts persisted.
In summer 2000, an article by Philip Gordon, formerly Director for
European Affairs at the National Security Council and later, under
President Obama, to become Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs, laid out ‘six guiding principles’ under which CSDP
might succeed in giving the EU more capacity without dividing NATO
and/or driving the Americans out of Europe. In addition to Madeleine
Albright’s ‘3 D’s’, all of which were repeated, three further conditions
were set down. The first was that Europeans should attach ‘far greater
priority’ to modernizing their military capabilities than to creating new
institutions. The second was that Europeans should recognize and state
clearly that ‘NATO remains their first choice when it comes to military
force’ and that CSDP would not challenge NATO’s primacy. The battle
over what became known as NATO’s ‘right of first refusal’ for military
operations was thus engaged. The third condition was that formal links
should be created immediately between the EU and NATO in order to
avoid crossed wires and potential areas of transatlantic conflict (Gordon
2000). These ‘conditions’ were controversial in Europe. Some member
states saw them as tantamount to an edict that CSDP should not be
allowed to take any steps without first clearing them with NATO and/or
Washington. Others accepted them as an understandable US attempt to
ensure that the advent of CSDP did not drive a wedge between the two
sides (Howorth 2000a).
Throughout 1999 and well into 2000, in an attempt to dispel misun-
derstandings, officials from both Brussels and a number of European
capitals (primarily London) criss-crossed the Atlantic in an increasingly
successful effort to reassure the Clinton administration that CSDP would
enhance and strengthen the Alliance rather than weaken and undermine
it (Champion 1999). In 1999, George Robertson, former British defence
secretary and at that time NATO Secretary General, countered the nega-
tivity of the ‘3 Ds’ with the more positive ‘3 Is’: improvement in Europe’s
military capacity; inclusiveness for all NATO allies; and indivisibility of
transatlantic security (Robertson 1999). Two full years of reassurance
were necessary to calm the nerves of the Clinton administration. After
the election of George W. Bush, Tony Blair paid a hasty visit to the US in
February 2001, primarily in order to reinforce that work of reassurance
(Riddell 2003: 133). But in June 2001, when Bush paid his first visit to
Europe, matters had reverted to roughly where they were at the time of
Madeleine Albright’s original ‘3 Ds’. After his first meeting with NATO’s
heads of state and government in Brussels on 13 June 2002, Bush
declared:
The United States would welcome a capable European force properly

integrated with NATO that provides new options for handling crises
when NATO chooses not to lead. Such a force will require EU
members to provide the resources necessary to create real capabilities,
without waste or duplication. And such a force must be inclusive, so
that all allies who wish to contribute are as fully involved as possible.
Our security is indivisible. (Bush 2001)
Yet again we see that the important distinction between a type of ESDI –
from within NATO – and an autonomous CSDP – outside it – is, inten-
tionally or unintentionally, blurred. Such confusion was also to be the
cardinal feature of Congressional inquiries into ‘CSDP’ in late 1999.
Resolutions were passed in the House of Representatives (2 November)
and in the Senate (8 November) confirming US support for NATO and
issuing a long series of concerns about the new European security devel-
opments. The gist of the Congressional concerns in fact amounted to
suggestions that even an ESDI capability within NATO would need to be
tightly micromanaged, but everything which smacked of an autonomous

European capacity should be resisted or hedged with very severe condi-
tionality (Sloan 2000: 27–33). The starting point in official Washington
at the turn of the millennium was crystal clear. CSDP as a European
project was acceptable only so long as it did not constitute a challenge to
the United States or a threat to NATO and so long as it actually brought
to the table military capacity and resources which could be useful to the
Alliance.
Beyond the quasi-official ‘Yes, but…’ approach, there are two rather
distinct groups in the US who have expressed a positive interest in CSDP.
One has been called the ‘domestic interests’ faction (Sloan 2000: 5). This
tendency believes that the US should downplay its world role and
concentrate on rectifying its many domestic economic and social prob-
lems. This view can be found in one variant in a man like the 2000
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, and in other variants in
the ultra-right paleo-conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, or
among the ideologues of the neo-liberal Cato Institute, which has gener-
ally tended to see ‘entangling alliances’ in general and NATO in particu-
lar as an expensive and unnecessary burden on US resources (Carpenter
1994). This approach was most trenchantly expressed recently by the
neo-realist MIT professor Barry Posen who had formerly interpreted
CSDP as ‘balancing’ against the US. Arguing that the US should
massively ‘pull back’ from its overseas commitments, Posen proposed in
2013 that ‘the United States should withdraw from [NATO’s] military
command structure and return the alliance to the primarily political
organisation it once was. The Europeans can decide for themselves
whether they want to retain the military command structure under the
auspices of the European Union or dismantle it altogether’ (Posen 2013).
Clearly the threat of balancing had receded.
A more positive approach was forthcoming from a leading European
specialist, Charles Kupchan, who sees American power as overstretched
and entering a period of decline in which robust and positive assistance
from the European allies should only be welcomed (Kupchan 2002). This
attitude I have dubbed the ‘Yes please!’ approach. In a key article,
Kupchan sought to dispel US concerns about CSDP. The partnership
between the US and the EU, he argued, would be healthier and stronger
if the Europeans were united, autonomous both politically and militarily,
and capable of securing their own neighbourhood. Kupchan expressed
confidence that CSDP represented a positive break-through in transat-
lantic relations, one the US needed (and had itself been urging on the
Europeans for decades) and one which would be of real benefit to both
sides. There were – and still are – in the US many leading analysts who
view Europe and CSDP positively and see a more balanced Alliance as
both necessary and desirable for both sides. But only Kupchan presents
this particular combination of US declinism, European resurgence and
transatlantic requirements, together with great confidence in a generally

applicable positive sum game.
A third attitude to CSDP was epitomized by the extreme scepticism
expressed by a man such as former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski (Brzezinski 2000). Europe, he argued, would never succeed in
becoming a military or even a political power, despite its best efforts,
because it simply did not (and does not) have the drive or the political
will to achieve this. Its influence and reach would, he insisted, remain
essentially economic and commercial. In short, the EU was little more
than a market. It would for ever lack the emotional and ideological-
crusading passion of the US dream. This attitude, I call the ‘Oh yeah?’
approach. The US should not be concerned about what he persisted in
calling ‘ESD’, because it was an insignificant project: ‘the so-called
European pillar will be made less out of steel and concrete and more out
of papier-mâché’ (Brzezinski 2000: 24). This attitude towards the EU and
CSDP is fairly widely shared across the US political class and is to be
found in both main political parties. It corresponds closely to those we
encountered in an earlier chapter who believe CSDP to be largely irrele-
vant. It is essentially based on the culture of the transatlantic relationship
during the Cold War and expresses confidence that, whatever else might
have changed as a result of 1989, the basic transatlantic relationship
(despite griping and moaning from Europeans) will continue to be based
on hegemony and dependence.
The final category of reaction to CSDP is that which I categorize as
‘No way!’. Advocates of this approach include the former US ambas-
sador to the United Nations, John Bolton (Bolton 1999), the former
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Peter
Rodman (Rodman 2000), Council on Foreign Relations member Jeffrey
Cimbalo (Cimbalo 2004), John Hulsman and Sally McNamara of the
Heritage Foundation (Hulsman and Gardiner 2004; McNamara 2009),
and many others. Their basic arguments are quite simple: further ‘deep-
ening’ of the European integration project in general is not in the US
national interest, and CSDP in particular is a threat to NATO and to the
Atlantic Alliance. It should be resisted and, if possible, prevented. The
evidence on which much of this hostile commentary is based is either
shaky or just plain false (Howorth 2005a).
After the US became bogged down in Iraq, the predominantly negative
US views of CSDP tended to give way to tentative expressions of support.
In the meantime, of course, CSDP had progressed from the drawing
board to the deployment platform and begun to demonstrate its worth.
Concurrently, transatlantic relations, despite a more positive official
tone on both sides of the Atlantic, continued to worsen (Anderson et al.
2008; Kopstein and Steinmo 2008). The result was that US comment on
the future of transatlantic relations tended to divide into two main
camps, which have been categorized as ‘disaggregators’ – those keen to
encourage the administration to adopt a policy of divide and rule in

Europe – and ‘reassurers’ – those allegedly willing to cut a deal with
Europe based on European support for US policy on terms favourable to
the EU (Van Oudenaren 2005). Overt disaggregators (Cimbalo 2004;
Hulsman and Gardiner 2004; Steltzenmüller 2004) became very audible
during the protracted negotiations over the European Constitutional
Treaty in the mid-2000s. But their influence over US policy-making
remained extremely limited. As for the ‘reassurers’, their numbers grew
as Iraq became more of a challenge (Gordon 2004; Asmus et al. 2005;
Compact 2005; Sloan 2006). By 2008, with Iraq and Afghanistan
absorbing all the energy of Washington policy-makers, the line on CSDP
from the George W. Bush administration became positively enthusiastic.
This was enunciated clearly and strongly in February 2008 by the
American Ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland: ‘I am here today in
Paris to say that we agree with France – Europe needs, the United States
needs, NATO needs, the democratic world needs – a stronger, more
capable European defense capacity. A CSDP with only soft power is not
enough ... President Sarkozy is right – “NATO cannot be everywhere”’
(Nuland 2008). At the Munich Security Conference in February 2009,
Vice President Biden stressed that ‘we support the further strengthening
of European defence, an increased role for the European Union in
preserving peace and security, a fundamentally stronger NATO–EU
partnership’ (Biden 2009). The ‘debate’ in the United States over CSDP
appeared to have run its course. It would resurface after the Libyan crisis
in 2011 in a different form (see below).
European Approaches to the NATO–CSDP Relationship
The second set of issues to be addressed in this chapter concerns the

evolution of various European attitudes towards NATO and/or the US in
the context of the emerging CSDP. The key challenge here is to under-
stand the range of views across the EU as to the precise nature of national
institutional preference with respect to NATO and CSDP. At one
extreme might come a country such as Denmark, the only one with an
op-out from CSDP, which clearly considers that NATO is the only secu-
rity actor with which it wishes to be associated (Wivel 2005); or Poland,
which, although obliged by the terms of accession to accept the CSDP
chapters of the acquis communautaire, tended in practice – at least
initially – to prioritize NATO almost to the exclusion of any real involve-
ment with CSDP, although there were, by the mid-2000s, signs that the
balance was shifting in the other direction. At the other end of the spec-
trum might be positioned countries such as Finland and Ireland, which
have traditionally refused to be associated with NATO and which have
contributed in significant ways to the definition of a European security
policy. Between these two positions, different EU member states can be

situated at various points across the continuum. The key question is
whether different nation-states have shifted in their relative attitudes
towards these two security entities. Most have.
The United Kingdom is generally considered to be the most
‘Atlanticist’ of the main EU member states (Croft et al. 2001). NATO
preference is not a beauty competition and other EU member states –
Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal – have also pursued a clear
Atlanticist line. But the UK is generally regarded as the most engaged in
and committed to NATO. Traditionally, in the UK view, both defence
and security in Europe have been underwritten by the United States
through NATO. The UK has therefore shunned or actively opposed vari-
ous European initiatives (usually orchestrated by France) aimed at gener-
ating a European security or defence entity. In addition to considering
the American commitment to European security as indispensable, and
while jealously safeguarding its own leading role in the Atlantic security
network, Britain has also traditionally feared that any serious attempt by
the Europeans to organize their own security and defence would encour-
age isolationism or withdrawal in the US. In this approach, it has been
backed by a number of other European states – with either a history of
naval interests in the Atlantic (Netherlands, Denmark), or a less central
involvement in continental Europe (Norway), or both (Portugal). The
fundamental reason why the UK, under Tony Blair, embraced the Saint-
Malo project was the stark realization, on the part of the 1997 New
Labour government, that – contrary to London’s long-standing assump-
tion – the United States considered greater European security self-
reliance to be a sine qua non of continued US commitment to the Alliance
(Howorth 2000a). In this sense, CSDP, for Tony Blair, was above all a
strategy aimed at preserving NATO. At first, the UK had to work hard to
persuade some of its traditional Atlanticist partners in Europe of the
salience of this approach. Denmark remained unconvinced (Olsen and
Pilegaard 2005; Larsen 2009). Portugal – more the military than the
politicians – expressed reluctance (Vasconcelos 2000). Norway battled
constantly with the recognition that adaptation to CSDP, while unwel-
come, seemed unavoidable (Tofte 2005; Graeger 2005). The
Netherlands, by contrast, had already ‘come to recognise that the long-
range commitment of America to NATO may be put at risk if the
European allies refuse to pool their forces’ (Van Staden 1997). The
Dutch were also pulled in the CSDP direction by their commitment to
European integration (Kreemers 2001).
Gradually, as CSDP acquired substance, and as transatlantic relations
continued to suffer from the fallout of the 2003 Iraq War, all of these
countries learned to balance their traditional institutional preference for
NATO with an increasing commitment to and belief in CSDP, not as an
alternative but as a complement to the Alliance. The United Kingdom,
which prioritizes pragmatism over ideology and outcomes over inten-

tions, took CSDP increasingly seriously as the need for its services grew,
alongside recognition that it could offer relief to the US military. Many of
the initial policy papers submitted to early meetings of EU foreign minis-
ters were drafted in Whitehall. It was the UK, with assistance from the
US, which negotiated with Turkey the Berlin Plus arrangements. It was
the UK in particular which, in 2004–5, was instrumental in persuading
the more Atlanticist-leaning new accession members from Central and
Eastern Europe to embrace the battle-groups concept and to participate
in a practical way in the EU’s security instruments. However, the UK’s
attitude has also been marked by ambivalence, bringing with it a serious
downside to the UK’s role in CSDP. The operational requirements of the
UK’s participation in both the (US-led) Afghanistan and Iraq operations
throughout the greater part of the 2000s resulted in a reduced British
participation in CSDP missions in the second half of the decade. After the
2010 election of the Conservative-led government, London appeared to
attach less and less importance to CSDP, in part as a result of the UK’s
growing frustration with the perceived lack of seriousness of purpose
about defence on the part of many EU member states. The UK
consciously refused to allow CSDP to develop to its fullest capacity. The
first Defence Secretary in David Cameron’s government, Liam Fox, was
unambiguously hostile to CSDP, openly inviting it to a future of ‘malign
neglect’ (O’Donnell 2011). With the prospect looming of a referendum
on the UK’s continuing membership of the EU, it becomes very hard to
imagine what Britain’s relationship with CSDP in 2020 might be
(Howorth 2013).
While it would be too soon to conclude that the more Atlanticist states
from Central and Eastern Europe have followed the same evolving trajec-
tory as their West European peers, there are some signs that this is
happening. Poland has markedly shifted in the balance of its allegiances.
Initially, Poland considered that NATO was the only international insti-
tution in which it was worth investing serious time and energy, and
Warsaw displayed an attitude towards CSDP of scepticism and even
hostility. This subsequently shifted to a position more in favour of CSDP
(Mink 2003; Zaborowski 2004: 17; Osica 2004) as a consequence of
two major developments: growing disillusionment with the US record in
Iraq; and the consequences of Polish membership in the EU. Three
secondary factors have complemented these two stimuli and accelerated
Poland’s evolution towards greater acceptance of CSDP. The first has
been a growing sense that Warsaw can play a genuinely leading role
among major European decision-makers, a status which is not on offer
via NATO where the most Poland could hope for would be a special
‘niche’ function. The second is Poland’s embrace of the EU battle-groups
concept. Poland is to take the lead role in a group including Germany,
Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania. The third is a growing awareness that
Warsaw’s desired policy of extending the security hand of friendship to

its Eastern neighbours will be more easily – and probably more success-
fully – implemented via CSDP than via NATO. Like the UK, Portugal
and the Netherlands, Poland has shifted from an exclusively pro-NATO
stance to one in which positive benefits are seen to derive from both
NATO and CSDP (Chappell 2010). Similar trends have been detected in
other Central and Eastern European countries (Howorth 2003b; Valasek
2005; O’Brennan 2006). When, in July 2013, Lithuania assumed the
rotating Presidency of the EU, there were strong signs that this tradition-
ally Atlanticist country was also shifting the balance of its priorities
towards CSDP (Gros-Verheyde 2013a; 2013b).
The four former ‘neutrals’ – Sweden, Finland, Austria, Ireland – are all
neutral for different reasons, and their approach to neutrality has shifted
constantly. Several studies noted that, by the end of the 1990s, they no
longer attached the same significance to the fact of being ‘neutral’ and all
four are in many ways more comfortable with the concept of ‘non-
aligned’ (Ojanen 2000; Aggestam 2001; Gustenau 1999; Knutsen 2000;
Keohane 2001). In a world of complex interdependence, what is there to
be neutral about? Yet the culture of neutrality – tightly tied to issues of
identity – dies hard. A nation such as Sweden, which has of its own voli-
tion remained outside major conflict since the early nineteenth century, is
conditioned at least as much by the belief that its neutrality underpins its
security as by any evidence of realism (Aggestam 2001: 183). And the
negative outcome of the 2001 Irish referendum on the Treaty of Nice
confirmed the assumptions of Irish politicians across the political spec-
trum that the time was not yet ripe to suggest that Ireland officially
change its stance of ‘military neutrality’, so closely associated with Irish
identity (Keohane 2000, Ch. 2). Austria is committed to neutrality by
Treaty and by Constitution, and Finland by geographical caution, but
both countries have internalized neutrality as a key factor in national
identity. The new buzz-words for these countries are: ‘alliance-free
states’, ‘ex-neutrals’, ‘non-allied states’ or ‘post-neutrals’. I shall refer to
them as ‘post-neutrals’. Any of these terms still implies ‘a negative atti-
tude towards something, maintaining a distance from something, or a
reservation’ (Ojanen 2000: 2). As ‘neutrals’, the body they have tradi-
tionally been most distant from has been NATO.
At first, these countries were equally sceptical about European defence
integration (Ferreira-Pereira 2006), but after they joined the EU and
began to participate fully in its activities, they gradually integrated the
security sector and have made a significant mark on CSDP. The auton-
omy of EU decision-making (particularly vis-à-vis NATO), an aspiration
usually associated by commentators with France, is also seen as crucial
by the post-neutrals. In debates within the PSC, France’s position on the
autonomy of CSDP has often been strongly supported by the ambas-
sadors from the neutral countries (Interviews in Brussels). This is partic-
ularly so in the case of planning, where the incipient EU–NATO planning

structure is viewed with concern in more than one post-neutral capital.
On the other hand, all four states are also unhappy about any moves
towards a common EU defence, whether under Article V of the WEU or
under Article 28A b/i of the Lisbon Treaty. This was one of the reasons
for the inclusion in the Amsterdam Treaty of the ‘constructive absten-
tion’ clause which effectively gave them an opt-out – although precisely
what ‘opting out’ would mean in the case of common defence is not clear.
When Sweden and Finland abandoned their former objections to plans to
merge the WEU and EU in October 1999, they did so ‘on the condition
that they would not have to assist fellow members who were under mili-
tary attack’ (Ojanen 2000: 2). However, such an attitude, in reality,
seems improbable. Keohane (2001: 18) is similarly sceptical about an
Irish government remaining ‘neutral’ in the event of an attack on an EU
member state. Post-neutrality is shifting rapidly.
Although in the early years of the twenty-first century there were signs
in several of the post-neutral countries of a public debate about evolving
relations with both NATO and CSDP, this subsided with the transat-
lantic crisis over Iraq. Sweden, for instance, once indicated that it might
be forced to reconsider its approach to NATO if the Alliance succeeded
in embracing the Baltics (Aggestam 2001). This did not happen and,
instead, Sweden has conducted a subtle policy of bilateral cooperation
with both the US and the EU, emerging as one of the most valued and
professional of small militaries in multiple crisis management operations
both on land and at sea (Möller and Bjereld 2010; Andersson 2013).
Austria in 2001 was widely tipped as being tempted to apply for
membership of NATO (Liebhart 2003). On the other hand, there were
signs that Ireland and Finland might be more amenable to the idea of
collective defence if the EU were the key security institution. Most of
these straws in the wind disappeared with the stand-off over Iraq. The
participation of the post-neutrals in any crisis management or peace-
support mission would almost certainly require a UN or OSCE mandate.
Austria participated in both SFOR (Bosnia) and KFOR (Kosovo) – which
were under UN mandates – but refused to grant NATO over-flight rights
during the Kosovo air campaign (which had no such mandate). Ireland,
Sweden and Finland succeeded in signalling support for the Kosovo
campaign without actually participating. This has been an article of faith
with all post-neutrals, who would have difficulty in endorsing the
Alliance’s more liberal interpretation of the case for intervention. This is
not to say that such countries are hesitant about committing troops. In
many ways, their contribution – proportionately – is second to none and
all the post-neutrals have prioritized participation in crisis management
missions over territorial defence. It was, of course, a Finnish–Swedish
joint initiative which resulted in the Petersberg tasks being written into
the Treaty of Amsterdam, largely to ensure the political control of the EU
over the WEU and to ensure the right of the post-neutrals to participate
in EU peacekeeping operations on an equal footing with other member
states (Laursen 1998). All four post-neutrals have long been major
contributors to UN peacekeeping, and have taken their full share of EU
duties in the Balkans and in Congo. Moreover, all four are committed to
participating in CSDP’s new battle-group configurations. In short, while
the post-neutrals retain a clear distance from NATO – at least in part as
a result of the policies of the Bush administration – they have begun to
play an important part in CSDP, in large part because the overall profile
of the EU’s security and defence policy corresponds to the security
culture with which they are imbued (Rickli 2008; Brommesson 2010).
Germany epitomizes the most interesting and possibly the most clear-
cut shift in the balance of institutional preference as between CSDP and
NATO. German reluctance to go too far down the road towards the use
of military force is a well documented and well understood phenomenon
(Longhurst 2005; Dalgaard-Nielsen 2006; Dyson 2008). Thomas
Berger, in pondering the effect on German strategic culture of the weight
of historical memory, has dubbed Germany ‘the model penitent’ (Berger
2012). The remarks that follow draw on the trail-blazing constructivist
work of Felix Berenskoetter and Bastien Giegerich (2010). For Germany,
in 1955, NATO membership constituted a new lease of life. Not only did
it provide a ‘ladder out of the morass’ (Garton Ash 1993: 21) but it repre-
sented a new form of security identity, a type of ontological security
(Mitzen 2006) – defined as the most appropriate fit between a nation’s
collective identity, its security culture, the security environment and the
available security instruments. NATO allowed Germany to assert itself
as a purely defensive, essentially civilian power in which the armed forces
could only be used for collective defence and only in multilateral –
Alliance – mode, via a decision which would in fact be taken elsewhere.
Germany, in short, identified with NATO and, by the end of the Cold
War, had emerged – in terms of human commitment, territorial central-
ity and doctrinal salience – as the Alliance’s most important European
member. Thereafter, everything began to change.
As the United States slipped effortlessly into its role as the world’s only
superpower and began increasingly to project power around the globe,
carrying NATO in its wake and imposing on the Alliance a new, more
global and more interventionist culture, Germany became less and less
comfortable and experienced a growing contradiction in its ontological
culture which caused it progressively to distance itself from some of the
central pillars of the new NATO at the same time as it began to look else-
where for a security institution more consonant with its ongoing values.
Although in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the US designated
Germany as its principal ‘partner in leadership’, the Federal Republic
was to fail immediately to live up to this role through its collective recoil
from physical involvement in the 1991 Gulf War, which represented
everything Germany felt it had definitively rejected. For Germans, and

particularly for the student generation, the scale and nature of the war in
the Gulf came as a shock to the system tantamount to a ‘security
psychosis’ (Loedel 1998: 66). Matters only got worse with NATO’s shift-
ing security strategy, emphasizing intervention, through the Bosnian
imbroglio and especially with the Kosovo war in 1999. Germans were
faced with an impossible dilemma – being essentially forced to choose
between two equally unacceptable normative absolutes: the rejection of
war and the rejection of genocide.
Although German political leaders did their best to persuade the
public that adaptation to a new world reality required a relaxation of the
pacifist–civilian culture which had dominated the Cold War period, the
public were not so easily swayed (Dyson 2005; Dyson 2008).
Berenskoetter and Giegerich (2010) have charted the course which
Germany adopted throughout the 1990s in its quest for an alternative
security institution. Successively, they argue, Bonn looked to the UN, to
the CSCE/OSCE, to the WEU and eventually to the EU itself for a new
security framework more consonant with deeply rooted and unchanging
Germany values. Progressively, Germany came to switch its security
identity and to construct its ontological security through CSDP which
offered choices that were increasingly absent in NATO: crisis manage-
ment rather than the pursuit of US global strategy, multilateral decision-
making rather than pressure from Washington, a range of policy
instruments rather than exclusivity to the military and perhaps above all
genuine political influence as opposed to marginalization. In particular,
the choice between the underlying deployment norms of the European
reaction force (mandated, responsive, rare) and that of NATO’s post-
Prague Response Force (non-mandated, pre-emptive, frequent) offered
Germans little alternative but to draw ever closer to CSDP: ‘unable to
significantly influence American efforts to redefine the terms of Western
order […] domestic adjustments were increasingly linked to the EU as the
collective forum within which German identity could be embedded’. A
similar interpretation, focusing on German restraint, is provided by
Cornelia Bjola and Marcus Kornprobst (2007). Other analyses stress the
importance of ‘institutional Europeanisation’ on the part of the German
administration as it progressively embraced CSDP (Jacobs 2012).
Berenskoetter and Giegerich were criticized for overstating the extent to
which Germany had shifted away from the American protector. Their
article, which was written during the height of the Iraq crisis, was
undoubtedly influenced by Chancellor Schroeder’s uncompromising line
of ‘no German participation even with a UN mandate’ (Dettke 2009;
Dalgaard-Nielsen 2006; Buras and Longhurst 2004). Once Angela
Merkel was elected Chancellor in 2005, there was a real attempt on the
part of the CDU government to mend fences with the US, in particular by
stepping up German involvement in Afghanistan. But ultimately this did
not alter the continuing discomfort felt in Germany for military expedi-
tions of whatever sort. Germany’s participation in the EUFOR Congo
mission in 2006 in part explained her adamant refusal to participate in
the Chad mission in 2007 (Schmitt 2012). Moreover, Germany’s increas-
ing discomfort with the war in Afghanistan (Noetzel and Rid 2009;
Noetzel 2010) was undoubtedly a factor in Berlin’s refusal to play a role
in the Libyan operation in 2011, although domestic politics also affected
Berlin’s decision (Miskimmon 2012).
Although Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have not had to
contend with the same ontological security dilemmas as Germany, they
too have had to contend with the rival attractions of the traditional
NATO alliance and the embryonic CSDP in terms of the institutional fit
with national security preferences. All three countries have sought to
avoid having to make a choice (Dumoulin et al. 2003; Linster 2001;
Moyse and Dumoulin 2011). Realism alone dictates that small countries
like these cannot afford to burn their bridges with the American hege-
mon. However, for reasons not dissimilar to those which have affected
Poland and Germany (growing concerns about the direction of
US/NATO policy, particularly in light of Iraq; favourable evolution of
EU policy and particularly of CSDP), both Belgium and Luxembourg
have, in effect, nudged closer to the latter without ostensibly distancing
themselves from the former. In addition, leading Belgian decision-makers
‘saw an active contribution to CSDP as a further expression of Belgium’s
commitment to further European integration’ (Vanhoonacker and
Jacobs 2010). In the case of the Netherlands, it is largely the fact of shift-
ing US priorities which have led The Hague to establish a new balance in
its respective focus on NATO and CSDP (De Wijk 2007).
Spain, on the other hand, was never a ‘NATO unconditional’, having
only joined the Alliance in 1982 and then only with a status similar to
that of France: non-participation in the integrated military command
structure or in the military committee. This was in large part because of
the fierce opposition to NATO membership on the part of the Socialist
Party (PSOE). Spanish leaders had to tread very lightly in nudging an
instinctively anti-American public in the direction of Alliance member-
ship, but PSOE Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez was able, between 1982
and 1986, to achieve precisely that, winning a decisive referendum on
Spanish membership with the message that membership of NATO was a
necessary springboard to what was perceived as the real prize: EU
membership (Gillespie et al. 1995). In this way, Spain achieved some
leverage within the Alliance while constantly manoeuvring for greater
involvement with the EU. In 1996, the choice, on the part of the new
prime minister, José Maria Aznar, to take Spain fully into NATO
remained unpopular (Rodrigo 1997) despite the fact that NATO’s new
Secretary General was Spain’s former foreign minister, Javier Solana.
Aznar’s subsequent decision to align his country fully with George W.
Bush during the 2003 Iraq War was even more unpopular and the 2004
parliamentary elections, coming only days after the Madrid terror
attacks, translated into victory for the Socialist José Luiz Rodrigo
Zapatero who had campaigned on promises to withdraw Spanish troops
from Iraq (Woodworth 2005). Since 2001, all these countries, in their
different ways, have edged closer to CSDP and have begun to re-evaluate
the precise nature of their relationship with NATO. That process became
even more clear-cut during the Libyan crisis of 2011 (see below).
France presents the greatest puzzle. France is America’s ‘oldest ally’
(Cogan 1994), yet, according to stereotype, she is a ‘reluctant ally’
(Harrison 1981), engaging in ‘the politics of ambivalence’ (Menon 2000)
and incestuously inspired, in matters of security and defence, by ‘a
certain idea of France’ (Gordon 1993). With her complex attitude
towards NATO and European security, France has long been a source of
exasperation inside Washington, DC. France ‘opted-out’ of NATO’s
integrated military command structures in 1966 largely because General
de Gaulle was unconvinced of the credibility of the US nuclear ‘umbrella’
in the event of war with the USSR (Bozo 1991). Since NATO’s entire
strategy hinged on that nuclear guarantee, de Gaulle judged that the
overall Alliance package was flawed. For de Gaulle, once an allied coun-
try lapsed into what he called ‘vassalisation’ that country became, ipso
facto, a weaker ally. It ceased to think strategically and thereby to
contribute to the vitality and dynamism of alliance options. No less a
witness than Henry Kissinger concurred with this judgement: ‘the most
consistent, the most creative, the most systematic thinking on strategy in
Europe today takes place in France’ (Kissinger 1994: 337). Yet France
remained a member of the Atlantic Alliance and professed herself a firm
friend of the US. At the same time, throughout the post-war period,
France constantly promoted a more robust and autonomous type of
European security entity (Bozo 2000). The formula which most
succinctly captures this complexity is the triptych: ‘ami, allié, non-aligné’
(‘friend, ally, non-aligned’) (Védrine 2007). It has progressively been
internalized by the entire political class in France and is far stronger than
the personal preferences of any individual politician. The formula has
remained sacrosanct for every President of the Fifth Republic from
Charles De Gaulle to François Hollande. This balancing act between
NATO and the nascent European security project is one of the hardest
narratives to read and one which has given rise to numerous misunder-
standings.
Since the end of the Cold War, all French presidents have sought to
revisit the specifics of France’s ambivalent relationship with NATO.
Progressive rapprochement with the Alliance has been uninterrupted,
and yet no President has ever abandoned the Gaullist triptych. Since
1990, one main feature of the Cold War – the non-engagement of French
forces in battle as they sheltered from actual combat beneath the nuclear
deterrent – has been replaced with constant demands for intervention in

real conflict. France took the decision to fight alongside the US and her
NATO allies in four major regional conflicts (the Gulf area1990–1;
Bosnia 1992–5; Kosovo 1999; Afghanistan 2001–14). After protracted
hesitation, she refused to be involved militarily in a fifth – the US-led
invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Cogan 2004; Howorth 2006; Coicaud et al.
2006; Bozo 2014). Yet, throughout the Iraq crisis, France continued to
act as a firm ally of the United States, participating strongly in the US-led
military campaign in Afghanistan, deploying more troops on NATO
missions than any other alliance member including the US, sharing
invaluable and highly sensitive intelligence with Washington, and contin-
uing high-level cooperation on nuclear weapons programmes (Tertrais
2003). There is an overall consistency and coherence in France’s
approach to these quite different conflicts. The decision to intervene or
not is driven by three underlying considerations (all of them deriving
from ‘Gaullism’): ‘le rang’ (status) – the determination to play a role in
international affairs which is consistent with France’s own self-percep-
tion as a power; ‘la solidarité’ (solidarity) – a commitment to interna-
tional cooperation, multilateralism, alliance dynamics and respect for
international law in managing the crises of the post-Cold War world; and
‘la singularité’ (distinctiveness) – an insistence on autonomy of judge-
ment and response which has characterized her diplomacy and strategy
ever since Charles de Gaulle. These three characteristics were all present
(in different combinations and with different priorities) in all of France’s
responses to the challenges of the post-Cold War order.
Rapprochement with NATO began during the Bosnian crisis in the
early 1990s. Intervention in Bosnia meant that membership of the key
NATO committees, far from being a constraint on French action (as had
been the case during the inactivity of the Cold War) had now become a
strategic and political imperative (Grant 1996; Brenner and Parmentier
2002: 42). France’s absence from NATO decision-shaping structures was
becoming a serious liability. Ironically, it took the socialist President
François Mitterrand’s replacement by the neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac for
France’s new relationship with NATO to move to a new level. After his
presidential election in May 1995, Chirac took the lead in pressing for the
use of NATO (including US) ground troops to end the Bosnian conflict.
On 14 June 1995, Chirac spent more than an hour in tête-à-tête with Bill
Clinton, leading, in Richard Holbrooke’s words, to a ‘marked re-evalua-
tion of American policy’. It is widely acknowledged that it was Chirac
who forced the US ‘to deal with the reality – that one way or another, the
United States could no longer stay uninvolved’ (Holbrooke 1998: 65;
Delafon and Sancton 1998: 85). Thus, paradoxically, it was France which
ensured that NATO finally shifted from its Cold War stance of deterrence
and engaged in military combat for the first time ever. From that point,
France’s full return to NATO was simply a matter of time.
The move was formally announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy at

the Alliance’s 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg-Kehl on 4 April
2009 (Sarkozy 2009). The first reason for reintegration was military and
had to do, as we have seen, with the opportunity costs of staying out
(Bozo 2008; Howorth 2010b). At this first, purely military level, Sarkozy
simply took the logical and inevitable last step. The rewards were appre-
ciable. France was granted one of the two major NATO Commands,
Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia and also NATO’s
Regional Command in Lisbon. The second reason, which was political,
was more complex. France wished to carry her full weight in the ongoing
debates about where the Alliance was heading. But she also needed to
square the growing pressure for an autonomous EU defence capacity and
policy (CSDP) with Alliance transformation. During the internal French
debates over NATO reintegration in spring 2009, these political ques-
tions generated real heat. The Socialist opposition charged that Sarkozy’s
policy amounted to realignment with the US, that France had abandoned
her distinctive ‘Gaullist’ position on the international stage, that the
return to NATO would amount to the subordination of CSDP (Venesson
2010). They argued, somewhat disingenuously, that if France had been a
full member of NATO in 2003, she would have been obliged to join the
Bush war in Iraq and that with reintegration she would in future be under
greater obligation to participate in NATO missions (Jauvert 2008). The
issues raised broke down into two separate sets of questions: questions
about France’s political independence; and questions about her future
political influence. There was never any good reason to assume that
NATO reintegration would have any effect on France’s diplomatic inde-
pendence. After all, Germany, which had been a faithful ally ever since
1949, had no difficulty in saying ‘No’ to George Bush in 2002–3 (Dettke
2009). But the questions about France’s future influence over key NATO
policy issues were (and remain) more difficult to answer with any
certainty. Some allies viewed France’s return with a measure of concern,
as exemplified by one British general’s observation: ‘Oh bugger, they’re
in the tent’ (Bickerton 2010). Other analysts hypothesized that the return
to NATO would result, as Sarkozy had always insisted it would, in a
strenghthening of CSDP: ‘With France fully integrated into the Alliance’s
military command, the United States will be more relaxed about the
development of ESDP and less worried that it will develop into a rival of
NATO. This will make it easier, not harder, for European defence to
advance’ (Ghez and Larrabee 2009: 89). The debate over the compatibil-
ity of France’s return to NATO with the further strengthening of CSDP
was launched (Irondelle and Mérand 2010). It is still in full swing.
With the election of President Hollande in June 2012, it became
necessary to turn the page on the Socialist Party’s 2009 opposition to
reintegration of NATO’s command structures. Hollande tasked former
foreign minister Hubert Védrine with the drafting of a report on the
consequences of that reintegration (Védrine 2012). The report succeeded

in moving the conversation about NATO and CSDP forward. Védrine
insisted that there was no longer any question of revisiting the decision
on reintegration (which he himself had opposed in 2009). On the
contrary, the objective had to be for France and the other EU member
states to play a much more active and dynamic role in the Alliance – in
short to ‘Europeanize NATO’, in order to transcend the dichotomy
between NATO and CSDP. Quite what this meant in practical terms was
not spelled out, and in a lengthy conversation with M. Védrine in April
2013, I realized that the precise trajectory of that relationship remained,
in Védrine’s mind, open-ended. With the April 2013 publication of the
French Livre Blanc on defence and national security, a new step forward
was taken (Livre Blanc 2013). The Livre Blanc stated that French
defence policy ‘cannot be conceived outside the framework of the
Atlantic Alliance and our involvement in the European Union’ (p. 61). It
insisted that France intends to play a leading and active role in the
Alliance, which is portrayed as having three basic functions: the collec-
tive defence of its members (the Article 5 commitment is seen as the
‘cornerstone’); a strategic partnership between the two sides of the
Atlantic; and a ‘framework for military action against shared threats’.
These latter two functions seem close to statements of the obvious. As for
CSDP, a very strong pitch is made for the relaunch of the EU’s defence
and security project, which is portrayed as having run out of steam. In the
context of the financial crisis, the Livre Blanc stresses that it is both
‘possible and urgent’ to take ‘pooling and sharing’ of defence equipment
to a higher level. In view of the instability which surrounds the entire EU
borderland from the Arctic to the Atlantic, the EU, it is asserted, has no
alternative but to refine and develop its security options. At a closed
meeting of French government officials and parliamentarians in July
2013, which was pitched as the opening round in a series of high-level
meetings designed to generate policy proposals for the European Council
meeting on defence in December 2013, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius
and Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian both stressed that intensive
cooperation between the EU member states for a relaunch of CSDP was
an urgent priority (Fabius 2013). In a Senate Report on CSDP only two
weeks earlier, France’s upper house had recommended a robust step
forward for CSDP, transcending ‘L’Europe de la Défense’ and moving
unambiguously towards ‘Le Défense de l’Europe’ – based on a core
group of member states baptized the ‘Eurogroup’ (Sénat 2013). In the
next section of this chapter, we will see what that might evolve in the
wake of recent events in Libya, Syria and Mali.
On the whole, as the above pages suggest, almost all EU member
states, whatever their initial point of departure in relation to the complex
issue of relations between NATO and CSDP, have recently shifted some-
what in the balance of their institutional preferences. The shifts mainly
involve slight moves reflecting waning (but by no means expiring) enthu-

siasm for NATO and growing (but by no means energetic) enthusiasm
for CSDP.
The CSDP–NATO Relationship: Zero or Positive Sum?
The historical origins of NATO and CSDP suggest more differences

between them than similarities. NATO arose and persisted for 40 years
because of a single, massive, systemic and existential military threat not
just to Western Europe but also to ‘the West’ in general. This required an
overwhelming military response. CSDP arose because of the re-emer-
gence across the European space (and beyond) of a range of destabilizing
risks and threats which required, above all, comprehensive political
management. NATO’s rise was accompanied by the emergence of the US
as the indispensable security actor in Europe, a theatre which was also
projected to centre-stage in US defence planners’ agendas. CSDP arose
because of the gradual disengagement of the US from the European
theatre, no longer seen as strategically central, in favour of a major
American concentration on other parts of the globe (Asia, Middle East).
NATO arose at a time when the various states of Europe, bled dry by two
world wars in 30 years, were literally and figuratively on their knees
(physical exhaustion and the begging bowl). CSDP arose at a time when
the EU as a global actor, having established the Single Market and the
Single Currency, and having emerged as the largest and wealthiest trad-
ing bloc in the world, was buoyantly seeking to complement its economic
and commercial clout with some serious political and even military
muscle. NATO arose in an era dominated by arguably the starkest form
of Westphalian realism, where the only concerns of international rela-
tions were to avoid at all cost another interstate global conflagration.
CSDP arose in an era marked by the quest for a new world order based
on the growing role of international institutions, an inchoate but
discernible body of international law, the ascendancy of non-state actors,
the assertion of human rights and even human security above those of
states, and much talk of a post-Westphalian order.
NATO (1949) had a 50-year head-start on CSDP (1999), and had,
despite its stark realist origins, by the turn of the century transmogrified
itself into a vast politico-bureaucratic machine in search of an appropriate
international role (Gordon 1997; Yost 1998, Rynning 2005; Rupp 2006).
International relations scholars and journalists regularly declared NATO
to be comatose or dead (Layne 2001; Lieven 2001). Government officials
and heads of state equally regularly praised it as ‘the greatest alliance the
world has ever known’ (Obama 2009; Panetta 2013). CSDP, on the other
hand, was, as the new century dawned, little more than a blank sheet of
paper on which the various member states of the burgeoning EU were
poised to write a script. That script, far from narrating a strategic vision
of a dynamic EU lucidly embarking on a heroic future as a regional and
potentially even global actor, has in fact turned out to be a painstaking
‘work in progress’ whose end-state is impossible to discern. What is the
nature of the relations between these two entities?
The EU per se does not have a relationship with NATO, nor indeed
should it. The two entities are different in their membership, their
essence, their raison d’être, their overall objectives, structures, function-
ing, activities and history. Any direct EU–NATO bilateral agenda is diffi-
cult to imagine and yet many, on both sides of the Atlantic, have tended
to see NATO as the first port of call for discussions on a range of issues
which go far beyond security and defence (Howorth 2009). The EU does
have a bilateral relationship with the United States, and that relationship
could become structurally and politically significant if the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership becomes a reality (Hamilton 2010;
Schott and Cimino 2013; Garcia-Legaz and Quinlan 2013). There does
exist a (kind of) relationship between, on the one hand, the EU’s Political
and Security Committee (PSC), and, on the other hand, NATO, repre-
sented by the North Atlantic Council (NAC). The two committees meet
formally every few months. Other interactions also take place, within
this general CSDP–NATO framework, between political and military
officials from both sides – at all levels. NATO’s DSACEUR, as opera-
tional commander of the EU military mission in Bosnia, has interacted
regularly with the EU’s Political and Security Committee and facilitated
liaison between the PSC and the NAC. The High Representative and the
Secretary General of NATO meet occasionally to talk through issues of
complementarity between the two entities and missions. Members of the
EU and NATO Military Committees also met spasmodically in the mid-
2000s. Foreign Ministers from both entities have held ‘transatlantic
dinners’ to discuss matters of mutual concern. There are liaison teams on
the ground in Bosnia to smooth relations between staff members from
both entities and there are daily contacts between representatives in BiH
from both sides. It is usually this interaction between CSDP and NATO
that is, in effect, analysed in the literature on ‘the EU and NATO’. There
is a widely shared consensus among analysts and politicians that the rela-
tionship is unsatisfactory if not actually dysfunctional (Hofmann and
Reynolds 2007; Hofmann 2009; Lachmann 2010). One root cause of the
problem is Turkey.
Turkey Holds the CSDP–NATO Relationship Hostage

From the very outset of CSDP, Turkey, with its epicentre between the
turbulent Balkans, Middle East and Caucasus, felt a serious sense of
grievance about the new EU policy area. As a major security actor within
NATO, Turkey had played an important role in the WEU. That role
abruptly ended with the emergence of CSDP in 2000. Ankara worried

that the primary responsibility for European security, in which it felt
itself to be a major stakeholder, was being transferred from the US (in
which it had great confidence) to the EU (in which it had very little).
Along with Norway, Turkey initially attempted to negotiate a seat at the
EU’s defence and security table – in effect membership of the embryonic
Political and Security Committee (PSC). However, as non-members of
the EU, this was legally non-negotiable. Much of the narrative of
EU–Turkish relations in the 2000s is complicated by the ‘triangulating’
role of the US, which sought constantly to pressure the EU to accommo-
date Turkey, while simultaneously attempting to constrain the EU’s drive
towards autonomy (CSIS 2009; Larrabee 2010; Tocci 2011). Although
the EU, in spring 2000, instituted regular security and defence discus-
sions between the PSC and the six non-EU NATO members, as well as
with all 15 non-EU European states, Turkey found this inadequate in
three ways. First, it was widely recognized that most of the scenarios for
regional destabilization which might theoretically trigger a CSDP
mission, had their locus in South Eastern Europe – in Turkey’s immedi-
ate neighbourhood. Second, viewed from Ankara, this was particularly
worrying in the context of the unresolved disputes between Turkey and
Greece over Aegean airspace and territorial waters, and over the divided
island of Cyprus. Turkey, in effect, demanded a non-aggression pact
from the EU – against itself as a NATO member. Third, the matter was
exacerbated by the EU’s long-standing reluctance to engage in discus-
sions over Turkish membership of the Union (Arvanitopoulos 2009;
Dervis 2013). Turkey therefore used its membership of the North
Atlantic Council effectively to veto the embryonic ‘Berlin Plus’ process
whereby the EU might acquire access to NATO assets. This, however,
was a double-edged sword since, at the same time as it denied the EU the
ability to mount military missions before it was autonomously equipped
to do so, it also provided an incentive to the EU to precipitate its move
towards total autonomy from NATO (Aykan 2005; Missiroli 2002).
A series of high-level discussions between UK, US, and Turkish diplo-
mats led to an initial solution in December 2001 (involving EU guaran-
tees to Turkey on both non-aggression and consultation). Greece then
proceeded to veto these agreements. It was not until December 2002 that
a solution to this long-standing dispute was finally negotiated. Ankara
settled for ‘the fullest possible involvement’ in the EU’s security and
defence decision-shaping process, and automatic involvement in the
event of an EU mission using NATO assets – the only significant exam-
ple of which was the EU’s 2004 takeover of the NATO mission in Bosnia.
Turkey was also given a formal guarantee that CSDP missions would not
be deployed in the Aegean and that an EU force would not attack a
NATO member state. Greece then successfully negotiated what some
might deem to be unnecessary reciprocity of this clause (that a NATO
force would not attack an EU member state!). Another key concession

made to Turkey was that Cyprus would not be allowed to participate in
CSDP operations. Technically, this also excluded Malta since the agreed
policy was that states lacking partnership agreements with NATO under
Partnership for Peace would be excluded from CSDP operations. The
resolution of this dispute theoretically put an end to the two-year stand-
off over the Berlin Plus arrangements.
This apparent breakthrough allowed the EU and NATO, on 16
December 2002, to make a landmark Declaration on ESDP (Haine 2003:
178–80) providing a formal basis for a strategic partnership between the
two organizations in the areas of crisis management and conflict preven-
tion. The EU and NATO – at least in theory – could henceforth techni-
cally develop their relationship in ways deemed mutually reinforcing,
while recognizing that they are organizations of a different nature. In
particular, the EU could theoretically rely on access to NATO’s sophisti-
cated planning capabilities, which had always been the essential prereq-
uisite for any credible EU military operation. In principle, the Europeans
could also look forward to more extensive access to other (essentially US)
assets. However, in the context of America’s ongoing military involve-
ment with Al-Qaeda, Iraq and Pakistan, the availability of such assets
could not be taken for granted.
Technically, the December 2002 Declaration enabled the political
implementation of the Berlin Plus arrangements of 2003. However, the
fact that the former NATO and current CSDP mission in Bosnia-
Herzegovina has remained the only example of CSDP–NATO institu-
tional cooperation underscores the stark reality that political
disagreements between the EU, Turkey and Cyprus in effect held the
entire CSDP–NATO relationship hostage for years. What worked
reasonably well in Bosnia was not allowed to work at all in either Kosovo
or Afghanistan – to the considerable detriment of all sides. Turkey’s veto,
from within NATO, of any meaningful collaboration between CSDP and
the Alliance produced an effective stalemate. The official explanation for
this state of affairs offered by Ankara was that it could not agree to pass
NATO intelligence to the EU (a fundamental precondition for the Berlin
Plus agreement) for fear that that intelligence would be acquired by non-
PfP EU members Cyprus and Malta. That ‘explanation’ was always
largely specious. Turkey forced both NATO and the EU to spend two
entire years negotiating Berlin Plus. Those arrangements could only be
concluded when they were predicated on the exclusion of Cyprus and
Malta from the ‘deal’, but this was always little other than a face-saving
technicality. It also results in Cyprus occasionally blocking EU business
(for instance Turkey’s participation in the activities of the European
Defence Agency (EDA), or proposals for EU–NATO counter-terrorism
cooperation) on the grounds that Turkey is not complying with its oblig-
ations, under the terms of the ongoing EU accession negotiations, to
open its ports to Cypriot flag vessels. In short, the actual institutional
arrangements between CSDP and NATO degenerated in the mid-2000s
into little more than a farce. This did not prevent Turkey from partici-
pating in a number of CSDP missions, especially EUFOR Althea in
Bosnia (Madelan 2012).
CSDP–NATO Relations beyond Turkey: Crossed Wires?

Some scholars insist that the Turkey–Cyprus stand-off has effectively
been exploited by various European members of NATO as a smoke-
screen behind which they can continue to promote CSDP at the expense
of the Alliance (Cebeci 2011), and there is some truth to this. Beyond the
Turkish impasse, the CSDP–NATO relationship has proven to be fraught
with several sets of internal crossed wires. The first and most immediate
set derives from the very nature of the relationship itself. The EU, by the
fact of entering into this relationship, was, in effect, expecting that
NATO would help it to achieve its autonomy. The US, by contrast, at
least until the late 2000s, expected the relationship to perpetuate a part-
nership which Washington would continue to dominate. This raised
many sensitive issues. There were problems with the very timing and the
format of the negotiations between the two entities, given the vast dispar-
ities in current and future power and influence. The US insisted that it
should be given some kind of oversight over the emerging architecture of
CSDP (van Ham 2000; Donfried and Gallis 2000; Hunter 2002). It was,
said a senior French officer, rather as though the EU, having barely laid
down the foundations for its own new construction, was being over-
whelmed by consultants from the shiny glass and concrete NATO struc-
ture across town, all proffering free advice on internal partitioning,
electric wiring circuits, the positioning of water pipes and the optimum
number of floors (Author’s interview in Paris MOD June 2000). There
were problems of conditionality: what was the reality of the relationship
if the US was in a position to impose conditions such as the ‘3 Ds’? There
were major problems of asymmetric membership. Who was to be
allowed to talk to whom – about what? Moreover, beyond the narrow
institutional or military issues of NATO–ESDP relations, there lay the
overall problem of the respective political preferences and normative
stances of the US and of the EU. At the heart of the CSDP–NATO rela-
tionship, there lies the complex – and rapidly evolving – web of the entire
transatlantic relationship.
The CSDP–NATO relationship has already generated a vast literature
(Hunter 2000; Quinlan 2001; Brimmer 2002; Hamilton 2002; Howorth
2003; Howorth and Keeler 2003; Burwell et al. 2006; Cornish 2006;
Dufourq and Yost 2006; Valasek 2007; Serfaty 2008; Armitage 2008;
Vasconcelos 2010; Watanabe 2010; Sloan 2010; Kashmeri 2011;
Hofmann 2013). Implicit in the overwhelming majority of that literature
are three assumptions. First, that there is some inherent similarity and
proximity, as well as considerable overlap and synergy, between the two
entities deriving from the fact that they are both geared to delivering secu-
rity in the European space. Second, that there is some natural partnership
between the two, based, usually, on what is portrayed as a fairly self-
evident division of labour. Third, that NATO, because of its history, its
size and capacity and the fact that it is dominated by the United States, will
naturally act as the senior partner in the relationship. These assumptions
have arisen in part because of the historical, structural–functional and
hierarchical relationship between the two entities. However, ten years
after the birth of CSDP, none of those assumptions can today be taken
entirely for granted. CSDP and NATO, while remaining partners in the
Euro-Atlantic security framework, have followed distinct trajectories and
have emerged as different types of security actors. Neither entity is inter-
ested in a formal division of labour. US political leadership has been
undermined by the transatlantic crisis over the Iraq War and by the uncer-
tainty over alliance tasks and objectives in Afghanistan, not to mention
widespread concerns in Europe over the US ‘tilt’ to Asia (see below).
At regular intervals, from the spring of 2005 onwards, major US
think-tanks and strategic studies organizations produced a flood of
substantial studies devoted to the problems of NATO–ESDP relations
(Serfaty 2005; Flournoy and Smith 2005; Burwell et al. 2006; Serfaty
2006). All of these pondered long and hard over the unsatisfactory
nature of the NATO–ESDP relationship and generated policy recom-
mendations for its improvement. It is perhaps not insignificant that the
main EU equivalent of these policy studies (Zaborowski 2006) made no
such effort, but instead focused on specific deep-rooted problem areas
where the transatlantic relationship is perceived to be weakest. The
American studies all take as their starting point that EU–US relations
have been derailed into a siding, that the future direction remains uncer-
tain, but that everything possible must be done to shunt the relationship
back onto the mainline. This normative approach is underpinned by
quasi-tautological assertions that the EU–US relationship remains the
most important relationship for each side. ‘Europe matters to America,
and America to Europe, because converging concerns, compatible values
and overlapping interests make of each the other’s partner of choice’
states Serfaty (2005: 2–3). ‘Politically, the United States and key
European states must overcome the political differences that have
plagued efforts to build NATO–EU cooperation and begin again with a
new commitment to transatlantic cooperation’ state Burwell et al. (2006:
viii). These expressions of hope and goodwill do not tend to find a
comparable echo across the Atlantic. Zaborowski, in concluding the
240-page European study entitled, questioningly, Friends Again?, noted
that ‘the ideological gap between the allies is widening’ and that ‘we may
be moving towards a new and a much looser formula for transatlantic
cooperation’. He concluded bluntly that, whilst NATO ‘has remained a

central instrument in US thinking about transatlantic relations, a grow-
ing number of issues are being addressed through a direct EU–US frame-
work. This is likely to become a continuing trend, which, in turn, means
that NATO’s purpose and role may have to be redefined’ (Zaborowski
2006: 213–30). Chancellor Schroeder, in a landmark speech to the
Munich Security Conference in February 2005, was even blunter:
‘NATO continues to be attractive … However, it is no longer the primary
venue where transatlantic partners discuss and coordinate strategies’
(Schroeder 2005).
Many believed that, with a new administration in Washington after
2008, the CSDP–NATO relationship would progress to a new type of
functionality (Asmus 2008; Korski et al. 2008; Rubin 2008;
RAND/Bertelsmann 2009; Vasconcelos and Zaborowski 2009). This
overlooked the deep political issues which still bedevilled the relation-
ship. It has been asserted that the problems between CSDP and NATO
‘are practical rather than philosophical’ (Valasek 2008). This sidesteps
the key point that the problems are fundamentally political. It is the polit-
ical confusion surrounding the relationship which, in large part,
prohibits practical cooperation. Furthermore, commentators have
assumed the existence of an implicit ‘division of labour’ between the two
organizations: for NATO the heavy military lifting and for CSDP the
seemingly less challenging tasks of crisis management (De Hoop Scheffer
2007). To the extent to which the basic capacity of the two bodies has
been consistent with such a vision, there may have appeared to be some
logic behind the idea. Moreover, to the extent to which the two bodies
have found themselves involved in overseas missions in the same parts of
the world (Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan), this has indeed
been the broad pattern of the interrelationship. However, these real-life
examples notwithstanding, there is no inevitability about the idea of a
division of labour. CSDP emerged as a project and a practice which was
both sui generis and indeterminate – it is difficult to foresee precisely
what it will eventually become. It is also multifaceted and complex –
covering an increasingly vast range of policy instruments. NATO has
evolved in rather different ways, but has also emerged as an agent of
crisis management and collective security (New Strategic Concept 2010).
Some even imagined a relationship between CSDP and NATO briefly
dubbed ‘Berlin Plus in Reverse’, whereby the former would supply to the
latter the instruments of civilian crisis management which it lacked
(Kammel and Zyla 2011). This rapidly proved a mirage since, as we have
seen, CSDP itself continues to be hard pressed to generate those instru-
ments. Moreover, both entities stepped back from the brink when it
appeared they were converging in their underlying objectives. Despite
this recognition, the relationship cannot be usefully analysed through the
quest for some sort of ‘natural’ division of labour.
Finally, there has long been an assumption that NATO will always
play the role of senior partner in the relationship. In the early days, this
took on the form of US strictures about what CSDP should be permitted
to do and to become (Madeleine Albright’s ‘3 Ds’). As CSDP moved off
the drawing board and began to emerge into the daylight, there was
much talk of NATO’s ‘right of first refusal’, by which was very explicitly
meant restrictions on what the EU could undertake and decide until the
issue had first been debated within NATO (Marsh 2006). This approach
dominated discussions on, for example, the EU’s aspirations to under-
take missions in the Balkans (Peterson 2003). And there has remained, as
we saw above, a major dispute over planning procedures, in which it is
asserted, particularly in London, that SHAPE’s very existence renders
redundant or superfluous the creation of an autonomous operational
planning capacity for the EU itself. Yet for all NATO’s military prepon-
derance, profoundly political questions about the Alliance remain.
The stark fact is that there is, within NATO, very little real agreement
on the true nature of the present or the future agenda (Kay 2005).
Throughout the 1990s, in the absence of any realistic parallel European
security/defence mechanisms, NATO did succeed in enunciating new
strategic concepts (in 1991 and again in 1999), succeeded in identifying
military tasks to be undertaken (in Bosnia and in Kosovo), agreed –
though with much agonizing – on enlargement to Central and Eastern
Europe, and undertook relatively enthusiastically the task of outreach,
standardization and training to new accession and partner states.
However, in the twenty-first century, there has been no such comparable
consensus. To be sure, the Prague summit in November 2002, taking
place in the somewhat aberrant context and atmosphere of post-9/11, the
US-led war in Afghanistan, and the euphoric climate following the unan-
imous adoption of UNSC Resolution 1441 on Iraq (but before the
collapse of transatlantic harmony in early 2003) actually agreed on four
major agenda items: the ‘big bang’ enlargement scheduled for 2004; the
launch of the NATO Response Force (NRF); the prosecution of the ‘war
on terror’; and the globalization of the Alliance’s remit. That was a major
act of transformation. But it reflected a unique political climate which
existed only for a fleeting moment – nobody wished to rock the US boat
at a critical time. And, despite the surface agreements, member states
were far from agreed on their implications. Since Prague, enlargement
has taken place, although it is far from clear what benefits either the
Alliance itself or the new accession states have derived from this. The
globalization of the Alliance’s remit transported 40,000 European
NATO troops to Afghanistan, where the intra-Alliance battle over
burden-sharing (and particularly the sharing of the military burden) soon
became almost as fierce as the battle against the Taliban (Gates 2008;
Janes 2008). The NRF has yet to become functional or even to find a role
and has long been subject to question marks over its very existence. As
one of its intellectual founders, Hans Binnendijk, put it in 2009, the NRF
‘should be on steroids and instead it is on life support’ (Ringsmose 2010).
And NATO’s precise role in the ‘global war on terror’ is difficult to
detect. The Riga summit (2006) demonstrated that political agreement
on the main agenda items was simply impossible (Kamp 2006). And the
Bucharest (2008) and Strasbourg/Kehl (2009) summits both grappled
unsuccessfully with no fewer than six strategic decisions which many
predicted could hardly survive further procrastination: burden-sharing
in Afghanistan; the future of the NRF; the future of enlargement; the
prospects for a ‘Global Partnership’; the NATO–EU relationship; and
the ‘new strategic concept’ (Kamp 2007; Kamp 2009). The latter was
finally unveiled at NATO’s Lisbon summit in November 2010, but the
document read like a wish-list rather than a strategy. The Chicago
summit in 2012 merely kicked the can a little further down the road
(Kamp 2012; Dorman 2012). What will become of NATO after the
draw-down from Afghanistan in 2014 is the question on every analyst’s
mind. Clearly, that question has direct implications for the future of
CSDP. The Western military intervention in Libya in spring 2011 offered
some signs of a possible way forward.
CSDP and NATO after Libya and Afghanistan
The Libyan crisis was a major turning point in the story of CSDP and its
relations with NATO. Exactly 20 years after the Balkans erupted – when
Europe proved, like Frances Cornford’s Young Apollo, to be ‘magnifi-
cently unprepared’, the EU confronted a new crisis in Libya (Johnson and
Mueen 2012). In the early days of the crisis, European statesmen reacted
just as they had 20 years earlier: with overwhelmingly national
responses. Italy, Greece and Malta initially refused even to endorse sanc-
tions against Libya. Their historic trading partner Muammar Gaddafi
not only sat upon billions of their investments (and vice versa), but had
also helped suppress the migrant flow from North Africa. In the most
serious crisis on the EU’s borders since the birth of CSDP, the Union per
se proved totally incapable of coherent action (Koenig 2011). It is diffi-
cult to overstate the extent to which Libya was precisely the type of
regional crisis management challenge the CSDP had been designed to
address. It was a medium-scale mission in the immediate neighbourhood
and militarily not too challenging. Furthermore, it was a mission involv-
ing military and civilian components (the ‘comprehensive approach’), a
mission the United States did not (at least initially) want to be involved
in, and one which key EU states, on the other hand, were pressing very
hard to take on. Libya checked all the boxes for the ideal CSDP mission.
Yet CSDP as a potential agent or actor in the crisis was nowhere to be
seen. A clear majority (18 out of 27) of EU member states did not want
to touch Libya with a barge pole, let alone a fighter plane. They were
strongly supported by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, who went to extraordinary
lengths to prevent the crisis from being fully discussed at the European
Council meeting of 11 March 2011 (Howorth 2011). If a clear majority
of EU member states (including major ones such as Germany and Poland)
do not consider Libya a fit subject for discussion as a possible CSDP
mission, then what exactly is CSDP for? CSDP seemed to have declared
itself to be irrelevant and to have handed back the responsibility for
greater European security to NATO. This led some commentators to
speak of an ‘existential crisis’ for CSDP (Menon 2011a; Armellini 2011;
Rogers and Simon 2011). In his report on the Libyan operation before
the French Parliamentary Defence Commission on 5 October 2011, the
French Chef d’Etat Major des Armées, Admiral Edouard Guillaud,
observed that CSDP was ‘in hibernation’ and that the world must await
‘the European springtime’ before it came back to life (Guillaud 2011).
The fact that the Libyan operation became a NATO mission is worth
pondering. Most major players did not want NATO to be the lead
agency. The Obama administration was initially opposed to any military
intervention at all. When the idea of a no-fly-zone was first mooted by
UK Prime Minister David Cameron in early March, he was effectively
slapped down by Defence Secretaryv Robert Gates and Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen, who insisted that such an operation would
be a major escalation which the US was not prepared to even contem-
plate (Cameron immediately back-tracked). Since NATO is, in the eyes
of the world, essentially a US alliance, a third US intervention in a
Muslim country was simply, in Washington’s eyes, a bad idea. For the
Obama administration, any operation in Libya had to be conducted by
the Europeans (Kashmeri 2011a). Germany did not want it to be a
NATO operation because that would put Germany, which was funda-
mentally opposed to the mission, seriously on the spot as an ally
(Miskimmon 2012). Poland did not want it to be a NATO operation, for
a number of significant reasons, one of which was that Warsaw felt it had
received no payback for its enthusiastic involvement in both Afghanistan
and Iraq (Gros-Verheyde 2011). Turkey did not want it to be a NATO
operation because Turkey was trying to emerge as an autonomous
Islamic broker across the broader Middle East and especially in key parts
of the former Ottoman Empire and did not wish to be tarred with a US
brush in its own backyard (Paul and Seyrek 2011). France did not want
it to be a NATO operation for various partly symbolic reasons. Sarkozy
repeated constantly that NATO would be an ‘inappropriate’ franework
for the operation and for an entire week after Resolution 1973 vehe-
mently rejected the NATO option (Nougayrède 2011; Wintour and Watt
2011). When President Sarkozy realized that it was not going to be an EU
(CSDP) operation – the default French option – he tried hard to persuade
David Cameron to run it as a bilateral Franco-British mission under the

aegis of the recent Franco-British Treaty (Interviews in Paris). However,
once the Obama administration embraced the cause of the mission,
Sarkozy was obliged to step in line. One compelling reason Operation
Unified Protector became a NATO operation was because only NATO
(other than the US) had the operational planning facilities (SHAPE) to
make it work. So, the mission became a NATO mission almost by
default.
Three distinct developments in post-2011 US global policy framed the
necessary and ongoing recalibration of CSDP–NATO relations. The first
was the concept of the United States ‘leading from behind’ in Libya
(Lizza 2011). This notion was technically a misnomer. The NATO
mission benefited from massive US military inputs, without which it
probably would have failed. But the Obama administration’s insistence
that Europeans should at least be perceived to be ‘taking the lead’ in
Libya represented a paradigm shift in both political and symbolic ways.
The US signalled that, henceforth, it was prepared to transfer responsi-
bility in the European theatre to the Europeans (Heisbourg 2012). We
are still a long way from the full operationalization of such a shift, but
there is no doubt which way the balance must swing. Leadership in the
European area seems set to change hands. In January 2013, the ‘leading
from behind’ model was repeated when the US elected to offer support to
France’s Opération Serval in Mali, but not to become directly involved
(Heisbourg 2013). The second US development was Defense Secretary
Robert Gates’ June 2011 valedictory speech in Brussels, effectively warn-
ing the Europeans of a ‘dim and dismal future’ for NATO if the imbal-
ances and free-riding in the Alliance continued. He cautioned darkly that
the new generation of US politicians, who had not come of age during the
Cold War, ‘may not consider the return on America’s investment in
NATO worth the cost’ (Gates 2011). This was similar to frequent
messages delivered in various forms throughout the post-Cold War
period, but it has assumed the dimensions of a mantra under the Obama
administration (Obama 2009a; Stelzenmüller 2010; Schake 2012). In
June 2013, the outgoing US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, went
even further than Gates in warning the Europeans that ‘the gap between
American and European contributions to the Alliance is widening to an
unsustainable level’. He evoked the dismal prospect of NATO sliding
into ‘military irrelvance’ (Daalder 2013). The third development was the
January 2012 Strategic Guidance paper announcing the US ‘tilt’ to Asia
(DoD 2012). The warning could not be starker. The US will no longer
offer an unconditional blank security cheque to the Europeans. All three
developments reflect strategic priorities in Washington as well as the
financial and economic constraints limiting US activity abroad
(Mandelbaum 2010). A debate inside the US was immediately engaged as
to the implications of these new developments, the options ranging from
a wholesale American ‘pull back’ from global responsibilities, and even

US withdrawal from NATO (Posen 2013) to a generalized reaffirmation
of US global leadership, including renewed acceptance of overall US
responsibility for European security (Brooks et al. 2013). A similar
debate began to take shape in Europe.
The realization, across the EU, that the US is likely to maintain its low
profile approach to European security, if not actually to institutionalize
‘leadership from behind’, was a major wake-up call that posed uncom-
fortable questions for Europeans (Valasek 2011). The key question was:
what sort of role should military instruments play in the toolbox of EU
power resources? That question remains without an answer as this book
goes to press. It can only be answered when the EU has worked out what
sort of relationship it hopes to develop with a changing NATO – which
was also chastened by the Libyan operation. After all, only half the
NATO member states supported the mission, which, according to
NATO’s own internal assessment, was hardly an overwhelming military
success (Schmitt 2012). Today, Libya is awash with militias and the
central government exercises limited control over the vast country
(Oborne and Cookson 2012; St John 2012). Moreover, the spillover of
the Libyan operation has affected stability across the entire Sahel region
and into the Levant. The Mali campaign in 2013 was, in some ways, a
direct consequence of the Libyan campaign. There is little likelihood of
the latter emerging as a ‘model’ for future European operations in the
neighbourhood, even though there can be little doubt that the ball shifted
in 2011 into the Europeans’ court (Hallams and Schreer 2012).
There are probably only two post-Afghanistan options for NATO.
One, the long-time American preference, is for NATO to become a
‘global alliance’. In 1993, Richard Lugar, a primary exponent of this
option, coined the expression ‘out of area or out of business’ (Medcalf
2008). But he was referring to a different type of alliance. Because the
bipolar constraints of the Cold War dictated tight solidarity between all
alliance members, the original NATO truly was an alliance as tradition-
ally understood (Walt 1990). Yet now, post-1989, in the absence of any
existential threat, regional crises, particularly at great distances from
Europe, impact NATO member states in very different ways. In a multi-
polar world, states are freer to pursue their own interests. Consequently,
there is little likelihood of unanimity among the 28 members of NATO.
The alliance has become a mechanism for generating coalitions of the
willing. Although NATO’s Prague summit in 2002 declared that distinc-
tions between in-area and out-area operations were no longer valid, there
is henceforth very little prospect of European forces signing up to
support US global strategy. Throughout the 1990s, the US agenda for a
Global Alliance never found favour with Europeans. In 2008, it was
reframed during the John McCain campaign for the US Presidency as the
League of Democracies (Carothers 2008; Kolodziej 2008). But the idea
has probably been administered the coup de grâce by the experience of

Afghanistan, which, however strong the official spin may be, is almost
certain to be judged by history as a military and political failure
(Nazemroaya 2012; Campbell 2013). NATO’s Chicago summit in May
2012 formally kept all strategic options on the table, but ongoing ques-
tions about the real nature and purpose of the Alliance are unlikely to be
resolved any time soon. NATO needs a radical rethink.
Assuming, as seems reasonable, that NATO will elect not to ‘go out of
business’, a more probable future for the Alliance is therefore a European
future (Kashmeri 2011). The Alliance will most likely be re-designated as
a mechanism for guaranteeing regional stability in the European area and
its neighbourhood. That stability, unlike during the Cold War, will not
be secured through a balance of nuclear forces or through existential
deterrence, but through the development of a serious capacity for
regional crisis management. Collective security will complement collec-
tive defence. That appears to be what the majority of Europeans want
from NATO (Vasconcelos 2010). This will require a new and construc-
tive relationship between NATO and CSDP. It is now also the clear pref-
erence of France, the only EU member to have previously abstained from
full involvement in NATO. France’s 2009 return to NATO’s integrated
command structure was decided in France’s own national interest.
Although it was, at the time, opposed by the French Socialists, now that
they are in government the page has been turned on that debate. The
Report issued by former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine on 14
November 2012 makes it clear that France, henceforth, will devote
major energies to what Védrine calls ‘Europeanizing the Alliance’
(Védrine 2012).
Conclusion
What might such a process entail and what would it imply for CSDP?
Assuming that CSDP (like NATO) continues to exist, the two security
entities must stop seeing one another as rivals in a beauty contest or as
contenders for a functional or spatial division of labour. The sterile quar-
rels over duplication in general and Operational Headquarters (OHQ) in
particular will have to be transcended. In a world of shrinking resources,
everybody recognizes that European forces and capacity, whether
deployed via NATO or via CSDP, are all drawn from the same pool. One
option for CSDP is to continue to attempt to carve out a workable rela-
tionship with NATO as a separate and autonomous entity. That option
presents a number of challenges. Why would another 20 years produce
markedly better results for CSDP than the last 20? As long as the two
organizations remain, or are kept, distinct, there will be a huge tendency
to revert to an uneven and inequitable division of labour – with NATO
doing the heavy-lifting and CSDP serving as a mere back-up organization

for minor missions. But that again will prove unsatisfactory both to the
US and to the EU. As long as the two organizations remain separate in
their membership and objectives, sparring and generally dysfunctional
behaviour are likely to afflict both. Moreover, it is unlikely that, under
these circumstances, CSDP would ever grow beyond the rather limited
objectives it now sets itself as a minor crisis management player.
The second option is for CSDP to enter into an intensive and increas-
ingly structural relationship with NATO, progressively assuming those
leadership responsibilities that the Europeans collectively proved unable
to assume during the Libyan and the Mali operations (Perruche and
Kandal 2011; Coelmont and de Langlois 2013). This also presents a
number of major challenges and is predicated on two key assumptions.
The first is that the United States is serious about encouraging the
Europeans progressively to become consequential players, essentially
responsible for taking on the leadership of stability and security in the
greater EU area. In the triple context outlined above, the odds seem in
favour of this being the case. Why would the US continue to want the
burden and expense of carrying the security of the Europeans (who are
more numerous and wealthier than they) in an era of austerity and
retrenchment and when the world of 1947–49 has moved on several
times? The US ‘decline’ has been seriously exaggerated, but even
Washington now has to make real choices and to focus its attention on
strategic priorities. In the short and medium terms, it is reasonable to
expect that, despite Gates’s and Daalder’s warnings and the uncertain
fate of the US defence budget, the United States will be prepared to
continue to underpin NATO for a transitional period (Keohane 2012;
Shea 2012). Washington remains committed to the transatlantic rela-
tionship, which constitutes a vital interest for US foreign and security
policy. But there are two caveats. First, it will do so increasingly reluc-
tantly, especially if the Europeans persist in shirking their historical and
strategic responsibilities. Second, the US will not do so for ever.
However, if the Europeans are seen to be taking control of their own
destiny and neighbourhood, then there are reasons to believe that the US
will be willing to share and eventually even to transfer responsibilities to
the Europeans, who will progressively become the major stakeholder(s)
in the ‘Alliance’. This is a major assumption.
The second assumption is possibly even more difficult to make. It is
that the EU (collectively) will agree to shoulder the responsibilities of
regional security and stabilization and to provide the resources that shift
will require. If the EU intends to become a global player, it has no alter-
native than to become a global military (and civilian–military) power.
However, the generation of a credible CSDP can only happen if the EU,
in the wake of developments at economic and financial level (the euro-
zone) agrees to move forward in significant pooling of sovereignty. If it
does not, then it is conceivable that, despite the renewed signs of move-
ment post-2012, the EU will never succeed in forging a seriously viable
common security and defence policy. In the second half of 2013, as the
European security community geared up for the important summit on
defence in December, many different papers and proposals were gener-
ated, all offering blueprints for the next stage in the development of
CSDP. The French Senate, in a July 2013 report, suggested that the 20-
year effort to create what is called in France ‘l’Europe de la Défense’ had
become bogged down and that the time was ripe to move resolutely
towards ‘La Défense de l’Europe’. This would involve the constitution of
a core group of member states who were committed to moving to a qual-
itatively new stage in the story of CSDP, possibly under the Lisbon mech-
anism of permanent structured cooperation. The idea of a ‘Eurogroup’ of
leading military countries began to generate some steam (Coelmont and
de Langlois 2013). What was perhaps remarkable in much of this litera-
ture was the absence of much serious thought about how CSDP might
interact with NATO. For that issue remains, in the judgement of this
author, the $64,000 question, without an answer to which, the future
remains extremely murky.
Chapter 5
The EU as an Overseas Crisis

Management Actor
‘What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the
size of the fight in the dog.’ – Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Common Security and Defence Policy is best understood not in

terms of institutions or of capacity, but in terms of what it does. Between
January 2003 and late 2013, according to the most comprehensive
source, ISIS Europe (2013), the EU launched no fewer than 32 overseas
‘crisis management’ missions. That is what CSDP does and, ipso facto,
what it is. That broad generalization conceals a complex pattern of mili-
tary and civilian deployments, the balance of which has shifted signifi-
cantly over time in favour of the latter. CSDP was essentially developed
in order to give the EU the wherewithal (political, institutional and in
terms of military and civilian capacity) to help stabilize parts of the world
where the EU was considered able to bring added value. The 2003
European Security Strategy stated that ‘Europe should be ready to share
in the responsibility for global security and in building a better world’.
The document did not specify whether the EU might be expected to focus
its crisis management skills in any particular region – either close to home
or more distant. It noted that, in the previous decade, ‘European forces
have been deployed abroad to places as distant as Afghanistan, East
Timor and the DRC’ (Democratic Republic of Congo), but did not add
the detail that only in the latter had those forces been deployed under the
EU flag. The ESS notes that ‘we need both to think globally and act
locally’ and it adds that: ‘with the new threats the first line of defence will
often be abroad’. The reality is that, of the 32 missions recorded by ISIS-
Europe as having been launched under CSDP (see Table 5.1), no fewer
than seven of them have been in the former Yugoslavia, and 16 in Africa
(ISIS 2013). Of the remaining nine, classed as ‘other’, four have been on
the EU’s Eastern border (three in Georgia and one in Ukraine and
Moldova). Two have been in the Palestinian Authority, for which the EU
assumed special responsibility decades ago. The final three missions have
been ‘one-offs’ – a police mission in Afghanistan, and a rule-of-law train-
ing mission for Iraq, both symbolic of the EU’s solidarity with the United
States after 9/11; and a brief peace-monitoring mission in Indonesia. Any
objective or realistic geographical analysis of these missions would have
144
The EU as an Overseas Crisis Management Actor 145
to conclude that the overwhelming majority of them have been in the

EU’s immediate neighbourhood. To this extent, it is clear that the EU is a
regional actor, but one which frames regional conflicts and destabiliza-
tion in a broader globalizing context.
It was only in the run-up to the Helsinki European Council in
December 1999, that the EU first began to think – collectively – about
the specific operational requirements of a putative security (although
not – yet – defence) policy. This was something utterly new for a Union
which had hitherto turned its face resolutely against any involvement in
military affairs. At the time, as we saw above, the obvious reference was
Kosovo. One of the principal reasons behind the Saint-Malo initiative
had been a shared Franco-British concern about the lack of EU military
capacity in the event of a new crisis similar to Kosovo. It is the ‘Kosovo
syndrome’ which, in large part, explains the specifics of the Helsinki
Headline Goal: the ability rapidly to deploy forces capable of tackling
peace enforcement operations potentially demanding up to corps level
strength (60,000 troops) as well as 100 ships and 400 aircraft. Only two
years after Helsinki, at the Laeken European Council meeting in
December 2001, it was asserted that the EU should be able to carry out
‘the full range of Petersberg tasks by 2003’ (Rutten 2002: 123). Serious
strategic commentators tended to view this claim as spurious (IISS 2001;
CDS 2001), notwithstanding the Laeken rider which cautioned that
‘efforts must be made if the Union is to be able to carry out the most
complex operations as efficiently as possible’. Nevertheless, by the end
of 2003, the EU had embarked on no fewer than four overseas missions,
including two police missions and two military missions and in 2004 it
launched its biggest ever military mission, Operation EUFOR Althea in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thus, three of the first five missions were military missions. That early
statistic gave a misleading impression of the real footprint of CSDP. Only
three further military missions were mounted between 2004 and 2013,
compared with a total of 27 missions which, while not being 100 per cent
‘civilian’, were all basically ‘non-military’. We will return to the possible
categorizations of CSDP missions shortly. The launch date of these
missions also tells an interesting story (see Table 5.1). Almost half the
total number of CSDP missions – 14 – were launched in the first three
years (2003–5). This included six of the nine ‘other’ missions beyond the
Balkans and Africa. A further 12 missions were started in the following
three years (2006–8). By 2008, all of the missions in the Balkans and all
of the missions in the DRC had been launched. Only one – rather minor
– mission was launched between 2009 and 2011 whereas five new
missions were mounted in 2012–13. All six of the missions launched
since 2009 have been in Africa, and, more specifically, in the Sahel (three)
and in Somalia (two). Critics of the CSDP missions have argued that, in
the early days at least, there was an emphasis on launching missions for
their own sake – to demonstrate the vitality and significance of the CSDP.
There is undoubtedly some element of truth in that, even though it would
be wrong to suggest that any of the missions was unnecessary or under-
taken frivolously. The initial emphasis on the Balkans was both obvious
and correct, given the need to stabilize a sizeable geographical area situ-
ated inside the borders of the EU itself, an area, moreover, which had
been formally declared in June 2003 as being destined eventually to join
the Union (Prifti 2013). The emphasis on the DRC is easily understood in
that that country is probably the least stable and the most violence-prone
of any in Africa. It had been in a state of continuous civil and interstate
war from 1996 to 2003 and has been riven ever since with insurgency
and conflict (Prunier 2009; Autesserre 2010). It is estimated that as many
as 5.4 million people may have died, although this figure is contested by
others (Spagat et al. 2009: 935). The EU’s various missions in the DRC
have been subjected to withering criticism (Matera 2013: 216) and we
will assess those charges shortly, but the attempt to ‘do something’ to
help needs no defending (Pohl 2012).
The absence of new initiatives at the turn of the decade is easily
explained in terms of the onset of ‘mission fatigue’ around the time of the
ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. By then, the EU had launched 26
missions in five years, and many member states were also involved in
Afghanistan and Iraq. It is significant that, since 2012, the Sahel has
become the dominant focus for CSDP missions. This vast region, which
marks the eco-climatic transition between the Sahara desert to the North
and the Sudanian savannah to the South, stretches from the Atlantic
coast in Mauritania to the Red Sea in Eritrea and embraces Mali, Niger,
Chad and Sudan. It has become the new stomping ground for Al Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) whose activities (hostage-taking –
mainly of Europeans – assassinations, trafficking in people, drugs and
weapons, and terrorism) were affecting societies and politics from
Mauritania to Chad. During the initial phases of the Arab Spring, the EU
adopted a Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel, an ambi-
tious programme promoting development, good governance, political
and diplomatic instruments, security, the rule of law and struggle against
violent extremism and radicalization (EEAS 2011). The new emphasis on
North Africa and the Sahel as the focus of European security efforts was
also a key feature of the 2013 French Livre Blanc (Livre Blanc 2013:
40–1).
How best can we go about analysing the drivers behind these missions,
their basic objectives and their relative impact? At one end of the spec-
trum, two policy analysts concluded – somewhat severely – that: ‘ten
years after the creation of ESDP, most EU missions remain small, lacking
in ambition and strategically irrelevant’ (Korski and Gowan 2009: 11).
At the other end, the first EU High Representative could, at the same
point in time, assert that ‘CSDP … is a reality on the ground with crisis
Table 5.1 Dates and host countries for CSDP missions
Date No. Balkans Africa Other
2003 4 3 (BiH + FYROM – 2) 1 (DRC) 0

2004 2 1 (BiH) 0 1 (Georgia)
2005 8 0 3 (DRC – 2 + 5 (Iraq; Aceh;
Darfur) Palest;
Georgia;
Ukr/Mold)
2006 4 2 (FYROM + Kosovo) 1 (DRC) 1 (Palestine)
2007 2 0 1 (DRC) 1
(Afghanistan)
2008 6 1 (Kosovo) 4 (DRC; Chad; 1 (Georgia)
Guinée-Bissau;
Somalia)
2009 0 0 0 0
2010 1 0 1 (Somalia) 0
2011 0 0 0 0
2012 3 0 3 (Niger; Horn; 0
Sudan)
2013 2 0 2 (Mali; Libya) 0
Totals 32 7 16 9
management operations making a real difference to people’s lives across

the world. […] the EU is still the only organisation that can call on a
whole range of stabilisation instruments, both to pre-empt or prevent a
crisis and to restore peace and rebuild institutions after a conflict’ (Solana
2009: 8). Those who have commented on the missions as a whole, tend
to adopt a position somewhere between these two poles. The first chal-
lenge is to decide how to classify different types of missions and how to
differentiate between them. Major-General Graham Messervy-Whiting,
who, as the first Chief of Staff of the European Union Military Staff in
2001, was responsible for kick-starting the planning of such missions,
proposed a breakdown according to the four main objectives of the
‘effective multilateralism’ dimension of the European Security Strategy:
support for the United Nations; support for the transatlantic relation-
ship; regional stabilization; and spreading good governance (Messervy-
Whiting 2006: 40). These are valid categories but do not take us very far
in the task of evaluation. The European Union itself presents the missions
according to geographical zone – Western Balkans, South Caucasus,
South East Asia, Middle East, Africa – with a distinction between mili-
tary and civilian missions and a further distinction between those that are
completed and those that are ongoing. As we have seen, while this is a
factual and therefore legitimate breakdown, it is also somewhat mislead-
ing. The EU is essentially a regional security actor. Although it has
deployed two missions to Asia, it is not in any meaningful sense a global
security actor. ISIS Europe breaks the missions down by type and this is
helpful. But the reality is that each of the six ‘military operations’ has
been very different from the other five. There is little in common between
a largely symbolic mission such as Concordia (FYROM) in 2003 and the
extensive anti-piracy naval operation Atalanta which has been deployed
in the Gulf of Aden since 2008. In the same vein, there is little compara-
bility, within the category ‘border mission’, between the EU’s sporadic
role in manning the tiny Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt; its
substantial and long-standing attempt to help police the 1,200 km border
between Ukraine and Moldova; and the 2013 launch of an effort to help
the new Libyan government manage its 4,348 km of land border and its
1,770 km maritime border, both of which are extremely porous.
Another way of classifying the missions would be to differentiate
between those with a clear strategic purpose – for the EU itself – and
those which are ‘merely’ offering assistance to others. This is a hazardous
Map 5.1 European Union: EEAS completed missions and operations
• EUPOL COPPS
• EUBAM RAFAH
Palestinian Territories
EUFOR ALTHEA
Bosnia-Herzegovina EUMM
Georgia
EULEX EUPOL
Kosovo Afghanistan
EUBAM EUJUST LEX

Libya Iraq
EUTM
Mali EUAVSEC
South Sudan EUCAP NESTOR
EUCAP SAHEL
Niger
EU NAVFOR
EUTM Atalanta
Somalia
• EUSEC
• EUPOL
RD Congo © European Union, 1995–2013
Map 5.2 European Union: EEAS ongoing missions and operations
• EUPOL PROXIMA
• EUPAT
FYROM
EUPM
Bosnia-Herzegovina
CONCORDIA EUJUST THEMIS

FYROM Georgia
EUFOR
Tchad/RCA
Support to AMIS II
Sudan/Darfur
EU SSR
Guinea-Bissau
• ARTEMIS AMM Monitoring Mission
• EUFOR Aceh/Indonesia
EUPOL RD Congo
Kinshasa
© European Union, 1995–2013
route to embark on since the definition of ‘strategic’ lies in the mind of

the definer. However, there is little doubt today that the term strategic
could be applied to Atalanta, which helps to keep open the shipping-
lanes between the Suez Canal and Shanghai (Rogers 2009; Ehrhart and
Petretto 2012); or (possibly – but see de Wet 2009) the EULEX mission
in Kosovo, whose central objective is to establish the rule of law in that
vital former province of Serbia (where lawlessness has prevailed for
centuries) as an integral part of stabilizing the entire Western Balkans
and preparing them for eventual EU membership (Chivvis 2010). On the
other hand, the brief 2012–13 European Union Aviation Security
Mission (EUAVSEC) in South Sudan, which aimed to strengthen security
at Juba International Airport, as part of the international community’s
overall assistance to that country; or EUPOL COPPS, the police training
mission in the Palestinian Authority, could clearly be categorized as
‘helpful’ rather than as part of a grand strategy (Bulut 2009). The classi-
fication problem starts at this point. It is extremely difficult to classify the
other missions along a spectrum ranging from strategic to helpful. All
could arguably enter into the latter category and so might be clustered
150
Map 5.3 ISIS–Europe mission map

▲ EUMM* in Former Yugoslavia COMPLETED 31 December 2007
❱❰ EUPM BiH. Followed on from UN International Police Task Force in January 2003 COMPLETED 30 June 2012
● CONCORDIA fYROM COMPLETED 15 December 2003
● ARTEMIS DR Congo COMPLETED 1 September 2003
❱❰ EU POL PROXIMA fYROM succeeded by EUPAT
★ EUJUST THEMIS Georgia COMPLETED 14 July 2005
● EUFOR ALTHEA BiH extended to 15 November 2014
❱❰ EUPOL Kinshasa succeeded by EUPOL RD Congo
◆ EUSEC DR Congo extended to 30 September 2014
★ EUJUST LEX Iraq extended to 31 December 2013
◆
◆ EU
EU support
support to
toAMIS
AMIS Darfur COMPLETED 31 December 2007
Darfur
▲
▲ AMM
AMM Aceh COMPLETED 15 December 2006
Aceh
◆ EUSR BST Georgia COMPLETED February 2011
▼ EUBAM RAFAH extended to 30 June 2014
▼ EUBAM Ukraine/Moldova extended to 30 November 2015
❱❰ EUPOL COPPS Palestinian Territories extended to 30 June 2014
◆ EUPAT fYROM COMPLETED 14 June 2006
◆ EUPT Kosovo COMPLETED 14June 2008, replaced by EULEX
● EU FOR DR Congo COMPLETED 30 November2006
❱❰ EUPOL DR Congo extended to 30 September 2014
❱❰ EUPOL Afghanistan extended to 31 December 2014
●
● EUFOR
EUFOR Tchad/RCA
Tchad/RCA COMPLETED 15 March 2009
◆ EUSSR Guinea-Bissau COMPLETED 30 September 2010
★ EULEX Kosovo extended to 14 June 2014

● Military operation
▲ EUMM Georgia extended to 14 December 2014
■ Military training mission
◆ Supporting/Assistance mission ◆ EUNAVCO replaced by EUNAVFOR Somalia
★ Rule of Law mission
● EUNAVFOR Somalia (Atalanta) extended to December 2014
▲ Monitoring mission
❱❰ Police mission ■ EUTM Somalia extended to March 2015
▼ Border mission ● EUFOR** Libya CLOSED 10 November 2011
Mission mandate extensions
◆ EUCAP Sahel Niger till August 2014
◆ EUAP NESTOR Horn of Africa till July 2014

Note: from 1 December 2009 with the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty,
the system of the 6-month Presidency and its role have changed. The PSC it.
◆ EUAVSEC South Sudan till January 2014
now has a permanent chair and the new HR/VP chairs the Foreign Affairs Council.
■ EUTM Mali till mid-2014
▼ EUBAM Libya till mid-2015
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
* Note the EUMM in former Yugoslavia began in 1991 as EUCM W. Balkans and then transitioned to EUMM in 2003.
** EJFOR Libya was not launched as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs did not allow it.
Box 5.1 CSDP missions
Mission Country Mandate Dates Force (peak) Participating

states*
1) MILITARY MISSIONS EU (+ non-EU)
Concordia FYROM Stability of FYROM 03–12 2003 350 13 EU (+ 14)

Artemis DRC Security of population 06–09 2003 2,000 16 EU (+ 3)
Althea BiH Compliance with Dayton Peace 07/04–pres 7,000–600 21 EU (+ 5)
Agreement
EUFOR DRC DRC Support MONUC during 07–11 2006 2,400 21 EU (+ 2)
elections
EUFOR Chad Chad CAR Protect refugees 03/08–03/09 3,700 23 EU (+ 3)
EUNAVFOR Gulf Aden Anti-piracy 12/08–pres 2,000 19 EU (+ 2)
2) MILITARY TRAINING MISSIONS
EUTM Somalia Somalia Training 3,000 Somali troops 04/10–03/15 125 12 (+7)
EUTM Mali Mali Training 1,000 Mali troops 03/12–06/14 340 24
3) POLICE MISSIONS
EUPM BiH Mentor, monitor, inspect to 01/03–06/12 540 27 (+7)

produce national police force
Proxima FYROM Mentor, monitor, advise on 12/03–12/05 186 24 (+4)
law & order →
151
152
Mission Country Mandate Dates Force (peak) Participating
states*
EUPOL Kinshasa RDC Mentor, monitor, advise 04/05–06/07 23 6

Integrated Police Unit
EUPOL RD Congo RDC Police reform, criminal justice; 06/07–09/13 53 9
SSR
EUPOL COPPs Palestine Sustainable & effective police 11/05–06/14 42 17 (+2)
force in Palestine
EUPOL Afghan Afghanistan Sustainable & effective Afghan
police force 06/07–12/14 225 16 (+4)
4) RULE OF LAW MISSIONS
EUJUST Themis Georgia Reform of criminal justice 07/04–07/05 10 10

EUJUST Lex Iraq Train police & judiciary 07/05–12/13 30 17 (+2)
EULEX Kosovo Kosovo Sustainable & independent 12/08–06/14 1,900 26 (+6)
multi-ethnic justice system
5) SUPPORT/ASSISTANCE MISSIONS
EUSEC RDC RDC Reform RDC army & foster 05/05–09/13 50 6

good security governance
→
AMIS & AMISON Darfur & Assistance to African Union 07/05–12/07 47 15 (Amis)
Support missions Somalia missions 04/07–1207 4 9 (Amisom)
EUSR BST Georgia Border Support Management 09/05–02/11 6 6
EUPAT FYROM Police Advisory mission 12/05–06/06 29 16
EUPT Kosovo Kosovo Planning for EULex Kosovo 03/06–06/08 25 25
EUSSR Guinée-B SSR Advice 06/08–09/10 14 6
EU NAVCO Somalia Preparation of EUNAVFOR 09/08–12/08 ?? ??
EUCAP Sahel Niger Train security forces in anti-
terror
EUCAP NESTOR Horn of Africa Enhance maritime capacity of 07/12–07/14 75 15?
5 states in Horn of Africa
EUAVSEC S. Sudan Security at Juba airport 06/12–01/14 50
6) MONITORING MISSIONS
AMM Indonesia Monitor peace agreement 09/05–12/06 125 12 (+7)

EUMM Georgia Ensure peace agreement 09/08–09/13 340 24
7) BORDER MISSIONS
EUBAM Rafah Gaza/Egy Help man Rafah Crossing 11/05–06/14 24 21

EUBAM Uk/Mol Ukraine/ Customs & border management 12/05–11/15 233 22 (+3)
Moldova
EUBAM Libya Libya Help Libya control borders 05/13–05/15 100 22
153
along the plotline somewhere in that direction. Few enter clearly into the
former category, although EU officials and spokespersons would
undoubtedly argue that any mission which is helping to stabilize
(however minimally) an unstable part of the world could be considered
to be strategic (Hazelzet 2013).
The best place to start for those wishing to get some clear sense of the
EU’s overseas missions is with the brief analyses of each of the first 21
missions offered in the bumper volume published by the EU-ISS to mark
ten years of CSDP (Grevi et al. 2009). These analyses give a reference to
the legal basis of each mission, offer brief highlights of the mission’s
mandate, details of the mission strength, and of contributing states, an
assessment of the background to the operation, the challenges involved,
the implementation of the mission and a performance evaluation, as well
as a useful bibliography. The problems faced by each mission are openly
discussed and the options carefully weighed. Given that the EU-ISS is an
agency at the service of the EU institutions, the verdicts are measured,
circumspect and balanced. The fact that there is no attempt, on the part
of the editors of this indispensable volume, to arrive at an overall judge-
ment on the 21 missions analysed reflects the difficulty and sensitivity of
any such attempt. The missions are so diverse, so different from one
another, so difficult to compare in any scientific sense, so unique in many
cases that any overall judgement is almost impossible to make. In the
following pages, I offer my own basic overview of the different categories
of missions, followed by a critical review of the increasingly massive
volume of scholarship devoted to their analysis.
The CSDP Military Operations
On 31 March 2003, the EU launched its first ever military operation,

Concordia (named after the Roman goddess of harmony) – a peacekeep-
ing mission in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM),
taking over from a NATO force. It deployed 357 troops, from all EU
states except Ireland and Denmark and from 14 additional nations, an
average of 13 troops per participating state. Several member states
provided one symbolic individual. In a small mountainous country, it
succeeded in helping keep the peace between bands of lightly-armed
irregulars and the Macedonian ‘army’, which boasted a defence budget
less than half that of Luxembourg. This was an operation high in politi-
cal symbolism and modest in terms of military footprint. Within a few
months, it was clear that the biggest problem in Macedonia was no
longer armed conflict but criminality – hence Concordia was succeeded
on 15 December 2003 by the police operation Proxima (see below).
Concordia’s primary value was that it allowed the EU to test its recently
agreed procedures covering every aspect of the mounting of a military
operation, albeit a very modest one, such as command and control, use-
of-force policy, logistics, financing, and legal arrangements and memo-
randa of understanding with host nations (Messervy-Whiting 2003). It
was also significant in that it was the first practical implementation of the
Berlin Plus procedures (Mace 2004; Abele 2003; Gourlay 2003). NATO
and the EU had previously cooperated closely in FYROM, with Javier
Solana and NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson jointly defusing in
2001 a potentially explosive stand-off between Albanian ‘rebels’ and the
Macedonian authorities, the former using the leverage of the
Stabilization and Association Agreement, the latter NATO forces.
Thereafter, a succession of NATO missions managed the security situa-
tion and oversaw disarmament of irregulars. In fact, NATO remained a
background presence and although the PSC exercised political control
over the mission, Concordia made use of NATO operational planning at
SHAPE. Concordia was deemed a successful operation by most commen-
tators, although the International Crisis Group insisted there was ‘no
room for complacency’ (ICG 2003).
From June to September 2003, the EU launched its first ever
autonomous mission, Artemis, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Operation Artemis, which was also the EU’s first operation outside
Europe and the first EU operation under Chapter VII of the UN Charter,
offers far richer lessons about EU capabilities than Concordia. The objec-
tive was to secure the area around Bunia in Ituri province which had been
the scene of violent confrontations between Ugandan and Congolese
armed forces, variously backed by local tribal militias in the war which
had convulsed the DRC since 1998. Over 50,000 people had been massa-
cred in the area since 1999. The UN force in DRC – MONUC – proved
unable to cope and Secretary General Kofi Annan called for international
assistance. France assembled an EU force, backed by the UK, the mission
partly impelled by the dynamism of Franco-British cooperation in Africa
since the mid-1990s, and partly as a way of helping heal the wounds of
European disagreements over Iraq earlier in the year (Ulriksen et al.
2004: 511; Duke 2009). The terms of reference of the mission included
the stabilization of security, the improvement of the humanitarian situa-
tion in Bunia, protection of the airport and of the refugee camps and
protection of UN personnel and other civilians in the area. This was
explicitly regarded as an interim mission to allow the UN to assemble a
more permanent force by September. An impartial assessment suggests
that the operation, which involved rapid force projection to a distance of
6,500 km into little-known and non-permissive terrain, was a success.
France was the ‘framework nation’, supplying 1,785 of the 2,200 troops
deployed. Sixteen other ‘troop contributing nations’ were involved,
offering strategic air lift, engineers, helicopters (South Africa) and
special-forces (Sweden). Operational planning was conducted from the
French Centre de Planification et de Conduite des Opérations (CPCO) at
Creil, to which were seconded officers from 13 other countries, thus

demonstrating the potential for multinationalization of a national
Permanent Joint Head Quarters. The operation demonstrated EU capac-
ity for rapid deployment (seven days after UNSC Resolution 1484 on 30
May), logistics, a single command structure, well and appropriately
trained forces, clear rules of engagement allowing for tactical evolution
in the theatre, good incorporation of multinational elements, excellent
interservice cooperation, and adequate communications (Cornish 2004;
Ulriksen et al. 2004). As Ulriksen et al. have chronicled, the EU forces
engaged in high intensity combat with the rebel militias, the Swedish
commander stating that Bunia was the toughest challenge for Sweden’s
armed forces since the UN campaigns in Katanga in the 1960s. NATO
procedures were adopted throughout, even though the mission was
conducted with no recourse to NATO assets or planning. Artemis
demonstrated conclusively that the EU could undertake a peacekeeping
operation, and on a significant scale, even at some distance from Europe.
The mission, despite its apparent success, nevertheless drew fire from
a number of critics. Several NGOs, with observers on the ground, consid-
ered Artemis too limited in time and space. The International Crisis
Group issued a report only days after Artemis deployed and judged the
mission ‘totally insufficient’, arguing that only a mission which was
‘more forceful’, more ‘geographically extensive’ and ‘maintained for
much longer’ could respond adequately to the crisis in Ituri (ICG 2003a).
A Médecins sans Frontières report similarly castigated Artemis for
having been ‘unable to ensure genuine protection for civilians’ (MSF
2003: 14). These criticisms, which were also aimed at the UN itself,
appeared to ignore the terms of reference of the mission, whose mandate
was strictly limited to the area around Bunia. Critics charged that
Artemis succeeded in demilitarizing Bunia only by driving the militia
elsewhere, where they continued their predations. Yet Artemis was not
mandated to demilitarize the entire province of Ituri and can hardly be
criticized for failing to do more than it was tasked to do. Questions arose
as to whether or not Artemis could be seen as a precedent for future EU
missions. Cornish concluded that ‘it is appropriate to regard [it] as a
practical experiment in politico-military collaboration in the EU, from
which to draw lessons for the broader ESDP’ (Cornish 2004: 19).
Ulriksen et al. similarly concluded that the mission – the ‘shape of things
to come’ – was indeed a precedent for EU intervention in Africa, espe-
cially in view of US reluctance to engage in that continent (pp. 521–3).
Catherine Gégout, however, analysing the mission from a strictly realist
perspective, concluded that Artemis did not ‘stem from a reaction to a
crisis situation in Africa’ but merely from a ‘will to promote the EU’s own
image’ (Gégout 2005: 443). In short, it was a clear case of France’s
national interests being wrapped in a European flag. Since, to date, there
has been no similar instance of an Artemis-type mission (the January
2013 French operation Serval in Mali was not ‘CSDP-ized’ and remained
a strictly national French mission), it is probably appropriate to conclude
that Artemis was indeed a one-off case which has few or no implications
for future CSDP military engagements.
The third EU military operation (EUFOR Althea) is more difficult
both to evaluate and to fault. The transfer from NATO to the EU of
responsibility for the Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in December 2004, represented a significant test of the EU’s military
muscle. The initial NATO force deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina (IFOR,
December 1995) had involved some 60,000 troops under the Dayton
Agreement. This was scaled down repeatedly, reaching a total of 12,000
in the follow-up SFOR by January 2003. Projections for 2004 had fore-
seen a further reduction to about 7,000 troops – which was precisely the
number deployed at the outset of Althea – the EU’s most ambitious mili-
tary mission to date. In addition to stabilizing Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Althea allowed the EU to experiment with large-scale helicopter manoeu-
vres, to combat drug-running, to organize the voluntary surrender of
small arms, and to undertake liaison and observation team (LOT) activ-
ities, peace-support training schemes, and psychological operations.
Forces were drawn from 21 member states as well as from five non-EU
states, including Turkey and Chile. In light of the improving security situ-
ation, Operation Althea was reconfigured four times, most recently in
September 2012, when the number of troops was reduced to 600.
Althea, which is still ongoing at the time of writing, operates under the
‘Berlin Plus’ procedures agreed with NATO and has had clear and
explicit objectives. The main challenge was to ensure a seamless transi-
tion from SFOR and to maintain a secure environment for the imple-
mentation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. In the medium term, the
mission aimed to help BiH move towards EU membership, through the
signature of a Stabilization and Association Agreement; and in the long
term to create a stable, viable and multi-ethnic BiH working harmo-
niously with its neighbours. Operation Althea is explicitly framed as part
of a broader EU policy towards the Balkans which deploys a wide range
of political, economic, commercial, cultural, and police instruments to
smooth transition towards eventual EU membership. The essential
difference between NATO’s SFOR and the EU’s Althea was that the
former represented ‘emergency surgery’ as the last stage of the road from
Dayton, while the latter aimed at ‘rehabilitation’ as the first step on the
road to Brussels. As such, Althea was far more of a civil–military mix
than a purely military operation. The operation exemplified the increas-
ing demands on European soldiers for a broad range of skills and train-
ing.
The first Force Commander of Althea, UK Major General David
Leakey, admitted to being somewhat bemused to find that his main
orders from Javier Solana appeared to be essentially non-military. His
‘key military task’ was to support the HR’s Mission Implementation Plan,
his ‘key supporting task’ to help the fight against organized crime. Above
all, Althea, in the words of High Representative Solana, needed to be ‘new
and distinct’ and to ‘make a difference’ (Leakey 2006: 61–2). The Mission
Implementation Plan comprised four elements (economy, rule of law,
police and defence reform) which at first sight seemed ill-suited for mili-
tary leverage. Leakey realized that the challenge in BiH was that of adopt-
ing a holistic approach to the main obstacles to reform, which included
smuggling; customs/tax avoidance and general corruption as obstacles to
economic governance; political obfuscation and corruption (particularly
in Republika Srpska); as well as extensive crime networks; and the protec-
tion of war criminals. At first, Althea’s involvement in the fight against
crime was not openly welcomed by the parallel police mission in BiH
(EUPM) which sensed a turf battle. However, the military mission’s
approach also involved detecting and surrounding criminal activities
before handing the situation over to the BiH authorities supported by the
EUPM. In this way, what began as a purely military mission was trans-
formed into a complex civil–military project in which the entire range of
EU instruments was brought to bear in a holistic approach (Bertin 2008;
Dobbins 2008; Overhaus 2009). The final judgement on Althea will be
tightly linked to the overall situation in BiH, which was deemed, in July
2013, to be the real laggard among the countries of the Western Balkans
in terms of their overall progress towards EU membership. In particular,
BiH was considered by the European Council to be in breach of the
European Convention on Human Rights as a result of its constitutional
discrimination against minorities (European Council 2013).
A fourth military operation under ESDP was launched in June 2006 in
support of the United Nations mission in Congo (MONUC) during the
crucial presidential election period (July to October). The mission, code-
named EUFOR RD Congo followed the model of Artemis in being an
autonomous EU mission under Chapter VII of the United Nations. It
comprised 2,400 EU troops under the operational command of German
Lieutenant-General Karlheinz Viereck based at the German Permanent
Joint HQ in Potsdam (the first time this PJHQ was used). Germany and
France supplied two thirds of the troops, the others coming from 21 EU
countries plus Turkey and Switzerland. The force HQ was in Kinshasa
under the command of French Major-General Christian Damay. An
advance contingent of several hundred troops was deployed to Kinshasa
and a reserve ‘over the horizon’ force of 1,200 was based in neighbour-
ing Gabon, only to be called up in the event of troubles requiring their
presence. The mission had a very limited remit: to support MONUC in
stabilizing the country, to protect civilians in the area of deployment, to
protect Kinshasa airport and to carry out whatever protection and rescue
missions might prove necessary. The mission was to last four months
from the date of the Congolese elections (30 July 2006).
From the outset, this CSDP mission generated controversy. The UN

request for assistance in overseeing the elections had been formulated in
December 2005, but it was only in March 2006 that an initial EU answer
was forthcoming. Two main problems arose. The first was the reluctance
of the UK to be involved, given its major deployments in Iraq and
(increasingly) in Afghanistan. The second was the fact that France
wanted to pressure Germany into leading this mission as a demonstra-
tion that the Franco-German partnership was still alive and well.
Germany was very reluctant and initial reports suggested that Berlin had
even ruled out participation. Eventually, a deal was struck whereby, of
the 780 German troops deployed, only 100 or so went to Kinshasa, the
remainder forming part of the reserve in Gabon (Gowan 2007; Major
2008). Many criticisms of the mission were voiced. The first argued that
the size of the force (1,000 maximum deployed in DRC itself) was inad-
equate given that the elections were nationwide in a country three times
the size of France with 50,000 polling stations. This, it was alleged, was
surely ‘tokenism’ in the extreme (Haine and Giegerich 2006). Second,
critics noted that the EU troops were overwhelmingly based in Kinshasa,
which had essentially been pacified for some time. None was deployed to
the eastern part of the country where troubles were likely to occur in
towns such as Goma, Bukavu or Kisangani. Third, this tokenism was
heightened by the stationing of the reserve force in Gabon. ‘I’ve never
understood what this force is doing,’ quipped presidential candidate
Christophe Mboso, ‘are the elections taking place in Gabon?’ Fourth,
critics noted that the mission would end at precisely the time when the
troops might most be needed – after the announcement of the result. One
analyst noted that this gave the impression, particularly to the local
population, that the mission had ‘cut and run’. However, the elections
did take place throughout the country practically without incident,
although the extent to which this could be attributed to the EU force
seems a moot point.
Unlike Artemis, EUFOR RD-Congo is unlikely to go down in the annals
as a CSDP success story (ICG 2006; Major 2008: 321–2). Accusations that
it was primarily intended to get some good coverage for the EU, and indeed
that the operational details reflected much more closely the internal
tensions within the EU than the actual requirements on the ground (Matera
2013: 177) are hard to avoid. However, the mission was consciously
framed as part of the EU’s comprehensive approach to the DRC, which
involved, in addition to Artemis and the Kinshasa police mission (see
below), a separate advisory and assistance mission for security sector
reform, EUSEC RD Congo, launched in June 2005 for 12 months. EUSEC
RD Congo had a staff of nine advisers from six EU countries, helping the
Congolese army establish an efficient administrative structure, with solid
finances and a reliable system for the payment of soldiers’ wages (a major
problem in the past with vast sums for ‘ghost soldiers’ being siphoned off
into military leaders’ bank accounts in Switzerland). In addition, the EU

financed the Congolese elections to the tune of 80 per cent and was instru-
mental in shaping the Congolese constitution and legal framework. When
taken together, the four EU missions in Congo do amount to a sizeable
measure of assistance, even though many might have wished for the EU to
assume a far more ambitious role in several crisis-ridden African countries
(Peyrecave 2007). When rebels surrounded government troops and a UN
contingent near the town of Goma in November 2008, France, holding the
Presidency of the EU, proposed sending in an EU battle-group. However,
the two on station at the time (a combined BG under German leadership,
and a UK BG) were both ruled out by their respective national leaders,
mainly on the grounds that it was inappropriate to send in a CSDP mission
when a UN mission was already on the ground. The answer, argued UK
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was to strengthen the UN force. The 2008
refusal to repeat a military mission in the DRC was taken by many as an
admission that there is little the EU can hope to do with military instru-
ments in that country.
The fifth military operation mounted under CSDP was EUFOR
Chad/RCA, which lasted from March 2008 to March 2009. The basic
purpose of the mission was to protect the refugees from neighbouring
Darfur, whose numbers had swollen to some 400,000, and to ensure the
delivery of humanitarian aid. EUFOR Chad/RCA also served to protect
the UN forces operating in Chad and the neighbouring Central African
Republic. The deployment, initially scheduled for November 2007,
suffered long delays as EU member states, facing competing demands
from NATO for troops and helicopters in Afghanistan, struggled to meet
the force generation targets, originally set at between 4,000 and 5,000
troops. The UN had estimated the optimum force levels for such a
mission at between 5,000 and 12,500, but the EU was obliged to settle
for 3,700, with a strategic reserve of 600 on stand-by in Europe. Troop-
contributing countries include France (2,000), Ireland (450), Poland
(400), Austria (210), Sweden (200), Romania (120), Belgium (120),
Spain (80), Netherlands (60), Finland (40), and Slovenia (15). Notably,
the UK and Germany were absent from the operation, the former because
of overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter, having commanded the
EUFOR electoral monitoring mission in Congo in 2006, feeling it had
already paid its ‘African dues’. Although the EU collectively boasted
around 1,000 helicopters, it proved difficult to find more than a dozen or
so adapted to operate in the harsh desert conditions of Eastern Chad.
Eventually Poland volunteered an extra two and even Russia chipped in
with three. The Operation Commander, Ireland’s Lieutenant-General
Patrick Nash, worked with officers from 22 EU member states at the
French permanent joint headquarters at Mont Valérien outside Paris.
The Force Commander, France’s Brigadier-General Jean-Philippe
Ganascia, was headquartered at Abéché in Eastern Chad.
The logistical challenge of projecting 3,700 troops into the heart of

Africa (4,500 km from Brussels) was the most difficult the EU has yet
faced and its success demonstrates what the EU is capable of if it is deter-
mined enough. There are only 400 km of paved roads in Chad, a country
twice the size of France. The area to be patrolled covered several hundred
thousand square kilometres, terrain described by General Nash as
‘unforgiving’ in its austerity and in the severity of its climate (Mattelaer
2008). Apart from the logistical problems, the mission faced three other
major challenges. The first was that of differentiating it from France’s
own post-colonial African policy. France has had a force of some 1,500
troops in Chad since the mid-1980s when it helped then President
Hissène Habré defeat a Libyan invasion. Since the current President
Idriss Déby’s ouster of Habré in a 1990 coup, Paris has backed the
regime in N’Djamena. In order to underscore the legitimacy of the EU
mission, Javier Solana and General Nash insisted on its strict neutrality
and impartiality with respect to Chadian domestic and foreign policy.
The second major challenge came from the very rebel groups and militias
who were opposed to the Déby regime, who derided the very notion of
EUFOR Chad’s ‘neutrality’ and who declared European forces to be fair
game for attack. The area patrolled by the mission (essentially the
Eastern one-third of Chad, abutting the 1,000 km border with Sudan),
was (and remains) rife with warring tribes, rebels and militias. In addi-
tion, since 2004, Janjaweed militants involved in the Darfur conflict had
regularly been terrorizing villages and towns in eastern Chad. Finally,
bandits operated relatively freely in the area, preying on traders plying
the desert routes between Chad and the CAR.
The third challenge had to do with EUFOR’s involvement with both
Chadian and Central African regional politics. Both Chad and the
CAR were (and remain) autocratic dictatorships with few vestiges of
democracy. The International Crisis Group defined the CAR as worse
than a failed state: it was a ‘phantom state’ (ICG 2007). Analysts
predicted that EUFOR could not simply ignore this reality. As the EU
discovered in the Balkans, the creation of ‘safe havens’, without
confronting the deep-rooted causes of the conflict, amounts to a band-
aid rather than deep surgery. If the EU was really to deliver on its aim
of providing a serious context within which refugees and IDPs could
return to their villages, critics argued, it would have to adopt a
comprehensive political approach which maximized synergies with
the UN and AU forces operating in the region, fostered coherence
between the inputs from the various agencies of the EU, delivering
humanitarian aid, trade policy and security, and between Brussels and
the member states – particularly France – in a situation where the
interests of the European parties involved were hardly identical (IISS
2008; Seibert 2010). This aspect of the mission’s deeper purpose was
in fact almost totally neglected.
In the event, the CSDP mission succeeded in its primary purpose of

protecting refugees, a reality which was somewhat grudgingly recognized
even by the ICG (ICG 2008). It ‘contributed, where its soldiers patrolled
and were present, to a safer environment and a certain “sense of secu-
rity” among both the population and the humanitarian community’
(Helly 2009: 345). With a hefty dose of luck, the 2,500 short-range
patrols and the 260 long-range patrols ran into no major fire-fights and
the mission handed over smoothly to a much larger (5,200) UN force –
MINURCAT – in March 2009. In a very real sense, the presence of the
EU force paved the way for the entry into Chad of the UN, an event that
would have been politically difficult if not impossible beforehand. This
mission was relatively widely hailed by international observers as ‘a
model’ (Erlanger 2009).
The sixth and final military mission, EUNAVFOR Atalanta has been
deployed in the Gulf of Aden since December 2008 and remains ongoing.
In the context of the protracted degeneration of Somalia into a failed
state, the incidence of piracy in the Gulf of Aden increased rapidly (Hesse
2011), in part accelerated by threats to the local Somali fishing industry
from long-range European fishing vessels. Piracy rapidly became a lucra-
tive business when shipping companies proved willing to pay huge
ransoms for the release of their vessels. In 2011, there were 176 pirate
attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden netting $146 million in ransom
payments from 25 ships held hostage. Since global containerized
commercial shipping more than doubled between 2001 and 2011, piracy
seems set to increase (Geiss and Petrig 2011; Palmer 2013). This first
CSDP naval mission has also progressively become the most strategic in
that, starting out as a means of swatting an irritant, it has morphed into
an operation to protect the global commons. In addition to the EU
mission, which is the largest coordinated naval operation in these waters
covering 1.4 million square nautical miles (equal to 1.5 times the surface
area of mainland Europe), the Gulf of Aden has hosted naval vessels from
China, India, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey
and Russia, the US-led Combined Maritime Forces – and a small NATO
force thrown in for good measure. Atalanta typically consists of a half
dozen surface combat vessels and two or three Maritime Patrol and
Reconnaisance Aircraft (MPRAs) mobilizing up to 2,000 service men
and women (European Council 2012). Its OHQ is at Northwood in the
UK.
The primary purposes of Atalanta are to protect the vessels of the
World Food Programme (WFP) delivering food aid to displaced persons
in Somalia; to protect the African Mission on Somalia (AMISOM); to
deter and prevent piracy; and to protect vulnerable shipping off the
Somali coast. The EU claims 100 per cent success in the first endeavour –
since none of the 160 WFP ships has been attacked since the mission
started. The remaining objectives have also resulted in a high success
rate. Almost a million tonnes of food aid have been securely delivered.
One hundred and twenty-seven AMISOM vessels have also been
protected. One hundred and fifty pirates have been arrested and trans-
ferred to judicial authorities, mainly in Kenya and the Seychelles, most
European countries being reluctant to take them for fear of encouraging
indirect immigration to the EU. For reasons still difficult to discern,
pirate attacks fell off from highs of 174 (2009) and 176 (2010) to just 35
(2012) and only 3 by early August 2013 (European Council 2013a).
However, the mission has been heavily criticized – often for reasons that
go beyond its mandate: it cannot stabilize Somalia and put an end to
piracy; it is insufficiently resourced given the huge stretch of water to be
patrolled; it cannot help what are probably the most vulnerable shipping
vessels; and the judicial capacity of countries like Kenya to handle the
arrested pirates is reaching capacity (Weber 2009; Helly 2009a: 400–1).
This has led to further EU missions, under the label of the ‘comprehen-
sive approach’, which have trained Somali soldiers – in Uganda – (EUTM
Somalia), and assisted the various countries of the Horn of Africa in their
own measures to safeguard against piracy (EUCAP Nestor). In addition,
an EU Special Representative for the Horn of Africa has been appointed
to coordinate these various efforts (Ehrhart and Petretto 2012; Holzer
and Jürgenliemk 2012). But few can be under any illusions that these
additional missions, which together involve fewer than 200 EU person-
nel, will make a huge difference to the challenge of stabilizing this excep-
tionally unstable part of East Africa (Harper 2012; Fergusson 2013).
When the first edition of this book was published in 2007, CSDP mili-
tary missions were in their earliest infancy and no scholar had sought to
offer a substantial analysis of any of them. That said, four of the six mili-
tary missions to date had already been launched, and two of them
(Concordia and Artemis) had been concluded. The fifth (EUFOR Chad
RCA) was already in gestation. In recent years, a growing number of
book-length studies (most of them emerging out of doctoral disserta-
tions) have appeared. They approach the topic of the EU’s military
missions in a variety of very different ways. I will review some of them in
this next section.
Katarina Engberg’s study (2013) seeks to answer a basic question:
under what circumstances does the EU undertake military operations? In
addition to the CSDP missions strictu sensu, Engberg brings into her field
of vision the 2007 UN mission in Lebanon (which acts as an explanatory
indicator for the EU’s refusal to intervene) and the 2011 NATO mission
in Libya. Her approach is that of both a practitioner and an academic. As
Head of the Secretariat for Analysis and Long-Term Planning at the
Swedish Ministry of Defence, and as a member of Sweden’s delegation in
Brussels, she was herself deeply involved in these CSDP missions. As a
sometime Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, she mastered the intri-
cacies of IR theory and methodology. The book focuses on the dynamics
behind the EU’s military operations. It brings out the interplay between
the intervener and the target of intervention, highlighting the little under-
stood role of local actors. It also stresses the symbiosis between political
and resource factors in the context of multilateral organizations. It devel-
ops a relatively unique analytical tool deriving from the procedures of
defence planning. It comprises a dichotomous model, presenting factors
which drive and factors which inhibit the use of force along a continuum
which is affected, at various points, by two other sets of dynamics:
factors external to the organization and factors internal to the organiza-
tion, each set involving political, pol-mil and resource issues. The book
argues that the CSDP military missions can best be understood in the
context of the increasing role of regional security providers in an unoffi-
cial division of labour based on the multilateralization of intervention.
The EU in the 2000s became not only a global actor but also a regional
sub-contractor to the UN as well as a provider of follow-on-forces to
NATO.
The conclusions are significant. For Engberg, CSDP missions are more
likely when the consent of influential local actors can be secured (as in
EUFOR RDC), and less likely when this factor does not obtain
(Lebanon). Furthermore, the EU, in her judgement, is likely to undertake
an autonomous military mission when it can be identified as an opportu-
nity rather than as a challenge; in other words, when the interests at stake
and the instruments to be used are situated in what she calls the low-to-
middle bandwidth (again, as in EUFOR RDC); but if either the interests
at stake or the mission itself are high risk (as in Lebanon), the operation
becomes less likely. Missions are also more likely in the former colonial
areas of the major EU member states and/or where other regional secu-
rity organizations (such as the African Union or ASEAN) are involved. If
such regional providers are opposed to the mission, it becomes unlikely –
unless there are vital EU interests at stake. When command and control
arrangements are assured (either autonomously – Artemis or Atalanta –
or via Berlin Plus – Althea – a CSDP mission is far more likely than where
these are problematic (Lebanon, Libya). In the latter cases, the EU tends
to rely on the UN or on NATO. In a general sense, the EU is more likely
to get involved in operations which are complementary to other regional
security providers – particularly the UN and particularly in Africa, or act
as follow-on operations to a NATO mission (Concordia and Althea). In
short, Engberg portrays the EU’s military missions as rather hesitant,
limited in scope, very conditional on lining up a positive outcome and in
most cases partly dependent on cooperation with other regional actors.
She expresses agnosticism as to whether the practice of engaging in CSDP
military missions will continue.
Alexander Mattelaer (2013) focuses on just three military missions,
one of which (EUFOR Chad-RCA) was an autonomous EU mission; one
of which (UNIFIL Lebanon) was a United Nations mission using essen-
tially European troops; and one of which (ISAF Afghanistan) was a

NATO mission. He labels these missions ‘crisis response operation’ in
order to highlight both their reactive nature and their military essence.
His research questions focus on the nature and scale of the ‘friction’
which emerges between the military and the political aspects of these
operations and on the extent to which they can be considered to involve
strategy, defined as the smooth transition from political ambition to mili-
tary planning and delivery, and on to a successful political outcome. His
disciplinary approach is that of strategic studies in general and
Clausewitzian approaches in particular and this in a scholarly context in
which the operational dimension of EU military operations still remains
very much of a poor relation. The broad topic is important not only in
and of itself (and for an understanding of where CSDP is heading) but
also because in the post-Cold War world, overseas military missions
‘other than war’ have tended to constitute a new norm, whether in the
guise of crisis management, post-conflict reconstruction, humanitarian
intervention or nation-building. This new reality – what some scholars
call the ‘fourth generation’ of military activities (Lind 2004) – is currently
the subject of an intense debate within the US armed forces over the
respective merits and demerits of ‘classical warfare’ as opposed to
‘counter-insurgency’ (Bacevich 2008a).
The conclusions drawn by Mattelaer’s work are significant and
broadly complementary to those of Engberg. Through a focused assess-
ment of the practice of politico-military planning in these case studies, he
detects a worrying element of dysfunctionality if not de facto break-
down. He argues that the operational planning cycle (from political initi-
ation to military plan) constitutes the critical interface in the making of
strategy. Yet there always exists friction between the intergovernmental
political level and the integrated military–strategic level. This inevitably
undermines strategic coherence. Mattelaer further argues that, in terms
of this political–military friction, few hard and fast lessons can be
learned. Not only is friction omnipresent and structural, but it represents
‘a clamorous bag of empirical diversity (p. 204). Finally, in terms of the
emergence or existence of a strategic dimension to the operation, the
picture is very cloudy. International organizations are not naturally
prone to devise or implement grand strategies, and in the case of these EU
operations, the most that is normally achieved is some degree of coher-
ence between the political objectives of the providers and the cost–bene-
fit calculations of the local parties. But, as Engberg stressed, it is only
when the cooperation of the latter is assured that a mission stands any
chance of ushering in that crucial period of post-conflict reconstruction
which can lead to nation-building. Mattelaer’s work illustrates this
perfectly.
Annemarie Peen Rodt’s book (2014) is a quest for an acceptable schol-
arly definition of ‘success’ in EU military missions – and thereafter for the
precise criteria under which success might be predicted. She noted that
there was (and still is) no shared, theoretically grounded understanding
of how to define and evaluate success in CSDP missions – or indeed of
broader international peacekeeping missions. She developed a four-box
matrix according to which missions could be evaluated in terms of their
internal context (what is the mission objective and mandate?) and their
external context (how well do these missions promote the broader inter-
national efforts to secure peace and stability in a given region?). Each of
these boxes is matched by another which considers the appropriateness
of the mission – internally, in terms of its timeliness, efficiency and cost-
effectiveness; externally, in terms of its contribution to preventing the
continuation, diffusion, escalation and intensification of violence.
Applying these four criteria meticulously, she came up with what is
shown in Table 5.2.
Her criteria are at variance with those applied by two scholars who
examined all CSDP missions, both military and civilian – Ginsberg and
Penksa (2012) (see pp. 182–3). Peen Rodt’s second quest – for the condi-
tions behind success – again complemented the findings of both Engberg
and Mattelaer, by insisting on the need for appropriate and sufficient
support for the mission, both internally (the EU), domestically (actors on
the ground in the host country), regionally (neighbouring states and
other actors) and internationally. She concluded that: ‘where an ESDP
military conflict management operation cannot secure sufficient support
Table 5.2 Peen Rodt’s evaluation of CSDP mission success rates
Internal Internal External External

goal appropriate- goal appropriate-
attainment ness attainment ness
Operation Success Partial Success Success

Concordia success
Operation Success Partial Partial Partial
Artemis success success success
Operation Preliminary Preliminary Preliminary Preliminary
Althea success success success success
EUFOR DR Success Partial Partial Success
Congo success success
EUFOR Success Partial Partial Success
Chad/CAR success success
Source: Peen Rodt, Annemarie (2014), The European Union and Military Conflict
Management: Defining, Evaluating and Achieving Success (London: Routledge).
at all four levels, it will not be able to succeed’ (p. 153). The book offers
the first robust blueprint for the definition and pursuit of success in
CSDP. From these ground-breaking studies, we learn that, unlike in the
case of military operations engaged in by nation-states such as the US,
UK or France, CSDP operations are inherently constrained by the inter-
governmental nature of the exercise and by the extreme difficulty of
reaching sufficient consensus among the participating countries on the
broad objectives and methods of the mission. Much depends on the
constructive participation of forces and actors from the host country and
on the parallel involvement of major actors such as the UN, NATO or the
US. An EU military mission under CSDP is a rare event – the exception
rather than the rule.
Military Training Missions

There have been two CSDP military training missions, both in Africa.
These are not military missions per se since the soldiers involved are not
engaging in soldiering. Their objective is simply to train African forces in
the skills required for stabilization missions in their own country or
region. In the general context of the EU’s engagement in Somalia, a small
mission (around 100 EU personnel) was launched in April 2010 to help
train soldiers of the Somali National Armed Forces (SNAF). To date,
some 3,000 have been trained, mainly junior officers and NCOs (includ-
ing 24 women who have received courses in international humanitarian
law, human rights law and the protection of civilians). Although, for
security reasons, the training took place mainly in Uganda, the Somali
government pressurized the EU in 2013 to open a liaison office in
Mogadishu. How effective it will ultimately prove to be in turning
around the catastrophic situation in Somalia is a moot point.
The second military training mission was in Mali. The international
community had been concerned throughout 2012 about the increasing
control in the North of that vast state exercised by Islamist forces linked
to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and allied to Tuareg rebels aiming at
independence from the government in Bamako. These groups were
empowered by vast quantities of weapons released from Libya after the
fall of Colonel Gaddafi. A brief coup d’état in Bamako in spring 2012 was
followed by a rebel Islamist declaration of autonomy for the North of the
country, an area the size of France. In July 2012, the EU decided to ‘study’
the possibilities of training the Malian army. In October 2012, the UN
Security Council, in Resolution 2071, formally called on international
partners to contribute to the training of Malian troops and on 10
December, the European Council approved the EUTM Mali, nevertheless
confining its activities to the south of the country. Before the mission
could get under way, however, the Northern Islamists began a drive south
towards Bamako, where 12,000 Europeans resided. The EU operation
was sidelined as France took up the military challenge, through

Opération Serval (Heisbourg 2013), of driving the rebels back into the
northern deserts. EUTM Mali finally began to deploy in late March and
early April, just as the first French troops were returning home. An initial
batallion of 700 Malian troops was trained at the mission centre in
Koulikoro, north of Bamako, and sent north in late June 2013 to assist
the residual French troops in Mali in their task of stabilizing the North.
A second batallion took its place in Koulikoro for training. This mission
demonstrated its ability to offer useful services to a battered and demor-
alized Malian army previously trained – to disastrous effect – by the
United States. Whether it can contribute in a significant way to achieving
the EU’s stated objective of restoring the territorial integrity of Mali (an
ambition which might not actually make sense or be achievable in the
long term) remains to be seen.
Non-Military Missions
Police Missions
One of CSDP’s most significant innovations rapidly emerged as that of
the police mission. In post-conflict or crisis management situations, the
most urgent need is often for local security forces and above all for a
professional police force. The EU has made a serious initial commitment
in this regard both through deployment of police officers and through
local police training schemes in FYROM, Bosnia, Congo (Kinshasa),
Palestine and Afghanistan. A Council Secretariat proposal was floated in
2004 to send a police mission to Darfur but the idea was abandoned after
objections from both Khartoum and the African Union. This is a new
departure for the EU – previously trail-blazed by the UN and by OSCE –
and one which is proving as necessary and pragmatic on the ground as it
is politically symbolic of a new approach to security and stability. Police
missions are ‘at the forefront of the operationalisation of the civilian
component of the CSDP’ in terms of numbers of missions and personnel
deployed (Merlingen and Ostrauskaitè 2006). However, the EU’s record
to date is mixed at best.
The most high-profile, and arguably the most important of the six
police missions mounted to date – as well as the most difficult and chal-
lenging – was CSDP’s first ever overseas mission, the EU Police Mission
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM) first launched on 1 January 2003,
renewed on a regular basis, and ‘completed’ in June 2012. The mission
took over from the United Nations International Police Task Force
(IPTF) which had been assisting with policing in BiH since the Dayton
Agreement in 1995. EUPM’s terms of reference were to establish in BiH
a sustainable, professional and multi-ethnic police service operating in
accordance with best European and international standards. Under the
guidance of the EU Special Representative (EUSR), Paddy Ashdown,

EUPM aimed to support, advise and guide the preparation and imple-
mentation of police restructuring. In addition, it aimed to improve,
through proactive mentoring, monitoring and inspecting, police manage-
rial and operational capacities, especially at the state level, in order to
enhance BiH’s capacity to fight organized crime. Most of Europe’s drugs
and sex-trade traffic as well as illegal immigration circuits operate via
criminal networks out of the Balkans. The EUPM was also tasked with
monitoring the exercise of political control over the police. At its height,
the mission involved 540 EU police officers and officials from 34 coun-
tries including all EU member states plus Canada, Iceland, Norway,
Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine. The international investment
in EUMM underscores the extent to which BiH was widely seen as a
crucial experiment in post-conflict reconstruction. If the EU proved inca-
pable of projecting stability into a country which, as of July 2013, shared
a 1,000 km border with its newest member state, Croatia, then what was
the purpose of CSDP? The mission was the EU’s first serious foray into
the operationalization of security sector reform, a recent post-conflict
state-building concept at the heart of the European Security Strategy
(Osland 2004: 546; Helly 2006a). BiH ‘became the “guinea pig” and
trail-blazer for the development of [CSDP], a laboratory to experiment
with “learning by doing”’ (Helly and Flessenkemper 2013: 7). Officially,
the EU has claimed a number of successes for EUPM, including the trans-
formation of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) into
an operational police agency with enhanced and executive powers to
fight major and organized crime; solid development of other state-level
institutions, in cooperation with the European Commission, not least the
Ministry of Security (MoS) and the State Border Service (SBS); develop-
ment of local ownership of the reform process through the establishment
of the Police Steering Board, co-chaired by EUPM and local authorities;
progress towards police reform with the EUPM playing a key advisory
role. Merlingen (2009) acknowledges that the mission can be credited
with three achievements. First, the very fact that the mission took place
and lasted for ten years was an important example of ‘learning by doing’.
Second, EUPM did succeed in transforming the Bosnian police forces
‘from an instrument of ethnic warfare into a professional service’. Third,
it made some progress in introducing European norms and standards
into mentalities and institutions previously impervious to them.
Initially, the mission came under heavy fire from critics. The
International Crisis Group, in a negative November 2005 report, consid-
ered that ‘no matter what criteria are used to assess EUPM performance,
the indicators are depressing’. It concluded that ‘a weak mandate has been
interpreted in the narrowest possible fashion, permitting it to avoid many
responsibilities’ (ICG 2005: 12). This verdict was reiterated in the EU’s
main weekly newspaper (Lyon 2006). Kari Osland also drew negative
conclusions from EUPM’s record of addressing the challenges set by its

own mission statement and drew attention to the lack of political will in
Brussels to address the problem of Serb obfuscation (Osland 2004: 557).
The fundamental problem facing the EUPM – that of persuading the
political authorities in BiH – and particularly the governing Serbian
Democratic Party (SDS) in Republika Srpska (RS) – to cooperate with the
EU had been identified in advance of EUPM’s deployment in the first
independent study of EUPM (Nowak 2003: 30). Part of the problem,
however, also derived from shortcomings in the EU’s conceptual under-
standing of the role of policing in post-conflict situations. One analyst
drew attention to the counter-productive effects of using the police as a
transmission mechanism for the values the EU wants BiH to embrace,
arguing that this undermined the basic functions of the police ‘to the
point that the institution is now in a parlous state’ (Celador 2005:
372–3). Two specialists offered a trenchant critique of the overall EU
approach (Merlingen and Ostrauskaitè 2006). They argued that a purely
functional definition of policing (social peacekeeping or crime fighting) is
inadequate and they stressed that policing is a ‘form of social ordering
work’. As such, it cannot be neutral but is geared to the protection or
projection of a certain ideal of social order. In particular, police aid oper-
ations involve the ‘import’ into a given social and political context of
international norms which may not be appropriate and will always be
difficult to impose. The EUPM mission statement stressed the need to
ensure local ownership of the process which is essential for sustainabil-
ity. However, it was also crucial to ensure that ‘local ownership’ was not
dominated by forces opposed to the overall process of security sector
reform (Osland 2004: 547). This ultimately proved to be the most diffi-
cult challenge for the EUPM.
Overseas police missions by definition aim to bring about the trans-
formation of the local by the international. They can involve two meth-
ods: strengthening (of local police forces) or substitution (direct policing
by the international authorities). The former can be minimalist (respond-
ing to urgent needs through ‘quick fixes’) or maximalist (involving polit-
ical institution-building).The main problem with the EUPM was that,
from the outset – as was also to be the case with the other EU police
missions we shall assess below – it was limited to strengthening rather
than to substitution and that it focused on the high to medium police
management levels rather than on that of community policing. Political
interference with policing was also a huge problem. In BiH, the mission
confronted the eminently constitutional conundrum of forging a federal,
state-level police force out of the disparate local forces which remained –
and were determined to continue to remain – ethnically homogeneous.
This reality stemmed from the General Framework Agreement for Peace
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (GFAP) emerging from the Dayton
Agreements. The first High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, attempted
to change this situation by decrees from on high. Not only did this not
work (the capacity of BiH officials to subvert Ashdown’s decrees was
inexhaustible) but, when subsequently this attempt was abandoned in
favour of a new ‘bottom-up’ approach, the EU was perceived as weak
(Tolksdorf 2013: 21–4). The issue of police reform remained the major
imponderable right up to the end of the mission in 2012.
A retrospective overview published by the EU-ISS in 2013 offered a
very mixed picture of accomplishments and shortcomings (Helly and
Flessenkemper 2013). The initial (1990s) inability (or unwillingness) of
the EU to get involved in BiH resulted in the injection into the country of
multiple actors – UN, US, NATO, OSCE, EU – which subsequently
rendered the EU’s task of achieving impact even more challenging. The
turf wars between the Council, the Commission, the member states and
powerful individuals were terribly counterproductive, but no firm
conclusions have been drawn as to how these might be transcended. BiH
is perceived as ‘too close to Brussels for the EU to fail there’ and yet, as
we saw above, the country is making less and slower progress towards
EU accession than all the other states of the Western Balkans and is
currently in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights as a
result of its constitutional discrimination against minorities. Officials in
Brussels took back a number of important ‘lessons learned’, including the
absolute need for greater coherence and for not relying overmuch on
technical solutions to problems which remain profoundly political.
Quarrels over ‘top-down’ approaches as opposed to ‘bottom-up’ have
given way to a recognition that both approaches are equally vital
(Fréjabue 2013: 38–41). On the other hand, progress has been made in
the battle against organized crime and the various police forces in BiH
conform more or less to international best practice. The mission was
terminated in June 2012 in the knowledge that further progress by BiH
towards EU accession will have to take place through the broader
process of the Stabilization and Association Process. Meanwhile,
Operation Althea continues to promote the work formerly done by the
EUPM. The mixed balance sheet which constantly hung over EUPM did
not augur well for the EU’s other police missions.
These have, to date, been present in four very different countries –
FYROM, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine and Afghanistan.
The original mission in FYROM (Operation Proxima) succeeded the
EU’s first military mission, Concordia, in the same country. It ran from
December 2003 to December 2005 and was replaced by a follow-up
mission, the EU Police Advisory Team (EUPAT) with a six-month
mandate from 15 December 2005 to 14 June 2006. The remit of these
two missions was similar to that of the EUPM (mentoring, monitoring
and advising the Macedonian police, fighting organized crime and
promoting European police standards and supporting the government’s
police reform measures). Although Proxima initially involved almost 200
EU police officers from 26 countries, EUPAT was scaled down to 30 offi-

cers from 16 countries in 2006. Both operations epitomized the ‘dual track’
approach of the EU whereby the European Commission supported long-
term structural change in the Ministry of the Interior and Police Forces,
while the Council, through CSDP, tackled ‘urgent needs’ in support of the
political Framework Agreement. Proxima involved 28 separate
programmes covering all functions in the uniformed police, criminal
police, the Department for State Security and Counter-Intelligence, and
internal control (police misconduct complaints). The mission was rein-
forced by a team of border-control police officers. It encountered many
problems of implementation, largely deriving from the fact that, as in BiH,
it was the latest arrival following a host of international bodies with
competing mandates, some of which were politically driven. Other prob-
lems stemmed from encrusted interagency turf battles and institutional
incoherence (Ioannides 2006: 76–82; Ioannides 2009; Flessekemper
2008). The FYROM government effectively asked for the mission to be
terminated, fearing that its very presence would compromise the country’s
chances of accelerated progress towards EU membership.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the EU was instrumen-
tal in establishing a special Congolese police force in the capital,
Kinshasa (the Integrated Police Unit – IPU) with the specific remit of
protecting the personnel, institutions and infrastructure of the transi-
tional government from the predations of various militiae which ran
amok in the country. The establishment of EUPOL-Kinshasa, launched
in December 2004, involved the monitoring, mentoring and advising of
the IPU in the period during the run-up to the Congolese elections in July
2006. The members of the mission – 28 officers from France, Portugal,
Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Turkey – were also active
participants in the Reflection Group for the Reform and Reorganization
of the Congolese National Police. This was the first CSDP civil mission
for crisis management in Africa, working in tight cooperation with the
UN’s MONUC force and marked a new step in relations between the EU
and the UN (Grevi et al. 2005). There is no doubt that the mission played
a role in the smooth running of the Congolese elections in July 2006. In
June 2007, it was replaced and succeeded by EUPOL RD Congo in an
effort to extend the practice to the entire country (which is the size of
Europe), via the Police Nationale Congolaise (Vircoulon 2009; Justaert
2011). However, since the relative ‘success’ of the 2007 elections,
followed by regime consolidation after the 2011 elections – which the
EU, out of ‘Congo fatigue’ failed properly to monitor (Willis 2011) – the
Kabila government has been less and less interested in the EU’s role in the
country and has effectively elected to marginalize it. According to one
scholar, ‘The continuing presence of EUPOL RD Congo and EUSEC RD
Congo reflect the reluctance on the part of the EU to leave the DRC and
admit defeat amid continuing instability’ (Matera 2013: 187).
Meanwhile, on 14 November 2005, the Council established an EU

Police Mission (EUPOL COPPS Palestine) in the Palestinian Territories
under the aegis of CSDP. This forms part of the EU’s major effort to
bolster the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) which has seen the
Union emerge as the majority bankroller of the embryonic Palestinian
state. The operational phase started on 1 January 2006 and the
mission remained ongoing in early 2014. The EUPOL COPPS has a
long-term reform focus and aims to provide enhanced support to the
Palestinian Authority in establishing sustainable and effective policing
arrangements. Although the mission embarked on its remit with confi-
dence and commitment, the Palestinian elections in late January 2006
leading to the election of Hamas, created a hiatus which effectively pulled
the rug on the mission. The majority of the Palestinian security forces
originate from the military wing of the PLO and are considered loyal to
President Mahmoud Abbas. A power struggle immediately ensued
between Abbas and Hamas since these forces were technically under the
control of the Prime Minister and the Interior Minister, both of which
shifted to Hamas (Pirozzi 2006: 6). Ever since, the EU has striven to
attain its initial objective – the de-politicization of the Palestinian police
force – at the same time as its continued presence in Palestine, which,
given the charged political circumstances, has rendered the mission itself
political rather than technical. This is an almost impossible act to pull off
and one eminent observer has feared that ‘the mission could be reduced
to the thankless task of efficiently and professionally helping rearrange
civilian policing and criminal justice on a sinking ship’ (Bulut 2009).
The final CSDP police mission was EUPOL Afghanistan which was
launched in June 2007 and is set to end in December 2014 with the with-
drawal of coalition forces from that country. The mandate was relatively
clear-cut: to contribute significantly to the establishment, under Afghan
ownership, of sustainable and effective policing arrangements, which
would ensure appropriate interaction with the wider criminal justice
system; and to support the reform process towards a trusted and efficient
police service, which works in accordance with international standards,
within the framework of the rule of law, and respects human rights (Peral
2009: 325). From the outset, the mission was beset with problems: inco-
herence and interagency sniping, grossly inadequate resources, and lack
of any clear strategy (Gross 2012). The mission came about in part as a
result of US pressure, which intensified in 2008, when the EU agreed to
increase its strength from an initial target of 240 (which had not been
met) to a new target of 400 personnel of which 269 police officers. But it
never came close to meeting that target, the challenge of persuading
European police officers to spend a year in Kabul being just too daunt-
ing. Fewer than 200 ever arrived. History will eventually record the
precise legacy of the Western intervention in Afghanistan, and in partic-
ular its attempts to impose Western values. The CSDP police mission is
unlikely to rate much more than a footnote. This should not be read in
any way as disrespectful of the many courageous and dedicated profes-
sionals who participated. But to continue the metaphor (above) of rear-
ranging deckchairs on a sinking ship, one wonders whether the Afghan
vessel was ever afloat in the first place. The EU’s experience of exporting
police services to crisis zones requires a serious rethink. With the (mixed)
exception of BiH, the story has been one of tokenism and minimal
impact, not just because of the limited size of the mission, but because the
politics of the host country would not allow for anything else.
Monitoring and Assistance Missions
It is appropriate to begin with the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM),

which was the most distant mission, and the only one, given the fiasco in
Afghanistan, to give some credence to the EU’s claim to be a ‘global
player’ (Braud and Grevi 2005). AMM’s remit was to oversee the peace
agreement between the government of Indonesia (GOI) and the Free
Aceh Movement (GAM) which in 2005 put an end to 30 years of civil
war. This purely civilian mission, comprising some 130 EU monitors
backed by another 96 from the ASEAN member states, supervised the
decommissioning and destruction of weapons, the demobilization of the
GAM and the reintegration of its soldiers into civil society. This was
successfully achieved, in large part because both contending parties were
committed to the process. On the other hand, the return of a civil rights
regime in the troubled province proved more delicate. Reports of the re-
emergence of Sharia law in Banda Aceh, accompanied by public canings,
were disturbing as was the increasing reluctance of the Indonesian
government to implement any of the human rights clauses of the
Memorandum of Understanding with the EU (ICG 2006; Schulze 2009:
272). AMM was launched on 15 September 2005 and concluded in
December 2006.
Why did the EU get involved in Aceh? The first reason was that the
peace negotiations between the contending parties were themselves initi-
ated in Helsinki under the auspices of the Crisis Management Initiative
(CMI), a non-governmental organization chaired by former Finnish
President Martti Ahtisaari. Initially, a majority of the PSC ambassadors
were strongly opposed to what was widely perceived as a distant distrac-
tion (Interviews in Brussels). Only Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands (the
former colonial power) and France were in favour. However, the Finns
were very persuasive, particularly with respect to the British, who had
initially been sceptical but were looking, as holders of the six-month EU
Presidency in late 2005, for a practical way of demonstrating that the
French and Dutch vetoes of the Constitutional Treaty did not spell the
end of CSDP. Secondly, the mission offered several benefits, including
the first serious testing of the EU’s CCM procedures and the first opera-
tionalization of the EU’s Brussels-based Civil–Military Planning Cell
(CMPC). Thirdly, and crucially, the Indonesian government and the
GAM were insistent that the EU was the only international organization
appropriate to take on this mission. Other agencies (the UN, ASEAN)
were unacceptable to one or other of the parties (Braud and Grevi 2005).
How can one evaluate this mission? Although all the details of a final
settlement – above all political – in Aceh still remain elusive, the EU
demonstrated its potential to push forward a peace process already in
train. It exemplified its own commitment, in the European Security
Strategy, to support regional organizations – in this case ASEAN – as
crucial partners in the quest for peace and stability around the world.
The specific objectives of the AMM (amnesty and reintegration of GAM
fighters, security arrangements, the dispute settlement mechanism and
above all political reform) were largely accomplished with the adoption
by the Indonesian Parliament, in summer 2005, of the Law on the
Governing of Aceh which paved the way for crucial local elections. But
the mission also highlighted deficiencies requiring urgent attention.
Problems with financing, procurement, logistical support and rapid
deployment mechanisms, as called for in the Civilian Headline Goal
2008, remained on the CSDP agenda after the mission was concluded. In
many ways, the AMM was an instance of determined ‘muddling
through’.
Very different was the EU’s record in responding to the humanitarian
crisis that convulsed the Sudanese region of Darfur from 2003. Sudan is
Africa’s largest country and Darfur is roughly the size of France. Fighting
between two local rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army
(SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on the one hand,
and the Arabic militia Janjaweed backed by the Government of Sudan
(GOS) on the other hand, rapidly affected close to 3 million people, with
almost 2 million becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs), and
hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border into neighbouring Chad.
The crisis became the first major challenge for the recently (2002) created
African Union (AU). An initial ceasefire agreement was reached in the
Chad capital N’Djamena in April 2004 and in May an AU monitoring
mission – African Mission in Sudan (AMIS) – was established with 60
military observers protected by 300 AU troops. This force rapidly proved
irrelevant since both sides ignored the ceasefire and in October 2004 the
AU created AMIS II, a 3,320-strong force of troops and police to engage
in monitoring and verification of the N’Djamena agreement. Troop
levels grew progressively to around 8,000. There were persistent
rumours that the EU was preparing a military intervention force. In late
July 2004, General Mike Jackson, UK Chief of the General Staff, told the
BBC that ‘if need be, we will be able to go to Sudan. I suspect we could
put a brigade together very quickly indeed’ (Williams and Bellamy 2005:
34). In reality, the challenge of Darfur proved too severe a politico-mili-

tary test for the fledgling CSDP – as indeed it was also to prove with
respect to NATO, despite President Bush’s February 2006 proposal to
send in 20,000 NATO troops (Dempsey 2006).
Instead, the EU provided a large range of services and support facili-
ties to both the African Union in general and to AMIS II in particular. On
the civilo-diplomatic side, it raised almost €1 billion via the Commission,
the Council and the member states; it was the prime mover behind UN
Security Council Resolution 1593 referring the situation to the
International Criminal Court; and proved to be a major force in the
peace talks which led, on 5 May 2006, to the somewhat more promising
Darfur Peace Agreement signed in Abuja, Nigeria. At the same time, on
the military side, it deployed 100 troops and 50 police officers to support
AMIS II, coordinated strategic airlift for over 2,000 AU troops,
contributed to the funding of the AU mission and appointed a special
representative to coordinate EU aid and assistance. The EU presents this
package of measures as further evidence of its ‘effective multilateralism’
under the guise of ‘working with partners’. At the same time, Brussels
claims that this rather modest level of involvement respects the ‘African
ownership’ principle whereby former colonial powers seek to take a back
seat in crises, deferring to the AU as the principal stakeholder. That prin-
ciple, of course, can also be viewed as a proxy for avoiding direct involve-
ment (Braud 2006). Two academic specialists have argued that ‘the most
likely explanation for [the EU’s] failure to contemplate intervention in
Darfur was that its leaders lacked the political will to muster the neces-
sary resources’ (Williams and Bellamy 2005: 34). That may be so, but the
challenge of intervening in such a vast country is utterly daunting.
Moreover, a major difference between the Aceh mission and the Darfur
mission is the fact that, in the former case, there was a genuine peace to
be monitored, one supported by both parties, while in the latter case
there is merely a peace ‘agreement’, one which is systematically violated
by both parties, particularly by the Sudanese government. In the end,
unable or unwilling to intervene directly in Darfur, the EU mounted the
military mission in neighbouring Chad which we examined above.
In 2008, the EU launched a Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM)
whose principal objective was to monitor compliance with the 12 August
six-point agreement between Russia and Georgia brokered by President
Sarkozy of France. Over 300 monitors were rapidly deployed in a tense
situation following the brief war between two of the EU’s most impor-
tant Eastern partners. Although neither the Georgian government in
Tbilisi nor the Russian government feels in any way constrained by the
presence of this EU force, both contending parties recognize that its pres-
ence helps defuse the situation, which might otherwise get out of control.
This is comparable to the situation in Aceh. The EU presence is restricted
to Georgian territory and the EUMM cannot enter either of the enclaves
occupied by Russia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, despite one part of its
mandate being to promote confidence-building measures (Fischer 2009).
While the initial deployment appeared to confer on the EU some leverage
over a very tense situation, subsequent developments have seen a rapid
decline in the impact of the mission. Although the EU has continued to
work for the development of Georgia as a partner, it has had limited
influence over internal developments. Both Russia and Georgia are more
focused on the US than on Europe. The EU failed in its effort (supported
by Georgia) to include US monitors in its mission – a proposal which was
vetoed by Russia. Moreover, it is the EU which appears to be most closely
involved in the so-called Geneva settlement talks, which are manifestly
going nowhere. By refusing to either recognize or deny the independence
of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the EU ‘may have contributed to
containing the conflicts [but] has done little to resolve them’. (Whitman
and Wolff 2012: 98). In short, this is a mission which, in many ways, the
EU could not afford not to launch, but which has very little actual influ-
ence over the evolution and outcome of the conflict.
Rule of Law Missions
The EU has also experimented with three ‘rule of law’ missions – in

Georgia, Iraq and Kosovo. The Georgian mission, EUJUST Thémis,
which ran for one year between summer 2004 and summer 2005, was
explicitly situated in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy,
which aims to foster a ring of well-governed countries around the EU.
EUJUST Thémis aimed to help solve the country’s principal internal
problem: a corrupt and antiquated rule of law and criminal justice system
which essentially harked back unchanged to Soviet days (Helly 2006:
89). The mandate was ‘the development of a horizontal governmental
strategy guiding the reform process for all relevant stakeholders in the
criminal justice sector, including the establishment of a mechanism for
coordination and priority setting for criminal justice reform’. The EU
Council noted, laconically, that, respecting its May 2005 deadline, ‘the
high-level group finished its work and submitted the strategy to the
Government of Georgia’ which duly approved it under Saakashvili’s
signature on 9 July 2005. It was then equally duly ignored. There is
consensus that the mandate was simply too difficult to implement in a
12-month period (Helly 2006: 99; Kurowska 2009: 207). Moreover, the
EU was not the only player in town. Georgian policy-makers were also
being advised by experts from the American Bar Association and the US
Department of Justice who offered a rather different legal philosophy.
The EU also proved reluctant to become too closely engaged with the
Georgian legal system both because of fear of Russia’s reaction and
because of reluctance to envisage eventual Georgian membership of the
Union (Leonard and Grant 2005). The best that can be said about this
mission is that it deployed, it spoke to the various stakeholders, it devised
a document and it demonstrated that, two years after its birth, CSDP was
not confined to the Balkans (Kurowska 2009).
In July 2005, immediately following the conclusion of EUJUST
Thémis, and in response to an invitation from the Iraqi Transitional
Government, the EU launched a second integrated rule-of-law mission,
this one in Iraq – EUJUST LEX. The mission consisted of integrated
training in the fields of management and criminal investigation for senior
officials from the judiciary, the police and the penitentiary in order to
help promote an integrated criminal-justice system in Iraq. All training
activities, which were conducted in Arabic and Kurdish, took place
inside the EU until summer 2011 when the mission moved to Baghdad,
where, in 2013, it was recruiting heavily for security guards. Information
about the mission remains classified and, under the terms of the Council
Joint Action which established it, all staff involved, both during and after
the mission ‘shall exercise the greatest discretion with regard to all facts
and information’ relating to it (Joint Action 2005/190/CFSP Article 6/2).
It is believed that some 3,000 Iraqi officials have been trained in all
aspects of the rule of law through over 100 different types of courses,
although the EU website annoyingly neglects to give details. The mission
was extended to December 2013 when it was terminated. A huge amount
of energy and effort was channelled into this mission as the EU’s contri-
bution to the shift from dictatorship to democracy in Iraq. Hundreds of
dedicated professionals worked night and day to improve the rule of law
in Iraq. However, in summer 2013, Iraq occupied the number three posi-
tion among states imposing the death penalty. It was 11th out of the top
20 ‘critically failed states’ as listed by Foreign Policy. For corruption, it
ranked 169th out of 174 states (according to Transparency
International). Amnesty International records, for Iraq, excessive levels
of arbitrary arrests, non-judicial imprisonment, systematic torture, judi-
cial executions and extra-judicial killings. It is not clear how much worse
the situation could have been had the EU mission never existed.
The third rule-of-law mission, EULEX Kosovo, is the most important
and by far the biggest. It is also the one which – for the EU – involves the
highest stakes. In many ways, the situation in Kosovo, for centuries a
part of Serbia, is an aberration. In 1999, a NATO mission engaged – for
largely humanitarian reasons – in military action against Serbia. In so
doing, NATO objectively strengthened political forces in Kosovo (the
Kosovo Liberation Army – KLA) whose objective was independence.
After almost three months of war, the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic,
accepted defeat. But what did that imply? The countries involved in the
NATO action against Serbia had in fact espoused the political position of
their military adversary: that Kosovo should remain a province of Serbia
– albeit with a significant measure of self-governance. No NATO
member state in 1999 was in favour of outright Kosovo independence.

The implications for many other ‘frozen conflicts’ around the world were
just too dire. Under UNSC Resolution 1244 (June 1999) a NATO mili-
tary force (KFOR) entered Kosovo to keep the peace, while a United
Nations force (UNMIK) was charged with administering the province
and with establishing the final status of Kosovo (which it was widely
assumed at the time would benefit from considerable self-government
inside Serbia). But the political objectives of Kosovars and of Serbs
remained un-reconcilable. Six years later, in 2005, a United Nations
mission was established, under former Finnish President Martti Ahtisari,
to recommend a final status for Kosovo. After two years of intense but
deadlocked negotiations, Ahtisari recommended ‘supervised indepen-
dence’, an ambiguous formulation which was condemned by Serbia,
Russia and several other states. Meanwhile, an EU Planning Team
prepared to launch a major CSDP mission in Kosovo to assist in the
implementation of the new status. Before that mission could deploy,
Kosovo declared unilateral independence on 17 February 2008. Several
member states of the EU refused to recognize that declaration, along with
(at the time) a clear majority of states worldwide. The legal, political,
geographic, diplomatic, social, economic and moral minefield into which
EULEX Kosovo stepped in December 2008 was totally unprecedented.
The mandate of EULEX Kosovo is as extensive as it is ambiguous.
Based on a set of assumptions about final status which turned out not to
have any validity – what Giovanni Grevi has called ‘the assumptions–
reality gap’ (Grevi 2009) – the mission involves ‘assist[ing] the Kosovo
institutions, judicial authorities and law enforcement agencies in their
progress towards sustainability and accountability and in further devel-
oping an independent multi-ethnic justice system, police and customs
service, free from political interference and adhering to international
standards and European best practice’. Although the focus is on ‘moni-
toring, mentoring and advising’, the mission retains certain executive
responsibilities in the fields of policing, prosecution, the courts and local
authority. Although EULEX Kosovo is supposed to have access to the
entirety of the province’s territory, in practice Serbian enclaves in the
North are excluded. Serbia insists that the only internationally valid law
in Kosovo is that stemming from UNSC 1244, whereas the EU has found
itself attempting to produce a successor legal regime to 1244 itself, in a
situation in which five EU member states prefer to stick with the status
quo. The arguments for and against the Kosovo mission are legion. The
working assumption of the EU mission is that, if Serbia and Kosovo
could eventually accede to membership of the EU, the problem would
finally go away. There is a very long way to go before we even begin to
approach that situation.
The EU, via CSDP, has engaged in extensive experimentation with the
projection of Western democratic precepts of rule of law into countries
with virtually no experience of it (and arguably little real taste for it).
Two of those experiments are of questionable worth. The third – Kosovo
– is one in which the EU cannot afford to fail. But it is far from certain
that the Union knows how to define – still less achieve – success. In the
field of monitoring and assistance, just as in the military and policing
fields, the EU is clearly ‘making it up as it goes along’. It has no alterna-
tive, but the results are ambivalent.
Border Assistance Missions
Three border assistance missions (BAMs) have also been launched under
the aegis of ESDP. The first, inaugurated on 30 November 2005, was at
the Rafah crossing point (RCP) between Gaza and Egypt. This is the only
Gaza entry and exit point not directly controlled by Israel and is there-
fore of crucial importance to the Palestinian economy and to the viability
of any future Palestinian state. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in
September 2005, the RCP was stormed by local Palestinians, hundreds of
whose homes had been bulldozed by retreating Israeli settlers. The riot-
ers arc-welded holes through the steel barriers enabling thousands to
pass unchecked into Egypt. Uncontrolled traffic in the opposite direction
– potentially permitting a chaotic influx of weapons, exiled extremists
and even terrorists into Gaza – was an Israeli nightmare and, under pres-
sure from Tel Aviv and Washington, Egypt promptly closed the crossing
point. However on 15 November 2005 Israel and the Palestinian
National Authority (PNA) concluded an ‘Agreement on Movement and
Access’ at Rafah which called for a Third Party monitoring presence. The
EU accepted the invitation from both parties to fulfil this function and
rapidly set in motion the EU BAM-Rafah mission. The operation moni-
tors, verifies and evaluates the performance of the PNA border control,
security and customs officials working at the Terminal and ensures that
the PNA complies with all applicable regulations. It also contributes to
Palestinian training and capacity building in all aspects of border control
and customs operations and contributes to the liaison between the
Palestinian, Israeli and Egyptian authorities. It was initially given a 12-
month mandate but this has been extended regularly. EU Liaison
Officers work with the Israeli authorities in Kerem Shalom to resolve any
disputes arising out of the border mission. At full strength, the EU contin-
gent involved 75 police and customs officers from 18 member states.
However, problems immediately arose with the election of Hamas in
January 2006, since the Israeli authorities announced their refusal to
allow Hamas ministers to cross the border (Pirozzi 2006: 5). In April
2006, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sent members of his
personal Presidential Guard to man the crossing in a move denounced by
Hamas as a power-grab. With the onset of military exchanges in Gaza,
the RBC was closed on 25 June 2006, leading to the stranding of thou-
sands on either side of the frontier. After two holes were detonated in the
border wall near Rafah on 15 July, the crossing was temporarily
reopened on 18 July 2006 in the direction of Gaza only, allowing almost
5,000 people to cross through. While the EU mission is clearly of cardi-
nal importance to the smooth running of border controls in Gaza during
peacetime, the mission became effectively irrelevant in the presence of
renewed armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The second EU BAM was established on the Ukraine–Moldova border
on 30 November 2005 at the joint request of the Presidents of Moldova
and Ukraine. This border is an especially sensitive one in that it skirts the
Eastern extremity of the disputed Russian-backed enclave of Transnistria
and has long been a hotbed of criminality, trafficking in people, drugs and
weapons, moneylaundering, smuggling and other illicit activities.
Ukrainian and Moldovan business circles ‘have become adept at using the
parallel Transnistrian economy to their own ends, regularly participating
in re-export and other illegal practices’ (ICG 2004: i). The EU has a vital
interest in stabilizing the area since in 2007 Moldova became an EU
border state and since the Transnistria issue complicates EU relations with
Russia. The border mission is an advisory, technical body and has no
executive powers. It is a joint CSDP–Commission initiative operating in
close cooperation with the EU Special Representative to Moldova whose
mandate is largely devoted to helping solve the Transnistrian conundrum
(Popescu 2005). Its aims are to assist Moldova and Ukraine to harmonize
their border management standards and procedures with those prevalent
in EU member states; to assist in enhancing the professional and opera-
tional capacities of the Moldovan and Ukrainian customs officials and
border guards; to improve risk analysis capacities; and to improve coop-
eration and complementarity between the border guards, customs services
and other law enforcement agencies. Strategically, if this border mission
could be made to work effectively, it would put enormous pressure on the
Transnistrian authorities to reach a settlement with Moldova. The
mission has its headquarters in Odessa, and mans six field offices.
Although it is intended that greater border transparency will create a more
favourable environment for settling the Transnistria problem, the EU
recognizes that any overall solution can only be the outcome of a political
process to which Brussels is, since late 2005, contributing through the so-
called 5+2 negotiations (Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Transnistria, OSCE
plus the US and the EU). In the view of one leading expert, this conflict is
both the closest to the EU physically and the ‘most solvable’ (Popescu
2005: 43). The EU border mission in Ukraine/Moldova is a significant
practical move to improve regional relations in an area where eventual EU
membership for both countries is possible.
The third border assistance mission was EUBAM Libya, launched in
May 2013. In a general sense, Libya is a source of enormous embarrassment
for the EU. It failed utterly to mobilize CSDP in implementing a no-fly-

zone over Libya in spring 2011. Although there were two EU battle-
groups on station, the mission fell to NATO. What the EU did do was to
assemble a quasi-military mission, EUFOR Libya, intended to support
and to protect humanitarian activities in the country – but then it made
actual deployment of the mission dependent on an invitation from the
UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – an
invitation which was never forthcoming because OCHA saw no need for
it. The EU’s first ‘ghost operation’ was formally terminated in November
2011. What post-Gaddafi Libya most needed was support in
Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and in Security
Sector Reform (SSR), skills the EU possesses, but which it neglected to
offer because the situation in Libya was too challenging (Gomes 2013).
Instead, it offered a Border Assistance Mission of 100 personnel, to train
Libyans to control the country’s 4,348 km land border with six highly
unstable neighbours: Algeria, Niger, Sudan, Egypt, Chad and Tunisia,
most of which is effectively non-existent, and its 1,770 km sea border. In
the words of Ana Gomes, the European Parliament’s Standing
Rapporteur on Libya, the mission is ‘far too little, too late’ (Gomes 2013:
3). The challenges facing the Libyan authorities in controlling these vast
expanses, particularly in the south, which are effectively in the hands of
Islamists, rebel tribes, traffickers and criminal gangs, are massive. In the
view of two analysts from ISIS-Europe, the border assistance mission
‘will remain an insufficient, isolated act, overlooking many of the prob-
lems facing the country’ (Hatzigeorgopoulos and Fara-Andrianarijaona
2013). Border assistance is no doubt important, but EUBAM Libya, with
the best will in the world, looks like tokenism on a grand scale. By
October 2013, Ana Gomes was already castigating the mission as a ‘fail-
ure’ (Gros-Verheyde 2013c).
Scholarly Analyses
Several scholars have attempted to produce an overall assessment of the

EU’s role and impact as an international crisis manager. Roy Ginsberg
and Susan Penksa (2012) have engaged in an ambitious assessment of
what they call ‘the politics of impact’. In order to offer broad, theoreti-
cally informed, assessments of the entire range of CSDP missions, they
engaged with over 40 scholarly and analytical works published between
2003 and 2010. To this scholarly base, they added considerable experi-
ence of first-hand interviews of principals on the ground, particularly in
the Balkans. The authors assess CSDP missions both in terms of their
internal impact on the EU itself and on the development of its foreign and
security policy approaches and practices; and in terms of their external
impact on the host country and on international security providers more
generally. The latter focus is of interest here. Parting company with many
of the more critical scholars and analysts who tend to focus on the over-
all shortcomings of CSDP missions, they judge these missions strictly in
terms of the specific mission mandate, its duration and its realistic (rather
than any ideal) potential outcome. For instance, when assessing the
three-month military mission Artemis in the DRC in 2003, they reject
critics of the mission who have argued that, by focusing on securing the
area around the town of Bunia, the EU troops merely drove the rebels to
other parts of the DRC where they continued their murderous acts. For
Ginsberg and Penksa, such an indirect consequence is irrelevant since the
mandate of the mission was to focus very precisely on Bunia. Similarly,
the fact that Atalanta has not solved the root cause of piracy or that it has
not helped stabilize Somalia are, for these scholars, issues which fall
outside the mandate of the mission and should therefore be considered
inappropriate variables in evaluating the mission. Ginsberg and Penksa
attempt to establish reasonable and credible technical benchmarks
allowing for standardized evaluation of CSDP missions across cases and
across time. While recognizing that the EU is still trying to establish
precisely what sort of security provider it will eventually become, the
authors nevertheless conclude that CSDP serves a useful and necessary
purpose:
CSDP operations demonstrate positive functional and temporal

impact on host states, with effects ranging from marginal to signifi-
cant. To date, notable achievements for the EU are in niche operations
that fulfil a clear and limited functional mandate (in Somalia and
Indonesia) or CSDP operations that intervene in theatres where no
other security provider but the EU is present (Georgia). Operations in
the European neighbourhood, while difficult to implement, have
made a considerable and even substantial contribution to improved
security governance (BiH, Kosovo, and Macedonia); these missions
have been mutually reinforced by the enlargement policy of the EU.
CSDP operations in difficult security environments (Afghanistan,
Chad/CAR, DRC) have made a marginal contribution to improved
security on the ground, in part because of the limited size of these
operations and the vast scope of domestic security problems in these
countries. (Ginsberg and Penksa 2012: 236)
Another study which leans in the direction of generosity is Norheim-

Martinsen (Norheim-Martinsen 2013). The book is more a study of the
emergence of a definable CSDP ‘strategic culture’ which combines
elements of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in unique and important ways, and
we shall return to it in the next chapter. The author gives considerable
credence to the EU’s capacity to develop a comprehensive approach and
he makes much use of the concept of ‘security governance’ (Webber et al.
2004; Kirchner and Sperling 2008) as a novel way of allowing a

congeries of state and non-state actors jointly to make policy in the field
of security and defence. From the US strategic studies literature, he
concludes that the EU has indeed become a ‘strategic actor’ aware of its
objectives and of its interests; and from the literature on normative
power or civilian power, he concludes that the EU does indeed engage in
missions partly for value-based reasons. The EU, for Norheim-
Martinsen, is a new type of security actor, and has the potential to gener-
ate an entirely new method of approaching international relations.
Assessing the CSDP missions in terms of concentric circles (Europe; its
hinterland; and the world) he argues that in each area there is consider-
able synergy between civilian and military instruments and activities. He
is aware that this process is incomplete, and he is acutely conscious that
the years 2011–12 pose huge question marks over the entire CSDP
project. But Norheim-Martinsen probably goes further than any other
scholar in giving the EU the benefit of the doubt in a multilayered,
complex and fast-moving framework.
Another – very different – study, which attempts to make sense of the
broad range of CSDP missions, is that edited by Muriel Asseburg and
Ronja Kempin (2009). Because this study consists of a succession of
essays in which different authors assess the main CSDP missions, the
volume lacks the methodical coherence of Ginsberg and Penksa or of
Norheim-Martinsen. The general message is that the 23 missions under-
taken by the end of 2009 should be seen as experiments which should
allow EU planners to learn important lessons and to carry out missions
in a much more effective way in the future. The authors highlight a
number of (by now fairly well-known) shortcomings in these CSDP
missions. They note that every mission was reactive rather than proac-
tive; that the EU’s much-hyped ‘rapid response’ capacity was shown to be
severely wanting (only five of the 23 missions were launched in fewer
than four weeks); that – even so – preparations for the medium term were
usually inadequate. Above all, they draw attention to what they see as a
grossly inadequate set of mechanisms for institutional learning, an issue
on which Ginsberg and Penksa are relatively positive. The SWP study
also criticizes the EU for failing to think ahead and to devise alternative
planning in the event that circumstances might change drastically. In this
way, they argue, the police mission in Afghanistan and the border
mission in Gaza were utterly undermined by rapidly changing events on
the ground, with the result that those missions must be considered fail-
ures. The main analytical thrust of this study – which is implicit in the
title – is that the EU is still very far from being a strategic actor. CSDP has
proved its ability to respond to a vast range of crises, but it fails ‘to plan
ESDP engagements strategically, prepare them adequately, follow up
thoroughly on their implementation, draw on all the EU’s resources,
adapt mandates and plans of operation to changing circumstances and
integrate ESDP deployments into comprehensive conflict management

strategies’ (p. 158). This is a fairly harsh judgement applied across the
entire range of CSDP activities, despite positives and negatives in the
individual case studies.
The 2009 study published by the European Council on Foreign
Relations (ECFR; see Korski and Gowan 2009) is even more severe in its
assessment of the EU’s performance, specifically in civilian crisis manage-
ment, which, as we have seen, accounts for 80 per cent of the CSDP
missions (Korski and Gowan 2009). In a Foreword to this study, Jean-
Marie Guehenno, the former United Nations’ Under-Secretary-General
for Peacekeeping Operations, noted that the EU, with its reputation as
‘the civilian power par excellence’, seemed to be fast falling behind the
Americans in the art of crisis management, the latter rapidly learning and
absorbing the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors of the ECFR
study detect several major factors behind their assertion that the EU’s
civilian power is ‘largely illusory’ (p. 11). The first is the ‘Bosnia
template’, which has resulted in the first ever civilian mission – the EU
police mission in BiH – being projected as the model for EU police
missions around the world. While that model may have worked in the
Balkans, the authors conclude, elsewhere it ‘has proved ineffectual’.
Moreover, whereas BiH was an important, but perhaps unique, learning
experience for the EU, few future missions are likely to resemble the
Balkans, with all its complexities. Korski and Gowan assert that the next
wave of CSDP deployments are going to resemble Gaza, Afghanistan and
Somalia – ‘fluid, violent and with few clear-cut good and bad guys’ (p.
15).
The second major issue raised by these analysts is what they call ‘the
member state problem’. Casting caution and diplomacy to the wind, they
classify the EU nations into four groups: professionals, strivers, agnostics
and indifferents (pp. 13–14). The former (Denmark, Finland, Germany,
the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) are judged to be ahead of the game
in recruiting and training civilian capacity for crisis management
missions. The strivers (Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and
Romania) are deemed serious in their intentions but disorganized. The
rest of the EU member states are either ‘unconvinced about the value of
civilian deployments’ or simply fail ‘to take the task of developing civil-
ian capacity seriously’. A third major problem is one highlighted by every
CSDP analyst: interagency turf wars in Brussels. Finally, for these
authors, the EU is in need of a ‘new mission concept’, which involves
nothing less than ‘rethink[ing] its entire approach to foreign interven-
tions – beginning with the nature of what an ESDP mission is’ (p. 15). A
battery of recommendations is formulated to improve speed of deploy-
ment, mission security and self-sufficiency, on-the-ground responsibili-
ties, staffing, training and support. This ECFR report remains the most
severe indictment of the inadequacies of CSDP missions yet published.
Benjamin Pohl (2014) sets out to apprehend what he believes to be the

true drivers behind CSDP missions, by applying to four key case studies
the approaches and methodology of four key theoretical perspectives
(realism, normative power Europe, EU integration theory and domestic
politics) and by testing these against the preferences of France, Germany
and the UK – the ‘Big Three’. For case studies, he uses two military
missions (Althea and EUFOR Chad-RCA and two civilian missions
(EULEX Kosovo and EUPOL Afghanistan). His findings, especially if
confirmed by future research, are significant. The realist paradigm which
sees CSDP as ‘balancing’ against the US, is shown to be devoid of any real
value. Even in the case of Althea which took place at the height of the
EU–US clash over Iraq, there is simply no evidence that balancing was a
driver. ‘To the contrary, three out of the four operations […] coincided
with US interest in CSDP action, none was opposed by Washington and
none conceivably led to greater EU influence at the expense of the US’
(Pohl 2014). The ‘normative power’ approach (Whitman 2011), which
suggests that CSDP missions are primarily undertaken to promote collec-
tively held EU liberal values, offers no greater insight into the deep
drivers of CSDP missions. To be sure, some of these missions involved
promotion of the rule of law and democratic values, but ‘in no case were
these objectives directly responsible or decisive for the launch of the
respective operation’. Far more important as drivers, he argues, were
‘regional stability and the EU government’s foreign policy credibility’. As
for the third putative driver – the promotion of deeper EU integration
and the demonstration that CSDP ‘worked’ – while not totally absent
from the calculations of some actors, it cannot be considered to be a key
driver. The UK and other member states systematically rejected such an
approach. Thus ‘the idea that they sought common foreign action to
convince their publics of the benefits of integration does not add up’.
Pohl concludes strongly that the primary driver was domestic politics:
‘What the EU did (and did not do) in the framework of CSDP was above
all what EU governments believed their societies would accept and
expect from them in terms of international security policy’. Pohl’s thesis
can easily be criticized for its neglect of a less theoretical and eminently
empirical explanation: that the EU was reacting in ad hoc fashion to a
series of challenges which emerged from the movement of history’s
tectonic plates, and to which EU leaders had no alternative but to
respond. But then Pohl is in the business of lining up alternative theoret-
ical explanations. Historical and empirical reality, which defies theory, is
another matter.
In recent years, beyond these key analyses, a mass of scholarly litera-
ture has appeared on the CSDP missions, much of it in the form of edited
volumes often deriving from conferences. Richard Whitman and Stefan
Wolff brought together a first-rate team to assess the EU as a ‘global
conflict manager’ (2012). They posit this concept as a composite of
conflict prevention and crisis management, arguing that any long-term

commitment on the part of the EU will almost certainly involve some
combination of military crisis management, development and humani-
tarian aid, and mediation between contending parties. The contributors
to a volume edited by Eva Gross and Ana Juncos (2011) focus more
particularly on the evolution of conflict prevention and crisis manage-
ment policies within the EU, expanding as they have to embrace aspects
of the rule of law and security sector reform as well as border manage-
ment and counter-piracy. A comparable study is that edited by James
Hughes (2012) in which the editor tackles quasi-epistemological issues
such as the symbioses between security, development and democracy to
provide a framework for a series of case studies ranging from Northern
Ireland to Cyprus, from the Balkans to Africa and from the Caucasus to
the Middle East. Another collective volume edited by Fulvio Attina and
Daniela Irrera (2010), sets the EU’s approach to crisis management in a
much broader, worldwide multilateral nexus of peace operations, their
technical evolution in recent decades, and the interagency issues
(EU–UN–NATO) which inevitably arise. A recent co-authored volume
by Arjen Boin, Magnus Ekengren and Mark Rhinard (2013) conceptual-
izes the EU’s role as a crisis manager even more broadly since it tackles
not just overseas crises under CSDP but also internal crises such as the
eurozone crisis and external issues such as natural disasters, involving the
delivery of civil protection, and ‘trans-boundary’ crises. For her part,
Nadia Klein (2010) has examined the extent to which the EU has
progressively wrestled its involvement in international crisis manage-
ment, particularly in the Balkans, from the hands of the member states
and, in so doing, has generated even more complex interagency tensions.
Conclusion
The 30 plus EU missions analysed above are too diverse and variegated
to allow for any comprehensive or (still less) definitive judgement on the
operational aspects of CSDP. The EU agencies make much of the fact
that CSDP missions have taken place on three continents. While not
insignificant, this does not make the EU a ‘global player’ in terms of
security and defence policy, still less amount to forming a global frame-
work for EU interventions. The two missions in Asia were, on the one
hand (Aceh) relatively short, simple and successful, and on the other
hand (Afghanistan) an objective failure. The two missions in the Middle
East are of very dubious import. Taken together, these poor results
suggest the EU should think long and hard before again becoming
involved in security provision outside its own hinterland. The bulk of
CSDP operations have been in the troubled Western Balkans, which is
the EU’s most urgent security priority, and in crisis-ridden Africa, the
source of increasingly heavy northward demographic and migratory

pressure, and, more recently, Islamist destabilization. To that extent
Africa is an inherent part of the EU’s immediate neighbourhood and the
recent focus of its security policy.
Together, the CSDP missions amount to an important new develop-
ment, from which the EU is (hopefully) learning all the time (Hazelzet
2013). The EU has shown that it is taken seriously as an international
partner by the United Nations, even if the US remains unconvinced about
its seriousness of purpose as a security provider. Its neighbours neverthe-
less welcome and benefit from its involvement. It has also demonstrated
its capacity to emerge – and grow – as a military actor. However, to date,
the military side of CSDP has been very limited in scope and scale and
extremely selective in its choice of missions. At the time of writing, I am
unconvinced that CSDP as an autonomous military project can or will
grow beyond the bit player it currently exemplifies. I shall argue in the
concluding chapter that a crucial issue for Europe’s leaders is that of
deciding how far they wish to go down the road of military capacity.
That question cannot be answered without addressing the parallel ques-
tion of CSDP’s relationship with NATO (see pp. 150ff). It is not unlikely
– indeed some would say it is inevitable – that the EU will be forced to
develop a core group of member states who are committed to taking
CSDP to a higher level (Coelmont and de Langlois 2013; French Senate
2013; IAI 2013). There is also the ongoing problem of the financing of
CSDP missions, a technical issue whose complexity grows constantly
(Missiroli 2003a, 2006; Sautter 2012; Tardy 2013). Until sustainable
budgetary instruments have been agreed, CSDP missions will be unable
to progress beyond baby steps. Fourthly, as almost every commentator
and scholar has stressed, there is an urgent need for far greater coherence
in the implementation of CSDP. Above all, the civil–military crisis
management procedures in Brussels need drastic streamlining (Pirozzi
2013).
Beyond all this, the period of experimentation with such a wide range
of missions is probably over. ‘Support and Assistance’ missions (Box
5.1.) cover such a diversity of reality as to be almost meaningless as a
category. I have not dwelt at length on the practice of security sector
reform, which, in and of itself, covers a vast range of activities (Dursun-
Ozkanca 2013). Some of these missions are so minuscule as hardly to
warrant a distinct mention. Most of them are experiments in being help-
ful to – principally – African governments in difficulty. There is nothing
wrong with these activities, but it would be wise to take a step back and
make an honest appraisal of their real impact on the ground. A majority
of the analysts referenced above clearly feels that any such impact is
negligible. Border assistance, peace-monitoring, the promotion of the
rule of law are all necessary and legitimate pursuits, but they also
disperse energies and resources which may well be needed in more
concentrated doses in the future. The EU currently has eight missions

running in Africa, only one of which (Atalanta) has any critical mass.
Between them, the other seven involve fewer than 700 European officials
and cover challenges and distances of epic proportions. Would it not
make more sense to prioritize, and to deploy an adequate force to many
fewer missions? Above all, in the context of the general pattern of
‘Western’ interventions in the internal affairs of sovereign states since the
end of the Cold War (most of which have turned out badly), the EU needs
to reassess its entire approach to crisis management – in order to avoid
the growing danger of shooting itself in the foot.
Chapter 6
Empirical Reality and Academic

Theory
‘If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.’ – Einstein
I have argued in this book that CSDP emerged overwhelmingly as a series

of empirical reactions to major historical events. While visionaries in
London, Paris, Brussels and other cities dreamed up blueprints for
CSDP’s short- and medium-term trajectory, which political leaders
worked hard to shape, it was the dual movement of history’s tectonic
plates on the two symbolic dates of 9/11 (9 November 1989 – fall of the
Berlin Wall – and 11 September 2001 – the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington) that acted as principal fertilizer and incubator of
this new policy area. Among the many consequences of those twin earth-
quakes, one which stemmed equally strongly from both of them was the
relative disengagement of the USA from its 50-year role as guarantor of
European security. Not only did the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall remove
Europe as the central blip on the US radar screen, but the 2001 Al-Qaeda
attacks also obliged Washington to concentrate its available resources
and forces in other parts of the world. While teleology should be firmly
rejected as an explanatory factor (nothing is inevitable solely because of
historical forces), this volume is predicated on the belief that ‘events’
were largely responsible for the specific course CSDP has taken. Since
November 1989, and especially since September 2001, events have run
ahead of the capacity of politicians and statesmen – even strong ones – to
micromanage their consequences. Many International Relations theo-
rists accept that ‘events’ – in the form of systemic shocks, economic crises
or social upheavals – are responsible for pressurizing states and other
international actors to respond to history’s summons. Theory, for such
scholars, can help analysts understand the precise contours of that
response. However, in the case of the European Union’s development of
a security and defence policy, theorists disagree fundamentally over the
reasons behind, the nature and significance of, and the precise coordi-
nates of that historical trajectory.
Readers will have noted that the approach I have outlined so far is
essentially empirical. I have not sought to situate my analysis of develop-
ments in European security and defence explicitly within the framework
of any particular school of International Relations theory or of European
190
Empirical Reality and Academic Theory 191
Integration theory. This is for two main reasons. First, my work has
almost always been grounded in empirical research, which then informs
my theoretical considerations and conclusions. I make no apology for
this. That is the work I enjoy doing and it is, in my view, the most fruit-
ful way of getting to grips with what is actually happening. My
approach is essentially inductive, pursuing relentlessly the concrete real-
ities of coordination and even integration of security and defence policy
on the ground – in government offices, in ministries, in the various EU
agencies in Brussels, among soldiers and diplomats in the field. It is
based largely on official documents, political speeches and government
statements and on interviews with many actors at many different levels.
Since the mid-1990s, I have conducted over 350 interviews with defence
actors in 15 countries. This approach is supplemented by close contact
with the many security and defence think-tanks across Europe and in the
United States where policy analysts constantly monitor and interpret the
evolving reality. That is the raw material of CSDP from which, to the
extent to which I believe it is possible to derive an overarching theory,
my own theoretical approach stems. My empirical approach also
reflects the fact that my initial doctoral training was as a historian and I
am incapable of not seeing every problem in terms of its historical
context and trajectory.
The second reason for my preference for empirical investigation is
precisely that existing academic theories have had great difficulty in
explaining the existence and evolution of CSDP. The writings of political
scientists and theorists provide a fascinating and necessary context
within which any scholar’s theoretical perspectives can be situated and
honed, but they do not, except on rare occasions, directly influence my
inductive analysis of the concrete reality that is CSDP. I am amused to
learn, from others writing about this subject, that I am classified, depend-
ing on the author, as a realist, a liberal and a constructivist. My empiri-
cal preferences should in no way be read as critical of those who choose
to prioritize theory. Most scholars thrive on the intellectual challenge of
constructing hypotheses which can then be tested, of elaborating theo-
retical models which are then offered as explanatory frameworks behind
complex historical and political reality. Many strive to situate their
research findings within one or other of these theoretical perspectives.
Such activities are indispensable. Theory is a valuable way of making
cognitive sense of complex reality. However, when applied to this unique
phenomenon of sovereign nation-states pooling sovereignty and
resources in the field of security and defence, traditional theory often
stumbles. Indeed, most theorists, from most schools, have long insisted
that, whatever other policy areas might one day come under the aegis of
European integration, security and defence will not be among them. In
other words, what most theorists over the years have focused on and
‘explained’ is the absence of CSDP (Ojanen 2006: 58–60).
Of course, the gap between theory and reality changes over time.
When, in the mid-2000s, CSDP appeared to be dynamic and buoyant,
some theorists who remained sceptical about its prospects because it did
not fit their theory appeared to be contradicted by reality. As CSDP
entered a period of crisis in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the sceptics
appeared in some ways to be vindicated. But theory cannot pick and
choose a favourable moment to step into the explanatory limelight. The
work in progress that is CSDP is a constant – which often eludes the
grasp of overarching theory. When the first edition of this book was
published in 2007, no single academic volume or monograph had
attempted to offer an overall theoretical interpretation of CSDP, which
was still an infant in diapers. Since 2007, however, dozens of books and
hundreds of articles have been published in an attempt to shed theoreti-
cal light on CSDP. It is noteworthy and significant that the overwhelm-
ing majority of these studies have been produced by European scholars
writing in European journals and for European publishers. Although the
overwhelming majority of political science and international relations
scholarship is carried out in the US, American scholars (with a handful of
exceptions) have simply not considered CSDP of sufficient theoretical
interest to merit their attention. An incursion into the domain of theory
is therefore essential in order to understand how what has been called the
‘second wave of CSDP scholarship’ (Bickerton et al. 2011) has
approached the task of applying theory to the mystery of CSDP. What
follows is my attempt to offer a guide to the labyrinth.
Applying Theory to CSDP
Discussion of theory as applied to CSDP is immediately complicated by

the fact that two different disciplinary approaches offer themselves:
International Relations theory and European Integration theory. While
often based on similar or proximate philosophical or epistemological
assumptions, these two theoretical approaches do not correlate easily.
The main schools of thought within these two broad disciplinary
approaches to theory offer elements of overlap (say, between construc-
tivism and sociological institutionalism), but in most cases the underlying
assumptions do not match up exactly. A second complicating factor
(which renders the entire discussion of ‘theory’ somewhat confusing) is
that a distinction needs to be made between substantive theories which
purport to explain how the EU works; and methodological frameworks
suggesting appropriate ways of going about explaining how the EU
works. A third complicating factor in making comparisons is that these
different theories often ask different types of questions. It is therefore
challenging to produce a comparative analysis of theoretical approaches
structured in such a way that cross-cutting similarities are highlighted
while retaining a necessary degree of distinction between the two main

disciplinary schools of theory.
Substantive Theories
Varieties of Realism
In the case of international relations theory, the dominant school, struc-
tural realism or neo-realism, for decades the mainstream leader in US
international relations theory (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 2001), has no
convincing explanation for the phenomenon whereby sovereign state
actors, of their own volition, pool elements of their sovereignty in secu-
rity and defence, constitute themselves as an intergovernmental entity
and, apparently ignoring the rules of the Westphalian system, elect to
intervene in the internal affairs of neighbouring – or even in some cases
quite distant – sovereign states. For structural realists, state actors alone
can engage in security and defence – that is, military – activities, either
individually, or as part of a military alliance (Walt 1987). A body such as
the European Union, in this conception, is not only inappropriate for,
but also theoretically incapable of engaging in security and defence
policy. Indeed, the most recent grand tome from the structural realist
camp, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Mearsheimer 2001: 392–6),
gives little credence to European integration and tends to assume, on the
contrary, that the EU, as a result of the end of the Cold War, is likely to
go ‘back to the future’ and revert to the type of nationalist jostling for
position we saw in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(Mearsheimer 1990). CSDP is, as noted above, barely studied by neo-
realists – mainly because it does not fit into their vision of things. The
principal explanation offered – that the EU is ‘balancing’ against US
dominance (Posen,2004; Art 2005; Walt 2005; Jones 2007) – is not hard
to refute (Brooks and Wohlforth 2005; Lieber and Alexander 2005;
Howorth and Menon 2009). We have already encountered this debate in
Chapter 1.
Several European scholars have attempted to explore the application
of neo-realist approaches to CSDP. Adrian Hyde-Price (2012), a self-
identified neo-realist, recognizes that CSDP is difficult for neo-realists to
apprehend, since their focus is on states in the international system – and
the EU is not a state. Moreover, not only is the EU not a state, but it
appears to have consciously turned its back on power, a development
which is incomprehensible to neo-realists for whom the distribution of
power is central. Neo-realist theory is considered to be ‘parsimonious’
because it revolves crucially around three key notions: the international
system, which is ‘anarchic’ in that there is no overarching authority; the
role in that system of states, who must look to themselves for security;
and the distribution of power among those states. In other words, the
theory focuses overwhelmingly on structures and allows very little room

for manoeuvre for ‘agency’ – i.e. the exercise of free will or creative polit-
ical imagination. For this reason, as Sten Rynning, who is associated with
the classical realist school, noted, neo-realists assume that ‘nothing much
happens in Europe and that if something were to happen, it would turn
the EU into a pole of power’ (Rynning 2011: 24). Neo-realists also have
difficulty in understanding the phenomenon of interstate cooperation
under an anarchic international system, a decidedly European activity
about which they have very little to say. For Rynning, neo-realists
compound their own problem in understanding CSDP by dividing them-
selves internally into three competing groups. ‘Defensive realists’ (who
do not see the world as inevitably dangerous because defence is easier
than offence) view CSDP as a way of participating in an American-led
division of regional labour (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008). ‘Offensive
realists’ (for whom regional dangers lurk around every corner) interpret
CSDP primarily as a way of containing Germany within a European
frame (Mearsheimer 2001; Jones 2007). The third group quarrels among
itself over whether CSDP amounts to ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ balancing of the US
(Posen 2006; Art 2005; Walt 2005). For Rynning (2011: 28), therefore,
strict neo-realists have rendered themselves somewhat marginal to the
debate on CSDP.
Hyde-Price, on the other hand, argues that neo-realist theory offers
much in the way of explanatory perspectives. To begin with, the
European integration project itself, far from being a normative departure
from traditional interstate rivalry and war (in other words – as the EU
likes to think of itself – a ‘peace project’), was, he argues, much more the
indirect outcome of bi-polarity, a classic realist systemic arrangement
under which the two Great Powers structured European stability and
allowed the European states to concentrate on ‘second order’ issues such
as trade and the promotion of values. Secondly, since neo-realism focuses
on the pressures which the international system exerts on states, rather
than attempting to predict precisely how states will respond to those
pressures, the theory has much to say about the impact of systemic
factors (bi-polarity, uni-polarity and balanced multi-polarity) on
European states. Neo-realism suggests that CSDP will be dominated by
the EU’s large and powerful states who will seek to use it for their own
national purposes rather than for trans-European purposes. These two
purposes, of course, are not necessarily contradictory and they both
assume that national and European leaders are lucid about what the
national or European interest actually is, an assumption which is easily
challenged (Wendt 1999; Pohl 2013). Nevertheless, neo-realism suggests
that CSDP will never be able to move beyond cooperation in minor
aspects of international security because its intergovernmental essence
will impose severe limits on what it can undertake. Once the Berlin Wall
came down and the US began to disengage (relatively) from Europe, the
foremost task of the Europeans was to ‘shape the milieu’ in which they
found themselves, by organizing enlargement to the East and South and
by exporting EU norms and values to the accession candidates. Milieu-
shaping is a well recognized, though second order, process in neo-realist
theory (Wolfers 1965) and the EU responded, Hyde-Price argues, as the
theory suggested. Finally, as the emerging new uni-polar or multi-polar
world begins to shape up, transatlantic conflict, for Hyde-Price, is almost
certain to increase, posing EU member states with the dilemma of decid-
ing what attitude to adopt towards the US. Neo-realist theory offers three
courses of action: balancing, buck-passing or band-wagoning (Waltz
1979). This is precisely what happened over the Iraq crisis in 2002–3
when different EU member states pursued one or other of all three
approaches. Hyde-Price does an excellent job of bringing out the full
panoply of factors which appear to demonstrate that neo-realism is not
wholly irrelevant to an understanding of CSDP. But he also recognizes
that the theory cannot go beyond outlining systemic pressures and their
likely consequences. It cannot even begin to explain the details of policy-
making and implementation in this area.
The most intellectually assertive neo-realist interpretation of CSDP is
offered by Tom Dyson and Theodore Konstadinides (2013). Their
ground-breaking book, which binds the legal and the IR theoretical
dimensions of CSDP in a holistic reappraisal of European security coop-
eration, offers a robust critique of most existing scholarship on the
subject, primarily constructivism and governance (see below). However,
their lengthy chapter, essentially authored by Dyson, on neo-realism as
the most convincing explanation for CSDP, poses various problems. The
chapter begins with a detailed rehearsal of the cardinal features of neo-
realism and then proceeds, under the somewhat inappropriate sub-head-
ing of ‘Europe in the post-Cold War era’ to assess American grand
strategy in the post-Cold War World, concluding with a rather perfunc-
tory assertion that, in that context, Europe is in a state of ‘balanced
multipolarity’ (p. 142). The argument here buys directly into one of neo-
realism’s key tenets: that only powerful states are consequential actors
and therefore of interest to theorists. In this way, CSDP is in effect
reduced to the activities of France, the UK and Germany. Since none of
these states is unambiguously dominant in the European theatre, they are
seen by Dyson as being in a state of ‘balanced multipolarity’ – which,
though a key concept in neo-realism, is not particularly meaningful when
applied to states which most scholars would agree could barely conceive
of entering into military conflict with one another. Balanced multipolar-
ity is a neo-realist concept which argues that, in such a systemic configu-
ration, powers are unlikely to go to war since none could be sure to
prevail. This logic is somewhat alien to the entre European project.
Moreover, the concept leaves totally out of the account other significant
players in CSDP such as Italy, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands and
Spain. The end of the chapter consists of an assessment of the respective

external vulnerabilities and power assets of the ‘Big Three’, particularly
in terms of their relationship with the USA in the context of their global
quest for access to strategic resources, notably energy. The discussion is
set within the core realist discourse of ‘entrapment’ and ‘abandonment’ –
the two key fears of all US allies – and becomes somewhat circular in the
sense that its underlying purpose is to illustrate the previously enunciated
thesis that Europe as a whole has chosen a strategy of ‘reformed band-
wagoning’ (p. 148) vis-à-vis the US. By reducing CSDP to Europe’s three
key powers – an approach we find in other neo-realists (Art 2005; Posen
2006) – Dyson effectively rides roughshod over the overwhelming major-
ity of CSDP scholarship (all of which he effectively dismisses in the previ-
ous chapter) and sets up a narrowly circumscribed neo-realist framework
as the only one, in his view, through which CSDP can be made to make
sense. But his analysis is under-substantiated, overly parsimonious, and
ultimately unconvincing.
Those analysing CSDP from a neo-realist perspective are forced by the
logic of their theoretical perspective to conclude that the EU will not
prove capable of evolving into a serious security actor. In part, this is
because their only possible definition of such an actor is one which
resembles the major nation-state powers either of the past or of the
present. When applied to the EU and to CSDP, these traditional neo-real-
ist categories, not surprisingly, fail to fit the bill. Since the EU explicitly
claims to be a liberal power promoting values of democracy, the rule of
law and individual freedom, it must, neo-realism asserts, give itself the
necessary (hard power) instruments of that ambition. Otherwise, as Sten
Rynning puts it, CSDP ‘translates into a policy of resolving other
people’s conflicts by military means if necessary, but without violating
international law’ (Rynning 2003: 486). This will, he argues, encounter
two major problems. The first is that, in order to apply coercive power in
the traditional manner, the EU will need to transform itself into some-
thing approximating a traditional nation-state – presumably by becom-
ing a fully fledged federal state. This it seems unlikely to do any time
soon. The second – related – problem is that the nature of contemporary
terrorism (asymmetric and messianic) is such that the loose political
structures and weak military capabilities of the EU will prove incapable
of combating it. Therefore, Rynning concludes, the EU ‘does not have the
capacity to become a “liberal power”’ and should abandon the effort,
contenting itself with its traditional instruments of aid and diplomacy
and leaving military engagements to ‘flexible coalitions outside the EU
framework’ (by implication NATO, or NATO-enabled coalitions of the
willing). Rynning, while offering a classical realist critique of neo-real-
ism, nevertheless brings us to a broadly neo-realist conclusion. I do not
entirely rule out the possibility that CSDP – as it has evolved so far – will
fail to emerge as a consequential international actor as defined by neo-
realists. But if that proves to be the case, it will be for a host of more
complex reasons than are contained in the parsimonious neo-realist
frame of reference.
Classical realists have arguably shown more insight into CSDP than
neo-realists. Stanley Hoffmann argued almost 50 years ago that integra-
tion could only take place in policy areas where state gains constantly
outweighed losses. This, he predicted, would not and could not be the
case in the area of ‘high politics’, of which defence was the ultimate
example (Hoffmann 1966). Nation-state differences in this domain,
Hoffmann asserted, would always trump efforts at international cooper-
ation. Hoffmann, of course, was educated in France and has remained
one of the foremost international specialists of that country. And there is
no doubt that, in matters of strategy and defence, France is different from
other European countries (Howorth and Chilton 1984; Howorth 1991).
Any attempt to grasp the subtler dimensions of CSDP has to come to
terms with what Hoffmann called ‘national public spaces’, in short has to
factor domestic politics into the equation. This is where classical realism
comes into its own because it can be used to combine the parsimonious
rigour of Waltzian neo-realism (with its emphasis on systemic pressures)
and the flexibility and adaptability of traditional realism (with its
concern to bring in factors of domestic politics, decision-making
processes, regime type and political culture) (Hyde-Price 2012: 36).
Rynning concludes that classical realism ‘sees the CSDP as a result of the
changes wrought on Europe’s nation-states by Europe’s history, political
choices and global processes’ (Rynning 2011: 32). Path-breaking work
has been carried out under this broad theoretical frame on several
European countries: France (Rynning 2001–2), Germany (Dyson 2010),
Central Europe (Hyde-Price 1996) and the UK, France and Germany
(Gégout 2010). The findings of Benjamin Pohl discussed in Chapter 5 are
also consistent with this approach, even though Pohl’s approach to
CSDP combines insights from liberalism, realism and constructivism.
A deep pessimist in the classical realist tradition is Julian Lindley-
French (2002, 2004). With a keen eye for historical parallel, Lindley-
French considers the development of a viable European strategic culture
to be ‘almost impossible’ (2002: 790). Adopting an overtly states-based
framework, he deplores the ‘strategic schizophrenia’ which plagues
European security and defence policy and leads either to ‘policy paralysis’
or to re-nationalization of defence policy (or both). His analysis, like that
of the neo-realists, revolves exclusively around the actions and aspirations
of Europe’s great powers (UK, France, Germany – to which he adds Italy
– ‘a big country that behaves like a small one’ (2002: 794) – as well as
Russia). The remaining states, he argues, ‘would rather not know’ about
strategy and, instead, ‘opt for a form of conflict myopia’ (p. 802). For
Lindley-French, the threats posed in the post-9/11 world by rising powers
such as China, rogue states such as Iraq and Iran, terrorist organizations
such as Al-Qaeda, and international criminal organizations are every bit as

‘real’ as the threats emanating from hostile state actors at any time in the
past. West European leaders, he concludes, ‘like it or not, are back on the
world stage’ and need the ‘mechanisms and capabilities that their place in
the world’s “Premiership” demands of them’ (p. 809). The answer, accord-
ing to Lindley-French, is a renewed Concert of Europe where the three
large powers (or even four, ‘if Italy decides it wants to be a major actor’)
must ‘begin a serious effort to develop a trans-national strategic concept as
the basis for a threat-driven rational response to the new security environ-
ment’ (p. 810). Lindley-French recognizes that the ‘smaller powers will not
like it’ but considers that, since they have been ‘on strategic vacation’ since
the end of the Cold War, they have no choice but to accept it. In a follow-
up article (2004), he deplored the division among Europeans over the Iraq
war, but considered that that soul-searching was ‘a strategic tipping point
in both Europe and the transatlantic relationship that will not be reversed’.
For Lindley-French, the divisions over Iraq reveal a ‘fractured Europe’
faced with a ‘fundamental strategic choice: either get real about the contin-
uing role of justifiable coercion in international relations and build struc-
tures accordingly […] Or accept that Europe’s concept of security is a sham
and that the United States will decide by right and might when and how to
apply power’ (p. 10). For Lindley-French, the only driver behind a putative
European strategic awakening is global systemic pressure. The Europeans
will either seize the opportunity, or go under.
A variant on this approach is provided by Lawrence Freedman (2004)
who argues vigorously for a straight bilateral Franco-British European
lead. There are only two countries in the EU which take power and the
military seriously, argues Freedman, therefore let’s just face it: Europe
needs a bilateral, Franco-British lead – rather than Lindley-French’s
somewhat more politically correct ‘tri-rectoire’ (adding Germany, or
‘quad’, adding Italy). To be fair, Freedman and the other contributors to
the volume in which his piece appears were given the specific remit of
analysing a ‘European way of war’ – in other words, the strictly military
component of any broader CSDP. From that perspective, Freedman
argues that any effective military doctrine will have to be based on a lucid
view of the world as it really is – and that only France and the UK possess
such a view. The prospect of the EU-28 generating a military doctrine he
sees as negligible – and if they did ‘it would stem from a determination to
demonstrate political unity and not from the need for a doctrine that
would provide effective guidance in an actual conflict’ (p. 15). Again,
systemic pressures dictate that ‘any attempt by governments to draw up
an EU military doctrine would be fraught and probably futile’. Such a
doctrine therefore should be formulated outside the EU framework and
simply accepted by those EU member states who were interested. This is
all the more necessary, in Freedman’s view, because the emerging
‘European way of war’ spearheaded by the UK and France is arguably
more relevant to the crisis management and nation-building challenges

ahead than is the US way of war. ‘Europeans do not have to fight as
Americans. Even if they wanted to, it would be totally beyond their capa-
bilities. But, more importantly, in many contemporary conflicts, they are
better off fighting the European way’ (p. 24). That way is epitomized, as
we saw in Chapter 5, by the comprehensive civ-mil approach. Freedman
concludes by arguing that ‘the key question is not whether the Europeans
can adapt to American doctrine, but whether the Americans can adapt to
the European way of war’ (p. 26). Freedman has little doubt that the
‘European way’ is the better way, the way of the future and that it can be
blueprinted in Paris and London.
Another approach which can be associated with realism is the applica-
tion of the Marxist theory of historical materialism to CSDP. In this light,
Europe’s dalliance with security and defence policy is seen as ‘a politico-
economic, rather than a purely strategic phenomenon, heavily influenced
by the expansionist, power projection orientation of European capitalism
and the interests of European internationalised military-industrial capital’
(Oikonoumou 2012). However sophisticated this approach might be, it
remains on the margins of scholarship into CSDP.
Realists of whatever variety take it for granted that the EU as an entity
of 28 nation-states with different strategic cultures has no chance what-
soever of gradually forging a coherent and consensual strategic culture of
its own. Movement in international relations is dictated by systemic
forces, to which nation-states (or groups of powers) must respond. The
environment is as dangerous and hostile as ever and the need for military
seriousness of purpose paramount. The only hope for West Europeans is
therefore to build a robust, coercive capacity around those nation-states
which understand such a notion and are capable of delivering its practi-
cal implementation. Realism carries out an important service in remind-
ing us that power relations are fundamental in the international system
and that that system, despite the profusion of international institutions
since 1945, remains anarchic. Realism also speaks directly to the
dilemma facing Europeans of how to react to the United States and to the
rising powers. While balancing, buck-passing and bandwagoning are
loose concepts, they nevertheless describe the various ways in which EU
member states deal with this problem. They also remind us that the EU
as such has not yet established a clear strategic pattern in its relations
with other powers. The realist approach is closely linked to theories of
rational choice which take it as read that states are unitary, rational
actors pursuing maximum gains.
Varieties of Liberalism
Other scholars from within the rational choice family applying the same
or comparable assumptions to the theory of European integration
portray it as a standard process of interstate bargaining with a view to

furthering the national interest. This school is known as intergovern-
mentalism. The approach was taken to its ultimate theoretical conclusion
– in the very year of Saint-Malo – by Andrew Moravcsik (1998) in The
Choice for Europe, his major work of liberal intergovernmentalism.
Moravcsik argues that although actors other than just states – social
actors of many types – can bargain at the international level for more
rational policy coordination, ultimately, all consequential decisions are
taken by the state as the ultimate embodiment of the unitary rational
actor. But Moravcsik’s chosen policy areas are trade, economics and
agriculture where hard-driven bargains are struck all the time and his
case studies are intergovernmental conferences where those bargains are
sealed. Fully embracing Stanley Hoffmann’s notion of nation-state diver-
sity in high politics, this perspective asserts that foreign, security and
defence policy are the prime policy areas where robust coordination and
(still less) integration will not happen. For Moravcsik, CSDP is but a
‘pipe dream’ (Moravcsik 2003). The application, for example, of a
liberal intergovernmentalist approach to understanding Tony Blair’s
decision to go through with the Saint-Malo process comes to the conclu-
sion that this was simply a tactical shift in the definition of the UK’s
national interest rather than a major change of UK preferences in favour
of a European perspective (Dover 2005).
Closely connected to liberal intergovernmentalism, but applied more
globally than to the limited context of the EU, is neo-liberalism, with its
emphasis on trade and economics as the twin pillars of interdependence
generating positive-sum outcomes (Keohane and Nye 1972, 1977). This
approach, while offering useful interpretations of the purely civilian
actor the EU used to be, makes no attempt to explain why the EU has
seemingly chosen to don the accoutrements of military power. Neo-
liberal approaches are, at one level, geared to explaining the absence of
war, the preference for cooperation and the presence of peace in
complex multilateral organizations. The focus on soft power (Nye
2004) has been informed by a belief that military instruments have been
over-analysed in IR and that the significant aspects of the present are the
features of persuasion, attractiveness and exemplarity of which the EU
is a model. These approaches lend themselves awkwardly to the analy-
sis of CSDP which at first glance seems to run against the grain of neo-
liberal theory. In 2011, Joseph Nye, who had theorized soft power in an
attempt to swing the US pendulum back from the excessive realist focus
on hard power of the uni-polar period, came up with the more balanced
notion of smart power which is often misunderstood as a simple combi-
nation of force and persuasion, of soft and hard power. In fact, it
involves ‘setting clear and manageable objectives, understanding the
resources available within dynamic circumstances, understanding the
sensibilities of the targets of a country’s objectives, choosing among
power strategies, and anticipating the success of those strategies’ (Nye

2011). This is a tall order and has been the subject of much confusion.
It is clearly a close theoretical relative of the EU’s ‘comprehensive
approach’ which we analysed in Chapter 5. A recent attempt to apply
the concept of smart power to the case of CSDP not surprisingly arrives
at the conclusion that the EU is not very good at it (Matera 2013). One
of the main problems in combining hard power with softer civilian
instruments is the implicit or even explicit confusion of ‘high politics’
with ‘low politics’.
That CSDP would never happen was also taken for granted by the
other main liberal school of European integration theory, neo-function-
alism, whose central idea is ‘spillover’. Spillover is the process whereby
the successful functioning of integration in a given policy area is
believed to create pressures in connected policy areas for a similar
measure of integration (Haas 1964). But spillover is only believed to
work in the area of ‘low politics’. Neo-functionalists excluded from the
processes of spillover the entire ‘high politics’ field of foreign and secu-
rity policy – considered as the last bastions of sovereignty. Hanna
Ojanen has suggested that all these liberal theorists were so focused on
finding a reason for the empirical absence of integration in security and
defence that they failed to realize that their own theories could in fact
explain a phenomenon such as CSDP if they simply jettisoned the
distinction between high and low politics (Ojanen 2006: 61). There is
no reason, she suggested, if they perceived their national interests as
being better served by coordination, why sovereign states should not
cooperate. One US scholar coming from the realist stable has even
detected signs of such a development in the emergence of coordinated
frontier management. ‘Although it is still a nascent institution, the
growth of FRONTEX could be a significant step forward in the EU’s
growing power over issues that blur the line between high and low poli-
tics’ (Selden 2010: 409). One problem with such an approach, however,
as Frédéric Mérand (2008: 18–19) has argued, is that it would imply the
likelihood of much more extensive and explicit interstate bargaining in
the realm of security and defence than has actually taken place. Would
states, hard pressed for resources and struggling to justify their sizeable
but ultimately ineffectual militaries, not logically have made much more
of an effort to coordinate force generation, troop deployment, defence
expenditure, equipment procurement – in short pooling and sharing – if
this rational intergovernmental approach were the principal motor
behind CSDP developments? Thomas Risse concurs with this judge-
ment, suggesting that it is the lack of spillover in the area of high politics
which seems to invalidate a neo-functionalist interpretation of CSDP.
But he also argues that it is very difficult to determine where low politics
ceases and high politics begins, since internal security – which also lies
at the heart of sovereignty – has been the subject of considerable
spillover (Risse 2005: 301–4). However, Risse has also argued that, if
the EU wishes to realize its dream of being a soft power, it will also have
to develop a significant measure of hard power, even if it is not spillover
which delivers this (Risse and Börzel 2007). All the liberal theories we
have just mentioned are theories of intergovernmentalism that focus on
the EU member states and their interaction, particularly in the European
Council.
The other main theoretical approach to European integration is supra-
nationalism (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998; Stone-Sweet et al. 2001;
Seidel 2010; Dehousse 2011). Scholars who theorize this approach
examine policy areas such as telecommunications, the environment and
air transport, where trans-European developments towards supranation-
alism have taken place. But they avoid security and defence. They tend to
focus on the one indisputably supranational institution in the EU – the
European Commission – and examine its capacity to spread its influence
and impact into as many policy areas as possible. However, as we have
seen, the European Commission, despite its relatively huge budget, has
little more than a bit part to play in CSDP (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012;
Kassim et al. 2013). As with the realists, one discovers that both liberal
intergovernmentalists and supranationalists have tended to neglect or
eschew analysis of this key policy area whose very existence poses a chal-
lenge to the bases of their theoretical approach. Both groups of scholars
have striven to stake out a territory fenced by a dominant or mono-causal
explanatory factor for European cooperation (the former) or integration
(the latter): on the one hand the sovereign state as a unitary actor
involved in hard political bargaining; on the other hand supranational
institutions with diverse actors at multiple levels involved in functional
integration. The key element here is that each of these two camps believes
that its dominant explanation trumps that of the other. It is not clear why
scholars would wish to detect mono-causal or even dominant drivers
behind complex political and historical processes. CSDP is certainly such
a process, but one which neither theoretical approach on its own can
really explain. Liberals have much to say about the European Union in
general but rather less about CSDP in particular. This is paradoxical in
that the EU experiment is clearly a ‘liberal’ experiment in terms of values,
institutions and objectives. But liberalism always had difficulty dealing
with the reality of power and theoretical liberals have even greater diffi-
culty deciphering an entity such as the EU which appears to be preparing
to act like a power while denying that this is its objective. Taken on their
own, the various liberal approaches do not help much in understanding
CSDP. But if we short-circuit the hard and fast distinctions between
intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, we can actually begin to
get some purchase on the emerging reality of the security and defence
project.
Transcending the Supranational–Intergovernmental Dichotomy

For scholars and practitioners of European politics alike, the time-
honoured distinction between supranationalism and intergovernmental-
ism has always been fundamental. This distinction has largely defined the
various schools of European integration theory, just as it has remained
crucial for European governments keen to demonstrate that the member
states remain in charge of key policy areas. Nowhere is this considered to
be more central than in the area of foreign and security policy, which has
consciously been set within the rigid intergovernmental framework of
Pillar Two of the Maastricht Treaty and, under the Lisbon Treaty,
remains subject to the unanimity rule. And yet, scholarship on the major
decision-making agencies of the foreign and security policy of the EU
suggests that the distinction is not only blurred but increasingly mean-
ingless.
Within that general literature on CSDP, there have been a growing
number of studies focusing on decision-shaping and decision-making in
foreign and security policy. This literature has been framed by a wide
variety of epistemological and theoretical approaches, including (but not
restricted to) institutional dynamics (Smith M. E. 2003; Grevi 2007);
socialization theory (Checkel 2007); committee governance (Hooghe
1999); trans-national networks (Mérand et al. 2010); epistemic commu-
nities (Haas 1992; Howorth 2004; Cross 2011); European diplomatic
analysis (Cross 2007); CSDP policy creation (Salmon and Shepherd
2003; Dumoulin et al. 2003; Howorth 2007; Mérand 2008); security
culture (Meyer 2006; Giegerich 2006; Sjursen 2006) and a major focus
on negotiation theory (Risse 2000). These many different approaches
have underpinned the emergence of a substantial body of literature
analysing the main agencies of decision-shaping in CFSP and CSDP:
Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) (Bostock 2002;
Lewis 2007; Cross 2011); Political and Security Committee (PSC)
(Meyer 2006; Juncos and Reynolds 2007; Howorth 2010; Cross 2011);
the European Union Military Committee (EUMC) (Cross 2010);
Committee for Civilian Crisis Management (CIVCOM) (Cross 2010);
the Council Secretariat Working Groups (CWGs) (Juncos and Pomorska
2006; Beyers 2007; Warntjen 2010); the European Defence Agency
(EDA) (Trybus 2006; Batora 2009).
Fourteen years ago, I suggested, with respect to CSDP in general, that
there were indications that we might be in the presence of a phenomenon
I called ‘supra-national inter-governmentalism’ (Howorth 2000). CFSP
and CSDP are very deliberately situated under Pillar Two of the
Maastricht Treaty and fall under the unanimity rule of the Lisbon
arrangements, where intergovernmentalism is considered to be sacro-
sanct and all decisions are officially taken either at foreign ministers or at
heads of state or government level. However, scholars are increasingly
agreed that the reality is far more complex. Much of the literature
referred to above touches to a greater or lesser degree on the tensions
between the intergovernmental and the supranational dimensions of
CFSP and CSDP. With few exceptions, scholars have puzzled over the
reality of a growing sense of de facto supranationalism. Scholars wonder
whether we are not in fact witnessing the disappearance of any meaning-
ful dichotomy between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism.
In a recent article on the significance of institutional environments
for decision-making in the EU, Jeffrey Lewis concludes that ‘variables
that impact whether more competitive or more cooperative styles
adhere include: insulation; issue scope; interaction intensity; and infor-
mal norms. Higher levels of [these variables] deepen the mutual trust
and introspection that engenders more cooperative styles of negotia-
tion to take hold and become routinized’ (Lewis 2010: 658). Most of
the institutional agencies studied in this vast literature correspond rela-
tively closely to the ‘higher levels’ of scope conditions which Lewis
outlines. EU foreign and security policy is a recent policy area which
has to coexist with residual ‘heroic’ stances taken on a number of key
international issues by a handful of European national capitals (e.g. the
Iraq crisis of 2003). But what we have seen over the past ten years is a
Union attempting to write a new security script essentially geared to
international crisis management which is only challenged around the
margins by the larger member states. That script features both a mili-
tary and a civilian component but is increasingly self-defining as the
interface between and the synergies between the military and civilian
components.
The vast majority of the ‘spade work’ in this policy area is carried out
by the many working groups, committees and agencies studied in the
literature referenced above. All of them, without exception, are formally
‘intergovernmental’ agencies composed of one or more representatives
per member state. A rationalist or liberal intergovernmentalist approach
to such policy-shaping and policy-making would insist that these repre-
sentatives are essentially in the business of bargaining around hard and
fast national interests or ‘red-lines’ and that the outcome will be a reflec-
tion of that bargaining. Much of the recent sociological institutionalist
literature (see below) has challenged that approach and argued that vari-
ous forms of socialization and intersubjectivity within the insulated insti-
tutional settings typical of the agencies involved in CSDP
decision-shaping allows for a different form of political process which
equates more closely to what Jeffrey Checkel has called Type I socialisa-
tion or even Type II internalisation in which government officials switch
from defence of red-lines to consensus-seeking behaviour (Checkel
2007). Most current scholarship suggests that, with varying degrees of
intensity, the latter interpretation is much closer to the truth than the
former (Howorth 2012; Chelotti 2013).
A tentative overall conclusion might be the following. While there is

no doubt that, within these different bodies, at different moments in time
and on different policy dossiers, there is variation in the extent to which
government officials are able to transcend a purely bargaining mode and
move towards consensus-building, there is little or no doubt that such
tendencies exist in all of them. In particular in the field of CSDP – which
is a work in progress – there is a marked trend towards consensus-seek-
ing which goes far beyond what one might normally expect of diplomatic
practice and which comes close on many occasions to policy-making.
Under these circumstances, to continue to draw distinctions between
intergovernmental procedures and supranational practices in CSDP is, at
the very least, unhelpful to our understanding of what is actually happen-
ing. Even in a body as robustly ring-fenced by intergovernmental
constraints as the EDA, the overall dynamics – largely driven by the
imperative of security cooperation in a rapidly changing world – is
clearly towards ever greater cooperation and even integration. Under
these circumstances, I might even be tempted to conclude that I was too
hasty, all those years ago, in speaking of ‘supra-national inter-govern-
mentalism’. The emerging pattern begins to look more like ‘inter-govern-
mental supra-nationalism’.
Thus, neither the dominant schools of international relations theory
nor the dominant schools of European integration theory, taken in isola-
tion and on their own theoretical terms, have much to offer by way of
explanation for the emergence of CSDP. In order to find some theoretical
leverage, we must look elsewhere than pure theory. Institutionalism on
the one hand, and constructivism on the other, prove to be more fruitful
methodological paths to tread.
Methodological Approaches
Although most of the substantive theories we have looked at purport to

explain how the EU works, they also adopt a methodological approach
which is often categorized as rationalism (or rational choice) which
assumes that actors – and in this case mainly states – are rational and go
about the business of pursuing their national interests in an entirely ratio-
nal way. Other analysts eschew rigid guidelines of a substantive theoret-
ical nature and adopt a method of approach in order to apprehend
reality. These analysts are concerned with exploring different ways of
going about pursuing truth. The first of these is institutionalism.
Institutionalism
Most scholars of the European Union agree that one of its inescapable
and central features is the complex web of institutions which allow it to
function. It is through an analysis of these institutions that many theo-

rists believe it is possible to arrive at conclusions about the nature of the
EU as an actor. This is as true in foreign and security policy as in other
policy areas. It has long been recognized that there are three main schools
of institutionalism: rational choice, historical, and sociological (Hall and
Taylor 1996). Michael E. Smith produced one of the first and most
comprehensive applications of institutionalist approaches to the under-
standing of the external workings of the European Union (Smith 2003).
Relying mainly on historical and sociological approaches, he assessed the
process and significance of the quasi-organic development of the institu-
tions of foreign and security policy-making in the European Union and
concluded strongly that this process generated its own internal dynamic
which progressively became stronger than the ability of any individual
member state to control it. He analysed a reciprocal relationship between
institution-building and interstate cooperation and charted this empiri-
cally by theorizing a symbiotic relationship between specific processes of
institutionalization and the types of cooperation which those different
processes encouraged. In 2003, Smith concluded that there was an extra-
ordinarily strong phenomenon of cooperation via the EU institutions –
above all of CFSP in general (rather than CSDP in particular). More
recently, Smith has nuanced his position somewhat, arguing that, while
the basic theory still holds up regarding civilian operations, and perhaps
light policing missions, real defence cooperation is a bridge too far with-
out strong leadership from one of the major players (Smith 2013). Since
that currently appears remote, there is a stalemate in the system. Smith
doubts (as he intimated already in 2003) that the EU would have the
political will to sustain a truly punishing type of operation such as
Kosovo or Libya. Institutional cooperation, from this perspective, thus
has very clear political limits.
A rather different take on the processes of institutionalization is
offered by Hylke Dijkstra (2013). Dijkstra situates his work within the
broad frame of rational choice institutionalism, using principal–agent
theory as his main method of analysis (Pollack 2003; Hawkins et al.
2006), while remaining fully aware of the importance of historical devel-
opments. His basic argument is that the member states delegated powers
to the Council Secretariat and Commission intentionally and lucidly in
an attempt to make decision-making more efficient and that this was
(and is) a long-term and ongoing process in which the member states also
balance very carefully between their need to continue to exercise sover-
eignty over foreign and security policy and their equally clear sense of the
functional requirements of effective foreign policy cooperation. Unlike in
policy areas such as trade and economics, the member states had no
desire to establish tight regulatory mechanisms for domestic compliance
with agreed policies. They sought simply to make the machinery more
efficient and to establish the institutions as the guardians of those agree-
ments. The fact that most of the authority delegated was to the Council
Secretariat, rather than to the Commission, demonstrates the extent to
which the member states remained cautious and nervous about the
consequences of their actions. In this process, the Council Secretariat
accumulated considerable expertise which gave it a measure of auton-
omy with respect to the member states. Dijkstra’s thesis offers a more
restrained and ‘rational’ vision of institutionalism than the work of
Smith.
Another interesting perspective from within the institutionalist camp
is that offered by Stephanie Hofmann, who has highlighted the notion of
institutional overlap (Hofmann 2009, 2013). Stressing that CSDP insti-
tutions were not created ex nihilo but were consciously modelled both on
WEU and on NATO institutions, she argues that this had a double-edged
effect on the institutional performance of CSDP. On the one hand, it
allowed governments and leaders greater flexibility in their choice of
which institutional agency to prioritize for a given mission. But at the
same time it created interagency confusion, decision-making complexity
and increased inefficiencies. In order fully to understand both the
strengths and (particularly) the weaknesses of CSDP, the institutional
framework, for Hofmann, must be extended to include the entire range
of actors with whom CSDP has institutional interaction.
Anand Menon (2011b) has attempted to theorize a distinctive CSDP
type of institutionalism by contrasting it both with traditional theories of
historical institutionalism and with rationalism and realism. He notes the
paucity of existing theoretical studies of international security institu-
tions and attributes this to the dominance of realist theory, according to
which such institutions ‘have minimal influence on state behaviour’
(Mearsheimer) – in part because states are concerned to maximize their
own power and are reluctant to generate security institutions in the first
place. On the other hand, historical institutionalists such as Pierson
(2000), who have theorized the path dependency of institutions, argue
that it is difficult to create new institutions and even more difficult to
change their trajectories once created, other than under extraordinary
historical circumstances (‘big bangs’). Other scholars such as Thelen
(1999) and Ikenberry (1998/99) focus on processes of both adaptation
and empowerment within institutions. However, the mainstream schol-
ars of EU institutionalism do not, for the most part, concern themselves
with foreign and security policy. Where Menon breaks new ground is in
demonstrating that, in the case of CSDP, adaptation is almost constant:
the institutions were created very rapidly ex nihilo, and have evolved
ceaselessly as a result of conflict between the objectives of the member
states (Menon 2011b: 89). He also demonstrates that the reality of CSDP
institutionalism contradicts the realists’ claims that the policy area has
been developed by the larger member states to promote their own power-
based interests. Smaller states, by insisting on the importance of civilian
instruments, have exercised considerable leverage over a policy area

which many, at the outset, believed (or feared) was dominated by mili-
tary thinking and concepts of power. Indeed, another scholar, Asle Toje,
has theorized that ‘the EU will not be a great power and is taking the
place of a small power in the emerging multi-polar international order’
(Toje 2010: 11). Power, which has been neglected by institutionalists, is
thus a factor in understanding CSDP, as are institutions themselves,
which have been underrated by realists. Menon concludes that CSDP ‘is
not an example of effective aggregation of national capabilities but,
rather, functions on the basis of a complex, consensus-based decision-
making system. The consensus requirement has played a crucial role in
shaping what the EU has proven capable of’ (Menon 2011b: 94).
Some may detect a tension between the constraining logic of consen-
sus-formation and the rapid institutional adaptation of CSDP (which I
analysed empirically in Chapter 2). The resolution of this tension can be
sought through the insights developed by Vivien Schmidt in theorizing a
fourth type of institutionalism: discursive institutionalism. A brief look
at this approach will serve as a transition towards sociological institu-
tionalism and constructivism which we will assess next. Discursive insti-
tutionalism focuses attention on the substantive content of ideas and the
interactive processes of discourse in an institutional context (Schmidt
2008, 2010). Taking the institutionalist insights discussed above as
background information, it explains the dynamics of change and conti-
nuity in a given institutional context by considering how government
officials may negotiate agreement in a ‘coordinative’ discourse of policy
construction and then communicate its basics to a wider audience in a
‘communicative’ discourse of political discussion, public debate and
legitimation. In the study of CSDP, a number of scholars have taken up
this approach in order to go beyond the neo-realists’ attribution of
expected ‘rational’ interests to state actors, as well as to be able to
explain why, for historical institutionalists, institutions may continue in
a path-dependent manner, or change incrementally. Discursive institu-
tionalism demands greater attention to the actual ideas being discussed
in CSDP as well as to how the discursive interactions among key offi-
cials involved in negotiations may lead to re-conceptualizing interests
and reframing institutions. In my own work on the construction of
CSDP from Saint-Malo up until 2003, I showed how the different mix
of ideas and discursive interactions in France, Britain and Germany
made a significant difference to the overall outcome involving a quan-
tum leap from dependency on the WEU to direct involvement of the
European Union itself (Howorth 2004). The key factor in this was the
emergence of small epistemic communities of defence-related officials,
in London and Paris, who, through constant interaction and the batting
back and forth of new theories and ideas in the creation of a coordinated
discourse, actually moved history forward.
Constructivism
Constructivism is arguably less a substantive theory of international rela-
tions or political and social interaction than a methodological approach
which rejects the rational choice approach of realists and liberals who
believe in the ‘logic of consequences’ – that is to say that there is a direct
causal relation between decisions, actions and outcomes. Constructivists,
on the other hand, espouse the ‘logic of appropriateness’, which suggests
that the purpose of political action and decision-making should be to
construct a normative outcome which fits a given cultural framework or
context. In the European context, therefore, constructivists tend to seek
out and to analyse the ways in which – and the extent to which – CSDP
both reflects and generates a European normative approach towards secu-
rity based on the rejection of traditional notions of war and peace (zero
sum) and which posits collective security and stability (positive sum) as
the crucial objective. Constructivists are interested in the intersubjective
interplay of ideas, language (discourse) and above all (European) identity
which underpin an emerging, peculiarly European, approach to security
and defence. To realists, such an effort is both misguided (there is no
special ‘European way’ of approaching IR) and therefore irrelevant. At
the heart of constructivism, on the other hand, lies the belief that the
construction of a unique and culture-specific trans-European approach to
security and defence, transcending the nation-state and all its assumptions
based on historical forces is both possible and crucially important.
International relations can and should be understood and conducted in
value-based or normative ways, rather than as a simple clash of interests.
Where realists and liberals insist that states have more or less fixed prefer-
ences dictated by unchanging factors such as the international system or
national interests, constructivists have insisted that those preferences are
in fact socially constructed through forces such as values, norms and
socialization – which are in a state of constant evolution. As Glarbo
(1999: 649) argued, ‘social integration is emerging as the natural histori-
cal product of the day-to-day practices of political co-operation’. Yet, for
years, constructivists seemed, for the most part, somewhat ill-at-ease with
the EU as their focal point and tended to fight shy of delving too deeply
into this recent, swiftly flowing and somewhat murky current. Two of the
major tomes of constructivist theory (Wendt 1999 and Katzenstein 1996)
fail even to look at the European Union as such.
However, among the ‘new wave’ of younger CSDP scholars, construc-
tivism has emerged as a quasi-dominant school. In the past ten years, a
number of substantial works have appeared which either epitomize
constructivist approaches or situate themselves within a slightly broader
but proximate orbit including sociological institutionalism, discursive
institutionalism, identity-formation and theories of epistemic communi-
ties (Tonra 2003; Keating 2004; Tofte 2005; Meyer 2006; Giegerich
2006; Anderson 2008; Mérand 2008; Watanabe 2010; Cross 2011;

JCMS 2011; Kurowska and Breuer 2012; Cross and Melissen 2013;
Schmidt and Zyler 2013). Much of this work has revolved around the
extent to which CSDP is forging a coherent and identifiable collective
security culture in Europe which I shall discuss further in the concuding
chapter. The kinds of questions constructivists ask – about what it
would take for the distinct historical experiences and strategic cultures
of the EU’s 28 member states to begin to converge around an identifi-
able collective whole – lie at the very heart of the CSDP project. Xymena
Kurowska and Friedrich Kratochwil (2012), for example, have
proposed a number of ongoing research ‘vignettes’ which fall squarely
in the orbit of aspiring constructivist scholars. A key issue for construc-
tivists is ‘international role formation’. The EU through its CSDP
engages in international activity (above all crisis management missions)
with an initial self-perception about its role and its objectives. This
perception then encounters both the reality of the situation in which
CSDP finds itself and the often rather different perceptions, held by
others, of what CSDP stands for. After a process of social learning,
socialization with other actors and interactive negotiation, the initial
CSDP profile is modified in an ongoing iterative process. Eventually, it
becomes clearer what CSDP is, how it fits into the international context
and how it evolves in response to external and internal stimuli. An excel-
lent example of this is the way the US has shifted its attitude towards
CSDP as the latter has evolved in constant interaction with real security
situations. Both sides now see the two-way relationship in much more
positive terms than they did in 1999. This is as a result of intersubjective
development through experience on the ground.
One of the main weaknesses of constructivism, deriving in part from
its being a methodology rather than a substantive theory, is its difficulty
in establishing exactly how shifts in strategic culture take place and why
states occasionally change course (Mérand 2008: 24). This problem
derives in part from a lack of clarity within constructivism about the
interplay of ideas and material forces in history. This debate goes back to
Greek philosophy and has been played out regularly in political–philo-
sophical debates ever since (Jaurès 1901). In an ambitious attempt to
push forward the contemporary debate between constructivists and real-
ists, Christoph Meyer and Eva Strickmann (2011) have examined how
material and ideational forces are interrelated in the development of
CSDP. Acknowledging that classical realists (but not neo-realists) recog-
nize the role of domestic politics, individual leaders and discourses in
their interaction with power, they also recognize that most construc-
tivists underestimate or simply ignore measurable material factors in
their quest for the ideational dimensions of social construction. Meyer
and Strickmann demonstrate with an extraordinarily revealing table (p.
70) that changes in the overall economic situation of a state, shifts in
defence spending, fluctuations in military capacity and in particular in

the EU’s ability to face up to emerging threats, can have a direct and
major effect on the ideas, identities and norms which drive CSDP. Their
bottom line is that constructivists are better suited than other scholars to
produce the most comprehensive account of how change happens. That
may be so. It is up to self-identifying constructivists to demonstrate it.
Constructivism holds out great promise for delving ever deeper into the
complex emerging reality of CSDP – but only on condition that scholars
working in this broad field come down from the abstract ethereal heights
and get their hands dirty with empirical reality.
Alternative Theoretical/Methodological Approaches
There are several alternative theoretical approaches worthy of consider-

ation. These are by no means detached from the more substantive theo-
retical or methodological approaches we have just examined, but they
are sufficiently distinctive to warrant a separate section which might be
seen as exemplifying methodological eclecticism. One approach which is
conceptually close to constructivism derives from the recent literature on
security governance. One of the earliest articles on this approach, which
I co-authored, defined security governance as involving ‘the coordinated
management and regulation of issues by multiple and separate authori-
ties, the interventions of both public and private actors (depending upon
the issue), formal and informal arrangements, in turn structured by
discourse and norms, and purposefully directed toward particular policy
outcomes’ (Webber et al. 2004: 3). Authority follows a pattern known as
heterarchy, which can be defined as a system replete with overlap, multi-
plicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of
relation. In addition, governance (unlike government) involves a multi-
tude of actors – officials, diplomats, soldiers, companies, NGOs, think-
tanks, academics – but the state, for all that, remains the primary actor.
Governance also assumes the key importance of ideas, not as free-float-
ing abstractions, but as embedded in material structures and thus reflect-
ing and reproducing relationships of power. Finally, purposefulness
indicates the intention of moving, via structures and processes, towards
clear policy outcomes. Elke Krahmann, also a co-author of that 2004
study, examined multiple levels of fragmentation in international secu-
rity governance, which is increasingly characterized by the proliferation
of international institutions, divergent national positions, transatlantic
tensions and cross-cutting agendas (Krahmann 2003, 2005). Kirchner
and Sperling built on these initial approaches to develop an overall
theory of the changing nature of the state, the evolutionary expansion of
the security agenda, and the growing obsolescence of the traditional
forms and concepts of security cooperation (Kirchner and Sperling
2008). Mérand and his collaborators developed a highly sophisticated

network model of all the different actors involved in European security
governance in order to test the degree of real influence exercised by these
many different individuals and agencies. They confirmed the findings of
the original 2004 study that the state and its immediate officials remain
primary in the management of European security (Mérand et al. 2011).
The most complete recent analysis of the concept argues that approach-
ing the understanding of CSDP from a governance perspective ‘allows us
to see the whole picture in a way that looking at a multitude of factors
which before have been treated in isolation, does not’ (Norheim-
Martinsen 2013: 33). Governance is indeed a valuable methodological
approach, but it runs the risk of focusing so much on the trees that the
forest becomes invisible. Norheim-Martinsen’s own conclusion is that
the ‘security governance’ criteria and objectives set out in Webber et al.
(2004) have only been partially fulfilled.
Janne Haaland Matlary (2009) applies Robert Putnam’s model – or
metaphor – of two-level games (Putnam 1988) to the arena of interna-
tional security, arguing that national governments can play their domes-
tic constituencies and international partners off against each other
depending on the issue and the stakes. On the one hand, domestic oppo-
sition can be marshalled to block unpopular international initiatives if a
government, for its own reasons, is hesitant or resistant. On the other
hand, the adoption of unpopular international initiatives, if a govern-
ment believes these to be in the national interest, can be ‘blamed’ on
international partners: ‘they made me do it’. At the same time, Matlary
sees the re-emergence of traditional power politics, particularly in France
and the UK, as a major dynamic behind CSDP. While there is undoubt-
edly some truth in this – essentially rationalist – approach, as we have
seen above, decision-making in CSDP is more sophisticated than is
implicit in two-level games. Many decisions are taken in committees
before the issue reaches ministerial or heads of government level.
Moreover, other – smaller – member states have had a major impact on
the development of CSDP.
In an ambitious and very alternative study, Moritz Weiss (2011)
argued that neither realism nor liberalism nor constructivism had come
close to explaining the fundamental question at the heart of CSDP:
‘Given the fact that military planning and the legitimate use of force are
normally regarded as constitutive elements of the state, the emergence of
CSDP poses one crucial puzzle … Why and under what conditions do
great powers with a substantial independent military capacity deliber-
ately seek to create institutions which will limit their autonomous mili-
tary planning?’ His focus on ‘great powers’ is reminiscent of the realists’
assumption that CSDP is ‘only’ about France, the UK and Germany and
this is one of the weaknesses of his approach to the reality of CSDP,
which is in fact much more inclusive. But we still have to answer the
question about the ‘Big Three’. In order to answer his own question,
drawing on the literature on economic institutions of Williamson (1985)
and North (1990), Weiss develops a model based on transaction cost
economics to explain CSDP. He treats the member states as if they were
companies and the European security order as if it were the market.
While this approach is unlikely to attract a massive scholarly audience, it
does have the merit of applying measurable indices to elusive interstate
relations.
Two other approaches must be mentioned, even though they relate
more to foreign policy than to security and defence policy. The first is
the approach which sees a central role for political leaders. This is a
problem for the European Union, which has a Presidency, but no clear
leader (Tallberg 2006; Hayward 2008). There is no question but that, at
key moments in history, no matter how seemingly compelling may be
the constraints of path dependency or systemic forces, individual lead-
ers can make a significant difference. Thus, to ignore the role of Mikhail
Gorbachev – or, more indirectly, of Ronald Reagan – in bringing an end
to the Cold War would be to discount one vital factor among others. To
underestimate the role of Tony Blair in breaking, at Saint-Malo, with 50
years of traditional British refusal to countenance a security and defence
role for the EU would be to miss a fundamental driver behind CSDP.
Jacques Chirac was instrumental in putting an end to the war in Bosnia.
In late summer 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy happened to be the right man in
the right place at the right time, and he brokered an acceptable resolu-
tion to the Russo-Georgian War. However, these examples are the
exceptions which prove the rule: in security and defence policy, leader-
lessness is the name of the game. Anand Menon has insisted that this ‘is
not only inevitable but also not necessarily as dysfunctional as most
analyses are wont to claim’. Arguing that the EU cannot and should not
attempt to act in ‘heroic’ manner like militaristic nation-states where
leadership is crucial, he notes that, in the case of CSDP, ‘overlapping
institutional competences are part of the very nature of what remains a
unique and sophisticated international organisation’. Rather than wish-
ing these away in pursuit of a man on a white horse, he argues that ‘it is
by designing mechanisms to minimise the extent of any incoherence
resulting from them that the Union can be made to function effectively’
(Menon 2008).
Another rather distinct but time-honoured problem-oriented
approach, which builds on leader narratives but goes beyond it, is that
of Foreign Policy Analysis. This approach concentrates on the wider
policy-making and institutional context of decision-making. The
domestic and international political contexts within which decision-
makers function constitute a central element in this approach, as do the
complexities and bureaucratic peculiarities and above all the intera-
gency tensions behind ultimate security and defence policy-making.
While this approach has been largely confined to foreign policy (Hill
2003), it offers considerable potential for application to security and
defence policy (Rynning 2001–2; Mérand 2008: 24–6).
As for those who adopt the more social-scientific approach of the
behaviourist school (Skinner 1976; Baum 2004), there are two main
obstacles to the application of its methodology to the European Union
in general and to CSDP in particular. The first is that behaviourists also
tend to reason in terms of interstate relations and have difficulty fitting
into their framework complex multilateral bodies such as the EU. The
second is that their analysis relies crucially on massive data-sets which
can be analysed inductively. Such quantitative data simply do not exist
for either CFSP or CSDP at this point. Nevertheless, objectively, one of
the bedrocks of this recent work – democratic peace theory which
argues that democracies do not wage war on one another – ought logi-
cally to allow for serious application to the EU (Russett 1994; Russett
and Oneal 2001). Unfortunately, to date, no major work has been done
on CSDP from within this perspective, although some initial research
findings have been published and doctoral dissertations are in train
(Donno 2008).
Conclusion
The moves towards coordination in that last bastion of ‘sovereignty’ –

security and defence policy – with all their limitations and caveats,
constitute a sea-change in the way the EU and its member states increas-
ingly relate to the outside world. The reality is deeply empirical and
lends itself awkwardly to theoretical speculation. It belies the prescrip-
tions of most main schools of theory. As this book has shown, there is
no question that coordination is taking place. Coordination is a term
much favoured by intergovernmentalists because it meshes with their
rational choice methodology and retains the primacy of the state. One
question which analysts nevertheless return to frequently is this: will
there come a time when the intensity, scope and scale of coordination
across a range of issue areas in security and defence becomes so intense
that it amounts, de facto, to integration. This echoes the transcendence
of the intergovernmental–supranational dichotomy which we examined
above. Integration, of course, is the notion favoured by neo-functional-
ists because it does, precisely, imply a shift towards supranational
processes. Hanna Ojanen (2006) has recently presented the outline of a
case for concluding that coordination might well lead to integration,
that the hitherto cast-iron distinction between high politics and low
politics might be disappearing. However, the precise distinction, and
above all the dividing line at which point the process shifts from one to
the other remains totally elusive. It might be helpful for the discussion if
a new term were to be coined which highlights the complex and symbi-
otic forces at play: co-ordigration. My view is that CSDP demonstrates
a great deal of co-ordigration. But, as this book has repeatedly insisted,
it also has a very long way to go before coordination in the field of secu-
rity and defence morphs into integration.
Chapter 7
Conclusion: The Major

Challenges Ahead
‘Success consists in going from failure to failure with no loss of enthu-

siasm.’ – Winston Churchill
As will be abundantly clear from the preceding chapters, CSDP is still

very much a ‘work in progress’. It is, for an increasing number of
analysts, approaching the ‘make or break’ point. One common feature
of the many conferences on this topic that I have attended in the past
few years is a seemingly ubiquitous paper (with many different
authors) outlining the available options either for the EU as a whole,
for the eurozone or for CSDP. This seemingly ‘must have’ paper invari-
ably evokes three hypotheses: disintegration and/or re-nationalization;
‘muddling through’; and a bold move forward towards greater integra-
tion probably involving some form of federalism. (A brilliant example
is Stelzenmüller 2012.) Most analysts who develop these models tend
to discount collapse as unthinkable and federalism as unlikely. They
therefore conclude that the EU will continue to ‘muddle through’ –
which means more of the same institutional infighting, incoherence and
inconclusiveness that we have witnessed to date. Andrew Moravcsik
has argued that the EU enjoys a happy state of ‘stable equilibrium’
which rules out with equal certainty either collapse or a great leap
forward (Moravcsik 2010). This thesis is unconvincing. To argue that
‘the European style of muddling through may be unglamorous, but it
works’ is to neglect the profound historical shifts shaping and engulf-
ing the world we are entering. This harsh reality was brought home
with force during the EU’s confused response to the Arab Spring in
2011. Muddling through may have worked when the world was rela-
tively stable. In 2014, it is simply no longer an option. In North Africa,
in 2011, it condemned the EU to irrelevance. There are a number of
urgent tasks the EU and its CSDP must fulfil and these cannot be dealt
with by muddling through. The first is to develop some clear notion of
the ultimate objectives and purpose of CSDP – in other words, to gener-
ate a modicum of strategic vision.
216
Conclusion: The Major Challenges Ahead 217
A Grand Strategy for CSDP
The European Union (and indeed the entire world) has reached a major
historical crossroads – not dissimilar in scale and significance to 1648,
1815 or 1945. We are entering a complex period of power transition,
triggered simultaneously by the end of the Cold War and by globaliza-
tion. These processes reflect powerful movements of history’s tectonic
plates. The challenges they have thrown up are like nothing the world has
seen before. The ‘Westphalian System’ (Moore 2010) morphed, after the
Napoleonic Wars, into the ‘Concert of Europe’ which proved quite inca-
pable of managing the rise of new challengers (Taylor 1954). The 75-year
European civil war (1870–1945) pitting France against Germany, which
twice dragged the rest of the world to Armageddon, could only be ended
by the massive military involvement of the two superpowers (Ferguson
2006). The bipolarity of the Cold War years succeeded, in part through
the balance of nuclear terror, in preserving the peace between the major
powers – yet at the expense of millions of dead in proxy wars across the
Global South. For 15 years after 1989, US uni-polarity preserved a tense
and increasingly challenged form of global order (Brooks and Wohlforth
2008; Walt 2005; Joffe 2007), which nevertheless proved elusive in two
main war zones: Iraq and Afghanistan. In the second decade of the
twenty-first century, the principal global players are continental-scale
nation-states (USA, Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia,
Australia), plus a small number of international institutions (UN, IMF,
WTO) and regional regimes – primarily the European Union. The chal-
lenges are unprecedented: the stabilization of large areas of the globe
marked by failing or failed states; the integration into a consensual new
international order of large and powerful states marked by vastly differ-
ent political, economic, social and religious cultures but linked by dense
networks of global interdependence; the elimination of global poverty
and despair and the violence it engenders; the management of weapons
proliferation and the pursuit of arms control; the reversal of looming
climate catastrophe; the generation of renewable and sustainable energy
supplies. The challenge is all the greater in that all these problems are
interlinked.
The first major attempt at policy level to formulate a coherent
approach to CSDP at strategic cultural level was the publication, in
December 2003, of the European Security Strategy paper (European
Council 2003). We have referred on several occasions already to this
seminal, but ultimately dated paper.
The European Security Strategy: New Norms for a New World?

A Secure Europe in a Better World was presented to and accepted by the
European Council in Brussels on 12 December 2003. The ESS sets out in
geo-political terms the normative strategic thinking behind CSDP. The

document was instantly subjected to intense comment and analysis – at
least in Europe (Haine 2003a; Biscop and Coolsaet 2003; Patten 2004;
Bailes 2005; Biscop 2005; Heusgen 2005; Martinsen 2004; Toje 2005;
Dannreuther and Peterson 2006; Whitman 2006). The ESS revolves
around a number of key concepts which have informed the overall
normative approach of CSDP. The first is ‘comprehensive security’ which
dates back to the Helsinki Final Act and reflects the intense discussions
over a new definition of security which characterized the 1990s
(Kirchner and Sperling 2002). The second key concept, as noted by
Biscop (2005), is that of global public goods which emerged out of
debates within the UN – physical security and stability; enforceable legal
order; open and inclusive economic order; general well-being; health,
education and a clean environment (Ferroni and Mody 2002). Thirdly,
the notion of comprehensive security is increasingly linked to the new
theories of human security which is defined as ‘freedom for individuals
from basic insecurities caused by gross human rights violations’ (Kaldor
and Glasius 2006).
The document itself inevitably constitutes something of a compromise
between different cultures and approaches among the EU’s member
states. The first section deals with the global security environment and
gives recognition to the mixed perceptions of globalization that exist. It
pays greater attention to the root causes of poverty and global suffering
than its US equivalent (US National Security Strategy 2002). It identifies
five key threats: terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), failed
states, organized crime, and regional conflicts. The ESS is unequivocal in
stating that the EU faces essentially the same challenges as the United
States. The second section outlines the EU’s ‘strategic objectives’. Two
features are stressed: that ‘the first line of defence will often be abroad’ –
via conflict prevention; and that none of the new threats is ‘purely mili-
tary’ or manageable through purely military means. The strategic objec-
tives rest on two main pillars: building security in the European region,
and creating a viable new international order. The former entails devel-
oping, through a comprehensive ‘neighbourhood policy’, a ‘ring of
friends from the Caucasus to the Balkans and around the
Mediterranean’. The document is strong in its assertion of a commitment
to upholding and developing international law and in recognizing the
UN as the primary source of international legitimacy. The final section
addresses the policy implications for the EU. The EU needs to be ‘more
active, more capable and more coherent’. One of the boldest statements
of the document (which guaranteed applause in the United States) is the
need to develop a strategic culture that fosters ‘early, rapid and, where
necessary, robust intervention’. The Strategy, it is claimed, will
contribute ‘to an effective multilateral system leading to a fairer, safer
and more united world’.
Like many of the core documents of CSDP, this first attempt to define
a trans-European security strategy is, at the most immediate level, little
more than a sequence of words designed to convey a message. The ESS
suggests a high level of ambition for CSDP – one which was undoubtedly
far beyond what probably a majority of member states was actually
comfortable with. In any case, as we saw in earlier chapters, its subse-
quent implementation left much to be desired. In December 2007, the
European Council asked Solana to ‘examine the implementation of the
strategy’ and to consider ‘elements to complement it’. The entire security
community, scholars, think-tankers and policy-makers spent much of the
following year in workshops and colloquia generating ideas and sugges-
tions for improvement. Alas, these were largely ignored by EU leaders
and the December 2008 Council contented itself with endorsing a Report
on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy (European
Council 2008a) which left the ESS untouched, noting that its implemen-
tation ‘remains a work in progress’. Indeed!
Following that 2008 (non-)revision of the ESS, the world changed
again – dramatically. The subsequent five years witnessed massive after-
shocks from the recent movements of history’s tectonic plates: the humil-
iation of the ‘Western’ model of market-driven capitalism and, despite
the resilience of liberalism (Schmidt and Thatcher 2013), the return of
the state as an economic and financial actor (Binder 2013); the crisis of
the eurozone (Jones 2013); the US prospect of energy independence; the
election of Barack Obama, the end of two highly controversial wars, and
growing questions about the utility of military power (Bacevich 2008);
the emergence and banalization of drone warfare (Benjamin 2013); the
return to the strategic scene of Russia – with a vengeance – in Georgia
(Asmus 2010); the rise to serious prominence of China (Kissinger 2012)
and the emergence of the G-20 as the predominant grouping of major
powers (Kirton 2013); the increasing centrality of India as a power
broker in South Asia and beyond (Kapur 2013); the designation of the
Indian Ocean as the principal theatre of future great power jostling
(Kaplan 2011); France’s return to NATO after 43 years’ absence, but at
the same time NATO’s increasing discomfiture in its first ever ‘out-of-
area’ mission in Afghanistan (Kashmeri 2011); Obama’s project for the
;global-zero’ elimination of nuclear weapons, accompanied by the real
risk of nuclear proliferation (Cirincione 2013); the transformation of
Africa where new global players are vying with one another for strategic
resources in what used to be perceived as Europe’s ‘backyard’ (Harbeson
and Rothschild 2013); the Arab Spring and the transformation of the
Middle East (Lynch 2013) and the banalization of chemical weapons
usage in Syria; the death of Bin Laden and the shift of Al Qaeda to the
Sahel (Atwan 2013). The world is being redefined in terms of relative
power assets. How relevant is the ESS’s approach to power (a word it
avoids using) in this new context? One Polish calculation of relative
power, based on a combination of GDP-PPP and demography, sought to

identify the ten major powers of the twenty-first century. If the EU stands
together, then it qualifies easily for a seat as one of the top four (China,
the EU, the US, India – in that order). If it fails to stick together, then not
a single European state makes it into the top five, Germany comes in as
number six and France and the UK scrape in (behind Indonesia) at
numbers nine and ten (Rybinski 2009).
It is a truism that the EU was founded to solve yesterday’s problem –
the one thousand year old civil war within and between Europe’s
barbarous nations. That narrative of internal peace, that message of
reconciliation, that solution of integration are no longer adequate – or
even salient – to the generation of twenty-somethings who will run the
Union in 20 years’ time. That generation takes internal peace for granted.
Given the global context I have just outlined, there is an urgent need for
a new type of motivation, a new EU narrative. If the member states
continue to fiddle while Brussels burns, then the whole intricate tapestry
woven over the last 50-odd years could well begin to unravel. Einstein
defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expect-
ing different results’. If the prime motive force behind the European story
is narrow member-state national interest, then the Union as a global
actor will remain merely a figment of the political imagination, a revolu-
tionary new Broadway show for which there were many rehearsals,
props and a script but which simply failed to open. The EU sorely needs
a grand strategy.
The literature on ‘grand strategy’ in general is voluminous (Liddell
Hart 1967; Paret et al. 1986; Luttwak 1987; Kennedy 1991; Murray et
al. 1994; Murray et al. 2011). For centuries, the concept was indissocia-
ble from Clausewitz and the ‘art of war’ (Clausewitz 2009). More
recently, it has been recast as ‘a process, a constant adaptation to shifting
conditions and circumstances in a world where chance, uncertainty and
ambiguity dominate’ (Murray and Grimsley 1994: 1). If that highly
elusive objective was valid in the 1990s, it is even more so today given the
interwoven complexities of the modern world which we outlined above.
In short, grand strategy is a tough nut to crack. If a definitional approach
is unavoidable, then the formula adopted by John Gaddis and Paul
Kennedy is probably as concise as possible: ‘the calculated relation of
means to large ends’ (Brady-Johnson 2010). Such a definition avoids any
circumscribed designation either of ‘means’ or of ‘large ends’. But it does
insist that these two elements are crucial and that the relation between
them is ‘calculated’.
As far as the European Union is concerned, such an approach offers
both positive and negative dimensions. The negatives derive mainly from
the extent to which the urgency of the grand strategy agenda runs
counter to the collaborative and iterative mode which is the essence of
EU decision-making (Howorth 2009a). Grand strategy requires the sort
of intuitive overview which rarely occurs in EU settings. It runs counter

to the specialization logic which underpins much of the activity of EU
officials and institutions – the ever greater mastery of highly focused
dossiers. Grand strategy must be based on the extraction of key but
limited information from a large range of sources and its quasi-instinc-
tive (rather than scientific or systematic) evaluation. Secondly, grand
strategy demands the type of bold decision-taking and implementation
from which Europeans generally recoil. The iterations of EU decision-
making involve the constant weighing of pros and cons, bargains and
compromises: a little bit of this for the Greeks and a little bit of that for
the Poles. Grand strategy, on the other hand, requires the early fixing of
an overall objective followed by its focused pursuit. At the same time,
and somewhat paradoxically, a strategic approach must know how to
respond to the unexpected. This requires agile leadership rather than iter-
ative deliberations seeking common denominators. Leadership itself
needs to transcend bargains and compromises and to demonstrate that
followers are willing, indeed happy to be led. This again is foreign to the
EU experience which goes to extraordinary lengths to incorporate the
viewpoints of everybody, even of those who are hostile. And finally,
grand strategy requires great discourse. From Pericles to Churchill, great
leaders have known how to use words to transform strategic reality. And
because words speak to the emotions, there tends to have to be an iden-
tity component in the magic. To date, no EU leader has so far asked its
citizens to go ‘once more unto the breach’ (Gaddis 2005).
Yet the definition also carries positive dynamics for the European
Union. What are the EU’s strong points as an international actor? There
are several, and they are not insignificant. They all relate to the context
in which international relations is set to take place over the next few
decades. In this context, the EU does have a comparative advantage. It
needs to learn to leverage it. First, the world has now enjoyed 65 years of
multilateral institutionalism and the progressive accumulation of a
corpus of international law which has sought – with relative success – to
regulate relations between states which operate under anarchy. The EU
has blazed that trail as effectively as (if not more effectively than) any
other actor. Second, we have an intensifying system of what Joseph Nye
and Robert Keohane have called ‘complex interdependence’ – the thickly
woven, deeply intermeshed and structurally interrelated global networks
of investments, exchanges, flows of every conceivable type – and even
interests – between nation-states and other actors (Keohane and Nye
1977). In many ways, in terms of forging and managing complex inter-
dependence, the EU is in a class of its own.
Third, the bloody violence of war in the twentieth century demon-
strates conclusively that territorial aggrandizement no longer pays. The
recent wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that military
power alone has very little utility when it comes to solving complex
socio-political problems (Bacevich 2008). Thomas Barnett has warned of

the pointlessness, in the twenty-first-century world, of deploying naked
military might – what he calls the ‘Leviathan Force’ – without having in
advance fully thought through what happens next (Barnett 2004, 2009).
The EU understood this dilemma earlier than most other players. The EU
as a military actor has trail-blazed integration of military instruments
and ‘everything that happens next’. Fourth, the ‘international commu-
nity’ has arrived at a historical turning point where failed states have
become more dangerous than strong states, where collective security
becomes more relevant than territorial defence, where human rights
become as important as states’ rights, and where multilevel bargaining
trumps muscle-flexing. In this radically new approach to IR, the EU has
blazed an often lonely trail. It may not yet have mastered (or even under-
stood what is involved in) the ‘comprehensive approach’, but at least it is
aware of its centrality.
In order to deliver on the serious potential it commands in the twenty-
first century, the EU needs strategic vision. For several years, there has
been mounting pressure for such a development among commentators
and analysts (Gnesotto 2009; Biscop et al. 2009; Shapiro and Witney
2009, Howorth 2010; Rogers 2011; Biscop and Coelmont 2012;
Missiroli 2013; Simon 2013). The European Council’s December 2008
‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy’ recog-
nized that, over the preceding five years, the threats facing the EU had
become ‘increasingly complex’, that ‘we must be ready to shape events’
by ‘becoming more strategic in our thinking’, and that this would involve
being ‘more effective and visible around the world’ (European Council
2008). Yet, disappointingly, the report made no effort to outline what
these laudable ambitions might require or how they could be achieved.
The Reflexion Group on the Future of the EU 2030 noted in its May
2010 report the ‘urgent need for a common European strategic concept’.
It urged the drafting of a strategic White Paper ‘to define the Union’s
long-term priorities and become the reference framework for day-to-day
external action’ (Project Europe 2010: 37). In May 2013, the French
White Paper on National Defence explicitly called for the writing of a
‘Livre Blanc de l’Union Européenne’ which would clearly define the
interests and the strategic objectives of the EU (Livre Blanc 2013: 65).
The Lisbon Treaty enjoins the member states to cooperate: ‘Before
undertaking any action on the international scene or entering into any
commitment which could affect the Union’s interests, each Member State
shall consult the others within the European Council or the Council.
Member States shall ensure, through the convergence of their actions,
that the Union is able to assert its interests and values on the interna-
tional scene’ (Art 16/b). The Reflection Group report stated bluntly that
‘we will only overcome the challenges which lie ahead if all of us – politi-
cians, citizens, employers and employees – are able to pull together with
a new common purpose defined by the needs of the current age’ (Project
Europe 2010: 2). Getting from there to a collective strategic approach,
however, poses a massive challenge (Biscop 2012). One collective
attempt to think all these issues through by confronting and comparing
the security strategies of nine European countries concluded that, while
strategy-making is difficult enough at national level, at the international
level it ‘becomes much more difficult’. Focus and precision are hugely
challenging: ‘most international strategies remain vague and broad in
order to accommodate the different positions within the organization
and these can be thought of more as guidelines than fully elaborated
strategies’ (Tanner et al. 2009: 76).
2013: The Year of Strategy?

In the summer of 2013, mindful of the crucial meeting of the European
Council on defence scheduled for December of that year, a number of
major reports appeared – all calling for and offering thoughts on a
European strategic approach. The first was an initiative launched by the
Strategic Research Institute of the French Ecole Militaire (IRSEM),
which had issued, in 2012, an 86-page comparative analysis of the
national White Papers of the then 27 EU member states in an attempt to
produce a European framework for an overall security strategy (IRSEM
2012). That study noted the extreme heterogeneity of the 27 disparate
European White Papers and called for an indispensable effort at conver-
gence. The IRSEM report was then refined, in April 2013, by the
European Council on Foreign Relations (De France and Witney 2013).
Noting the extreme seriousness of what the authors called the EU’s
‘strategic myopia and cacophony’, they called for an EU grand strategy
to be initiated by Herman Van Rompuy at the European Council meet-
ing in December 2013. The second initiative was launched by the foreign
ministers of Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden in an attempt to generate
discussion about the EU’s role as a global actor at a time of sweeping
international change. It was taken up by the main think-tanks in the four
initiating countries and joined by a variety of other think-tanks in
Europe. A number of key workshops were organized in the four capital
cities and an overall report issued in May 2013 (EGS 2013). The third
development was a collective initiative launched by 16 of the ‘great and
the good’ in European security and defence: ambassadors, flag officers,
parliamentarians and academics, each of whom wrote a substantial essay
on one or other aspect of a grand strategy for the EU. The 95-page set of
recommendations was published in June 2013 (IERI 2013). The
substance of these three major reports reflects their specific origins: the
first is very focused on military strategy; the second offers a broader
diplomatic vision; the third reflects the heterogeneity of its authors. The
starting point for all of these reports is the recognition that the world has
changed very rapidly, that new and unfamiliar threats have arisen which
cannot be met by traditional instruments, that the world is being struc-
tured by an ever smaller number of ever larger units, familiarly referred
to as multipolarity, that the EU, as the world’s largest economy – with
global interests – should both perceive itself and instrumentalize itself as
one of those poles, that the member states, on their own (even the large
ones), cannot be players in this new system and that, therefore, a collec-
tive strategy has become indispensable. What do these major reports tell
us?
The ECFR report, which is essentially limited to considerations of
military strategy, breaks EU member states down into those that actually
have a strategy (France and the UK), those that have some sense of strate-
gic purpose (Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic), those with global
horizons, although little in the way of operational plans (the
Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia), ‘abstentionists’,
who have no coherent plan and in some cases no defence ministry as such
(Luxembourg, Austria, Ireland, Malta), ‘drifters’, whose national plans,
for one reason or another, have not been updated since the turn of the
century (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Belgium) and the rest, dubbed ‘local-
ists’, whose main concern is their own territorial integrity (De France and
Witney 2013: 4–8). The main proposal of this report is for a ‘European
semester’ in defence, rather like the procedure which now operates for
economic and monetary policy in the eurozone, whereby the 28 member
states would submit their national defence budget and planning for
scrutiny by their partners. This, it is argued, ‘would highlight as no other
process could the extent of the waste and duplication in European
defence expenditure, the size and nature of the capability gaps, present
and future; the incoherence of national programmes when summed
together; and crucially the opportunities for getting more from less’ (De
France and Witney 2013: 9). The comparison of the 27 national ‘strate-
gies’ is enlightening. The blueprint for an EU grand strategy is somewhat
minimalist, but that, of course, was not the primary purpose of the study.
The European Global Strategy report, emanating from the four
foreign ministries (Sweden, Poland, Italy and Spain), stresses that the
main objective of the European Union is ‘to promote its shared values,
peace and the well-being of its peoples’ in an increasingly turbulent and
unpredictable world (Bonino et al. 2013). It devotes a great deal of time
to the optimization of conditions for enhanced global trade, which is
seen as the basis of Europeans’ well-being. It suggests six guiding princi-
ples behind a global strategy. ‘European economic and social develop-
ment’ should be seen as the condition for Europeans to compete
successfully in a global context. ‘A neighbourhood of democracy, human
rights and the rule of law’, is seen as a vital concomitant of regional – and
therefore – global stability. ‘A sustainable environment and access to
natural resources’ requires multilateral frameworks of regulation but
also diversification and adaptation. ‘Minimal constraints on the global

flow of people, ideas, goods and services’ is identified as a key principle
of a liberal world order. ‘Just and effective governance systems at a
regional and global level’ is again a necessary corollary to the promotion
of European values. The sixth precondition is ‘a secure and resilient EU’
in which the new threats of the twenty-first century have been contained
or dissipated (EGS 2013: 6–7). These preconditions are followed by 11
strategic objectives which amount in many ways to an elaboration on the
requirements of meeting the preconditions – objectives such as furthering
the internal market, enhancing energy efficiency, staying the course on
enlargement, forging a new relationship with the United States. Critics of
the EGS document were quick to note that it ‘has a distinct flavour of
motherhood and apple pie’ (Ojanen and Raik 2013) and indeed that was
my own reaction on reading the full report. It is extremely difficult to see
how these precepts could be rendered operational. Indeed, one of the
contributors to the EGS process, Anand Menon, argued that the entire
objective of drawing up a European strategic blueprint was unhelpful
and unnecessary: ‘Any document that all 27 member states can agree on
would be flaccid, couched in generalities, and unable to provide a guide
to specific foreign policy actions’ (Menon 2012). I disagreed strongly
with Menon at the time, but given the final product, I am no longer so
sure that he was wrong.
I shall return to a discussion of the complex issues raised by the EGS
paper after briefly presenting the third major report to be issued in 2013.
The lengthy set of recommendations published by the Institut Européen
des Relations Internationales addresses a more complex range of issues
than the other two papers. It also enters more fully into the discussion of
the real stakes over the coming decades. Starting with an open-ended
assessment of the implications of a multipolar world, which it sees as
oscillating between polycentrism and anarchy, it considers the new
threats the EU will face. The first is systemic instability. The traditional
Westphalian system, the paper argues, is being transcended, but it is not
clear by what. The second threat is regional conflict relatively close to
home (Caucasus, Sahel). The growth of fundamentalism has generated a
new competition between value systems. Thirdly, there are specific
European vulnerabilities such as energy and cyber-attacks, climate
change and new technologies. The new multipolar order offers the EU
possibilities of influence providing it decides that it wishes to play a polar
role. Its key position at the confluence of several geo-strategic spaces
(Euro-Atlantic; Euro-Asian; Euro-Mediterranean/African; and Euro-
Arctic) gives it extensive leverage. The US ‘tilt’ encourages the EU to play
a much stronger role in the former. The uncertainties in the Euro-Asian
space make a strategic partnership with Russia unavoidable (however, it
does take two to tango). In the Euro-Mediterranean/African space, the
EU’s geographical, historical and diplomatic assets make it a more
central player than any of the other great powers (but is the EU’s collec-
tive will as strong as that of one of its member states – France?). The
document offers many suggestions for capitalizing on the EU’s strengths
(IERI 2013).
Between them, these three reports highlight the massive challenges
facing the EU in its task of generating some sort of strategic vision. The
issue of how the EU should go about the business of ‘promoting its
values’ in a multipolar, multicultural world, lies at the heart of the ongo-
ing international debate about the ‘West and the Rest’. How can the
current process of power transition best be managed in the interests of
global peace? Political scientists and international relations scholars have
theorized that major power transitions tend to be accompanied by mili-
tary conflict (Organski 1968). As the stakes currently seem to be on the
rise in the South China Sea, this issue acquires huge salience, especially in
the context of the US ‘tilt’ to Asia. Is the EU planning on ‘tilting’ along
with the US? (Kaiser and Muniz 2013; Islam 2013). Scholars such as
John Ikenberry have argued that the liberal international system put in
place after the Second World War is sufficiently strong, attractive and
resilient to be able to co-opt the rising powers into its logic and institu-
tions without any fundamental change in its values. It is easy to join and
very difficult to overthrow – therefore the strategic objective of the West
should be to strengthen it (Ikenberry 2011). Since the end of the Cold
War, the EU has been relatively successful in helping to adapt the inter-
national institutions of interdependence to the new globalized and liber-
alized environment (Hoffmann et al. 1993). Its approach has been
reminiscent, at the international institutional level, of the quest for
‘milieu goals’ theorized by Arnold Wolfers (Yalem 1960). However, this
tactic is currently facing more serious obstacles as the world’s rising
powers attempt to modify the institutional framework which has domi-
nated for the past half century. The ‘Rest’ are unlikely simply to swallow
Western values and systems hook, line and sinker. Some scholars have
insisted on the need for the West to strike a ‘global grand bargain’ with
the Rest in order to avoid the inevitable military conflict theorized by
Organski and others (Hutchings 2008; Hutchings and Kemp 2008). Still
others, such as Charles Kupchan, envisage a global order in which, for
the first time in history, no one power will exercise unrivalled authority
and in which there will be multiple and divergent pathways towards
modernity. No single power will be able to impose its will on others
(Kupchan 2012). It is therefore not enough simply to state that the EU
will ‘promote its values’. It needs to know how it is going to achieve this,
in a world featuring significant political–cultural diversity, without
coming to blows with those who do not share those values.
There are many instances in which the EU has sought to promote a
‘principled foreign policy’ in the teeth of opposition from other interna-
tional actors, including the US. On issues as diverse as climate change,
food safety, the death penalty, torture, environmental policy, the rights
of children and women, landmines, sustainable development, democracy
promotion, the EU has generally taken a principled position in interna-
tional negotiations. Yet it is important to keep a sense of perspective. On
Kyoto and climate change, one major expert has recently offered the
following damning appraisal of the EU’s global contribution: ‘there has
been much action but little effect. The rhetoric, the plethora of initiatives,
directives, and interventions have not been matched by outcomes’ (Helm
2009). The EU went to the international climate change conference in
Copenhagen in 2010, confident in its role as a norm entrepreneur able to
persuade other actors to follow its virtuous example. It discovered to its
astonishment that soft power cuts no ice at all when push really comes to
shove (Groen and Niemann 2011). On development aid, for which the
EU takes pride in being the biggest donor in the world, it has been calcu-
lated that the cost to the Global South of the EU’s protectionist and subsi-
dized Common Agricultural Policy amounts to several times the value of
all the European aid monies disbursed (Grant et al. 2004). While the EU
roundly condemns all forms of torture, several EU governments have
recently been found complicit in assisting the US policy of ‘extraordinary
rendition’ whereby US prisoners arbitrarily labelled as ‘enemy combat-
ants’ are flown around the world to regimes where the administration of
torture is not only legal but the very purpose of the visit. According to a
European Parliament Report, the CIA operated 1,245 flights involving
the transport of suspects to torture bases overseas, often with the full
knowledge of the European governments involved (European Parliament
2006). In particular, the UK’s complicity in this and other shameful prac-
tices with respect to the island of Diego Garcia has been amply docu-
mented (Vine 2009; Freedland 2009). The EU may be a rights-based,
values-driven, postmodern entity. It has certainly done more, through its
power of attraction, to multiply the number of democracies in the world
(and particularly in Europe) than any other international actor
(Vachudova 2005; Grabbe 2006). But it is still made up of member states
who behave exactly as all states have behaved since the Treaty of
Westphalia. Alyson Bailes, pondering the coherence between the
declared values behind CSDP and other areas of policy, goes even
further:
The other side of this coin is that the EU is only too ready to do things
that hurt people for its own interests’ sake in just about any other,
non-military, field of its collective policy. EU trade policies hurt the
same weak states the EU tries to heal through its ESDP missions and
security advice; tough EU immigration and asylum policies throw
individuals back to the same environments that the Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) defines as an offence against human values.
(Bailes 2008: 120)
In evaluating the EU’s commitment to hard and fast values and principles
in foreign policy, elements of opportunism and hypocrisy are super-
abundant.
How should the EU deal – strategically – with the challenge of engage-
ment with actors who do not share (much, if at all) its commitment to
what in the West are considered basic human rights and freedoms and
are often unthinkingly categorized as ‘universal values’? While recogniz-
ing that other civilizations espouse different values, the EU should give
serious thought to the most effective way of engaging in ‘values competi-
tion’ without risking unnecessarily deleterious material consequences
and without compromising its basic beliefs. Can the EU, because it covets
a barrel of Russian oil, turn a blind eye to the gunning down in Moscow
of independent journalists? Should it ignore repression in Tibet or
XinJiang because it wishes to launch a new supermarket chain across
China? The literature on human rights promotion in the EU is consider-
able, and the conclusions are broadly consistent (Balfour 2011). The EU
promotes a strong self-image as a purveyor of human rights in its foreign
policies. The Commission ‘has made human rights and democracy a
central aspect of its external relations: in the political dialogue it holds
with third countries; through its development cooperation and assis-
tance; or through its action in multilateral fora such as the United
Nations’ (European Commission 2007). The Council, Commission and
Parliament have all set up committees or working parties to monitor
human rights situations in third countries and Javier Solana appointed a
Personal Representative for Human Rights. Yet the ‘human rights card’
is applied and enforced with considerable elasticity and selectivity and it
is very difficult to detect a principled thread running through the EU’s
approach to these issues. Different member states frequently adopt
diametrically opposite policies to deal with the same problem, each argu-
ing that their particular approach is more likely to further the cause of
human rights and democracy. Thus, for instance, the UK and other EU
member states demanded sanctions and a travel ban against Zimbabwe
and its president Robert Mugabe because of his appalling human rights
record inside his own country, while France and Belgium opposed such a
policy because of Mugabe’s allegedly constructive approach to peace
negotiations in Congo (Castle 2003). It is unrealistic to assume a clear
distinction between idealism and interests in the promotion, say, of
democracy. While the EU has been very successful in promoting democ-
racy among its accession states, this has not been devoid of interest-based
considerations: the policy helped prop up European security, it helped
the EU raise its international profile and it gave a fillip to the integration
process (Olsen 2000). Richard Youngs has cautioned against assuming
normative, value-driven motives behind external policy to the exclusion
of a concomitant focus on strategic calculation (Youngs 2004). Media-
assisted scuffles around the passage through Western cities of the
Olympic flame in 2008 did little for the people of Tibet and much to
enflame Chinese nationalism among a younger generation which had
hitherto been relatively immune to it. Such activity was, in short, coun-
terproductive. Given the limited success rate to date of efforts to leverage
human rights conditionality or to enforce democratic ‘norms’, even in the
EU’s direct neighbourhood (Kirkpatrick et al. 2013), let alone further
afield (Donno 2008, 2013), a radically new approach is required. The EU
should perhaps think less in terms of politically-loaded fungible condi-
tionality (a new trade agreement in exchange for greater internet access)
or of megaphone declarations of outrage about the incarceration of Aung
San Suu Kyi or the arrest of a Falun Gong leader, and more in terms of
discreet and ongoing conversations with cognate parties in the other
country (parliamentarians raising issues with parliamentarians, ministers
with ministers, officials with officials, but all outside the glare of the
media). The key questions which seem not yet to have been addressed
are: to what extent does the recognition of value diversity imply the rela-
tivization of value promotion; and what are the most effective methods
of influencing the outcome of a competition between conflicting values?
That is the stuff of strategic thinking, but it is not yet evident on the EU
radar screen.
On the other hand, where genocide and gross violations of human
rights, civil war or insurgency, physical threats to European interests, or
other acts of violence require the EU to intervene in the internal affairs of
sovereign states, Europeans will need to be clear about why, when,
where, how and with what instruments the Union should become
involved. Here, there are three sets of considerations which should guide
the EU’s global involvements. The first is the extent to which a belief in
and a commitment to human security (Kaldor and Glasius 2006) and/or
the responsibility to protect (R2P – ICISS 2001) can or should trigger the
deployment of military and civilian instruments in the cause of crisis
management. The EU is arguably the first post-Westphalian polity
(Cooper 2003). While it respects the internal and external dimensions of
state sovereignty, it does not regard these as absolutes. At times, state
leaders will be deemed in breach of their moral obligations to their own
people: intervention then becomes conceivable, indeed, under R2P, an
international duty and, to that extent, can be regarded as legitimate. The
EU needs to be much clearer than is currently the case about the circum-
stances under which such a situation might be considered to exist – irre-
spective of aspects of legality or practicality. The second set of
considerations addresses the legality of intervention. International law is
relatively clear. A UN mandate confers legality. The fact that an opera-
tion enjoys the support of 28 EU sovereign democracies (or 16, 19 or 28
NATO allies) does not. The European Security Strategy states that: ‘We
are committed to upholding and developing International Law. The
fundamental framework for international relations is the United Nations
Charter. The UNSC has the primary responsibility for the maintenance
of international peace and security.’ Yet, in 1999, 14 EU/NATO member
states agreed to wage war on Serbia in the absence of any UN mandate.
In 2003, the EU was split right down the middle over the crisis in Iraq.
Issues of mandates and legality are hotly disputed and still very much a
grey area (Roberts 2003; de Villepin 2003).
The third set of considerations was laid out by Tony Blair in his April
1999 Chicago speech – in part as an initial attempt to address the issue of
legality. These considerations involve questions about the practical crite-
ria for intervention. While acknowledging that the EU could not right
every global wrong, Blair formulated these criteria as follows:
First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for right-
ing humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only
means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplo-
matic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have
in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of
the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and
prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In
the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a
commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better
to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat perfor-
mances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests
involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo
demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a differ-
ence that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.
(Blair 1999)
In some ways, these questions were merely a recasting and updating of

the centuries-old principles underlying the concept of ‘just war’ (Walzer
2004; Brough et al. 2007). However, the mere fact of enunciating them
does not supply answers, still less a strategic blueprint and it is noticeable
that Blair sidestepped issues of legitimacy and legality. His questions are
essentially pragmatic. As we saw during the ‘Arab Spring’, lacking any
clear strategic answer to any of these sets of questions, the EU proved
totally ineffectual. This will not change until it begins to address seri-
ously the issue of grand strategy. What might be the practical, concrete
steps in that direction?
As we saw in Chapter 2, there are currently more than enough institu-
tions within the EU framework and there is no reason to add another
layer. However, existing agencies can easily be regrouped or reconfig-
ured to reflect the needs of a grand strategy. The 2010 Reflection Group
called for the establishment of ‘a European forecasting and analytical
unit, as part of the European External Action Service and working in
close cooperation with national centres under the principle of shared
intelligence’. Intelligence is a domain which goes to the very core of state

sovereignty. Attempts to develop some formal EU intelligence sharing
agency (or even procedures) have been bedevilled with suspicion and
mistrust (Müller-Willer 2004). Small states with no intelligence-gather-
ing facilities of their own resent their dependence on the large states.
Large EU states which do gather their own national intelligence (there are
seven of them: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden
and the United Kingdom) are traditionally reluctant to share it fully
either with one another or (still less) with smaller states. The result is that
the EU has had to make do with whatever scraps of intelligence its
member states are prepared to give it. There are two main intelligence
operations in the EU, the Intelligence Analysis Centre which is a branch
of the EEAS and the EUMS’s Intelligence Division. The former involves
70 to 80 analysts from all member states, working 24/7. It feeds intelli-
gence, garnered from agencies around the world, to the Council, via the
Political and Security Committee. The Intelligence Division, which is the
largest single component of the EUMS, involves several dozen senior offi-
cers working in three main branches: Policy, Requirements and
Production, supplying focused intelligence reports for the purposes of
operational planning and early warning (Antunes 2007). These agencies
liaise with and receive data from the EU’s Satellite Centre in Torrejon,
Spain.
The current arrangements are encouraging, but for the EU to generate
a serious intelligence-gathering facility of its own would require two
major developments. The first would be for the large member states
which enjoy their own intelligence-gathering facilities to agree to pool
the results in a comprehensive and transparent way. This would be a
huge step forward (Walsh 2009). The second would be for the United
Kingdom radically to revise its intimate relationship with US intelligence
– the price of which is a US-imposed prohibition from sharing most data
with EU partners. This would be an even greater leap forward and is
unlikely to happen soon (Svendsen 2009; Clark 2012). For the moment,
the EU’s intelligence arrangements are relatively satisfactory for the
limited purposes of overseas crisis management – but even there the
French operation Serval in Mali in 2013 was relatively dependent on US
intelligence. If the EU were ever to become serious about developing a
grand strategy, a qualitative leap towards an entirely new intelligence
framework and practice would be essential.
Beyond the generation of strategic intelligence, the second step in the
direction of a grand strategy would be to reorganize some of the existing EU
decision-shaping agencies so as to create some form of European Security
Council. Such an agency was first proposed by James Rogers in 2007:
The European Security Council’s role could be to provide a unified insti-

tutionalised setting at the European level for the relentless assessment of
security threats and strategic challenges. It could give advice to the

president of the Council of the European Union, the high representa-
tive and the Member States. It could be a centralised agency for
Member States to exchange and assess global and domestic intelli-
gence. The Security Council would provide a platform for input from
the European Union Institute for Security Studies and the European
Defence Agency, as well as from foreign offices and defence ministries
in the respective Member States. Finally, it could bestow a podium for
the formal exchange of ideas about foreign, security and defence poli-
cies between academics and think tank personnel with European prac-
titioners and officials. (Rogers 2007)
Many suggestions have since been formulated for a new overarching

institutional agency of this type. Alternative titles proposed have
included a ‘Strategic Advisory Body’, an ‘EU Forecasting and Analytical
Unit’, and a ‘European Defence Review Commission’ – among others. It
is significant that all analysts call for such a body. The key to the strate-
gic value-added of such a body would be its capacity to synergize the
inputs from a wide range of policy areas: trade, aid, development, diplo-
macy as well as the requirements of both the military and civilian dimen-
sions of international crisis management. It would, in short, become the
primary platform for the formulation and regular updating of an EU
grand strategy, akin to the quadrennial US National Security Strategy
documents. This would then, as a third step, require further develop-
ments in terms of operational planning.
The absence of any significant EU planning capability, and in particu-
lar of a dedicated Operational Headquarters (OHQ), has long been seen
as a major handicap to the development of CSDP (Biava 2009). As we
saw in Chapter 3, France has consistently sought to promote such a facil-
ity (in the name of empowering and autonomizing CSDP) and the UK has
equally consistently opposed it (arguing that this would ‘duplicate’ exist-
ing planning facilities at NATO, and that CSDP should in any case prior-
itize civilian planning where it can add value). Germany has hidden
behind this stand-off to avoid taking any decision, conscious that it has
misgivings about France’s military ambitions for the EU and, for its own
different reasons, not unsupportive of the UK’s somewhat disingenuous
support of civilian planning (Simon 2010).
These would be the major indispensable prerequisites for the develop-
ment of an EU grand strategy. Other initiatives would include growing
cooperation between the recently created External Action Service and the
diplomatic services of the member states; a lucid appraisal – by the
European Security Council – of the strategic objectives of the EU’s many
‘strategic partnerships’, and their calculated coordination; major further
development of the EU’s capacity for the mounting of international crisis
management missions, both civilian and military; the creation of new
configurations of the European Council, allowing for joint meetings (on

the model of the recent meetings of defence ministers and overseas devel-
opment ministers) between, say, foreign and interior ministers, trade and
development ministers, etc.; a significantly upgraded role for the
European Defence Agency, working in close cooperation with the
European Security Council and the External Action Service. Crucial too
will be the leadership of a dynamic few. This has now become a truism.
Franco-British leadership is problematic because of the ambivalent role
of the UK. Franco-German leadership is problematic because of
Germany’s nervousness. Increasingly, a consensus is building around the
designation of a ‘core group’ or ‘Eurogroup’ based on the Weimar Five
(France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain) (Sénat 2013; Coelmont and
de Langlois 2013). There are many other initiatives which would need to
be explored. An initial requirement would be for the EU to compose a
mission statement appropriate for the twenty-first century. The founding
narrative of ‘internal peace’, while by no means irrelevant, has exhausted
its motivating potential. Young Europeans are no longer impressed by
that post-war narrative and need fresh motivation in order to believe in
the European project. I would suggest that a new narrative informing the
EU’s global action might be: ‘to facilitate and engineer a peaceful transi-
tion towards a new global order’.
But before the EU could take that giant leap towards a collective
strategic purpose and vision, further progress would be essential in the
development of a common strategic culture.
Forging an EU Strategic Culture
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the govern-

ment ministry in most leading European nation-states which dealt with
defence, military planning and armaments procurement was named,
somewhat bluntly, Ministry of War. After the First World War, most
countries changed that title to Ministry of National Defence. Today,
most of them are called Ministry of Defence. Perhaps one day they will
shift register once again and become known as the Ministry of Collective
Security? Whatever their precise title (and the semantics are significant),
as we have seen, each of these EU ministries – now 28 of them – still
tends, to some degree, to perceive matters of war, peace and security
through a national lens. General de Gaulle noted that: ‘France was
forged by the sword’ (de Gaulle 1939: 1). Most European nation-states
have similarly long and bloody histories. The accidents of geography,
foundational mythologies, and turbulent overseas experiences have all
woven deeply rooted cultural narratives of national situation, security
and rank. Many elements contribute to these narratives: internal cultural
cohesion; interactions with neighbours; invasion, defeat and occupation;
past martial or imperial ambitions and traditions; solidity and durability

of national borders. The result is a cocktail that theoreticians and politi-
cal scientists have called ‘strategic culture’ (Snyder 1977; Booth 1979;
Gray 1984; Johnston 1995; Katzenstein 1996; Sondhaus 2006).
Although it would be an exaggeration to suggest that there are, within
the EU, 28 distinct strategic cultures, the exaggeration would not be
massive. The ways in which national entities think about defence and
security, the role of armies, the function of war and the likelihood of
peace are subtly different from one country to another. We saw with the
IRSEM/ECFR study (above) that each different member state has its own
approach to security, and this heterogeneity is amply confirmed by other
studies (Tanner et al. 2009; Biehl et al. 2013). In an early article on what
I called European security culture (Howorth 2002), I defined a number
of dichotomies which I argued would need to be transcended if Europe as
a whole was ever to move towards a common approach: differences
between allies and neutrals, between Atlanticists and Europeanists,
between those favouring professional power projection and those prior-
itizing conscript-based territorial defence, between emphases on military
as opposed to civilian instruments, between large states and small states,
between weapons systems providers and weapons systems consumers,
between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Since that article was written,
some of those dichotomies have begun to be resolved, but most have not.
Indeed, some scholars feel that things are going from bad to worse.
According to the authors of the most recent and most complete studies of
strategic culture, ‘the evolution of a genuinely European strategic culture
… never seemed as remote as in 2012’ (Biehl et al. 2013: 7). Nevertheless,
in recent years, a substantial and sophisticated literature (mainly deriving
from constructivist approaches) has begun to address the question of
whether developments in CSDP are or are not leading to the emergence
of a new, trans-European, strategic culture – Cornish and Edwards
(2005); Giegerich (2005); Meyer (2006); Sjursen (2006); Biehl et al.
(2013); Schmidt and Zyla (2013); Norheim-Martinsen (2013).
Much of the discussion of EU strategic culture posits the centrality of
identity at the heart of the concept (Anderson 2008). This immediately
appears to hang a question mark over the very viability of CSDP. If it is
assumed as a working hypothesis that, in order to function effectively,
CSDP must first await the generation of a common European identity
and the construction of a single strategic narrative, then the obvious
conclusion to be drawn is that nothing much is going to happen for a very
long time. One study which gauged the experiences of three countries
(Sweden, Germany and the UK) during the Kosovo conflict against their
persistent national security narratives, reached a negative conclusion:
‘Kosovo could have become a common experience that united the
European countries and told a joint story. However, this did not happen.
It appears that national strategic cultures are pre-eminent in obstructing
the creation of a common narrative about the ESDP’ (Heiselberg 2003:

35). Quite apart from the perils of expecting too much too soon, there is
a fundamental flaw in this type of approach. It is true that, from the late
eighteenth century onwards, the requirements of national defence
against invading foreign armies dictated national conscription, mass
mobilization, the construction of negative national stereotypes about the
other and the forging of a heroic national consciousness geared to collec-
tive survival – in short a national strategic culture. At stake was the very
existence of the national group. Yet the strategic situation of the EU in
the post-Cold War and early twenty-first century is very different. There
are no discernible existential threats massing on the borders of the Union
and, to the extent to which there are any discernible collective beliefs
about the other, these tend to emphasize tolerance, human rights and
multiculturalism – inclusiveness rather than exclusion. Where certain
(usually extremist) constituencies within each nation take an opposite
stance, the focus is not on an external enemy but on what is perceived as
an internal threat (Chebel d’Appollonia and Reich 2008). Moreover, the
new approaches to security stress indivisibility, positive-sum games and
collective security. At the same time, developments in international law,
the effects of globalization, alongside the persistence of pockets of what
Robert Cooper has called ‘pre-modern’ society (Cooper 2003: 16–18)
have presented the international community in general and the EU in
particular with the challenge of humanitarian intervention: the use of
military force in support of emerging international norms. In this connec-
tion, one might ask whether the generation of an EU-wide strategic
culture based on the same identity-driven criteria as the existing national
strategic cultures is necessary or even appropriate. European nation-
states were forged by violence and war. The EU has been constructed
through peace and dialogue.
Although much has been said and written about the lack of (and
normative desirability for) a European identity (Shore 2000; Habermas
and Derrida 2003; Robyn 2005), such a development has never been
essential to the functioning of the EU in other policy areas. The differen-
tiation between being and doing in Europe is fundamental to this debate
(Howorth 2000b). However much the European Commission and
certain European intellectuals might wish the EU’s 500 million citizens to
converge towards ever greater cultural commonality and a European
identity, the absence of any serious such development has not, to date,
prevented the EU from functioning rather well. The smooth running of
the Coal and Steel Community, the springboard for the entire EU project,
was assured despite the reality that an overwhelming majority of
European citizens knew nothing of its existence. The Common
Agricultural Policy, while keeping certain rural communities alive which
might otherwise have died out, would itself probably become a dead
duck if it depended for its survival on the existence of a common
European identity. Although some countries relinquished their national

currencies only with reluctance because of the element of national identi-
fication with, say, the Deutschmark, the Franc or the Drachma, the effi-
ciency and functionality of the Euro have been largely unaffected by
issues of identity. Similarly, there is no obvious reason why the expert
skills of professional armed forces, operating in international format to
pursue crisis management missions, usually mandated by the United
Nations, should require the forging of a trans-European identity in order
to be possible (Baun 2005).
However, the centrality of issues of identity to much of the strategic
culture literature does not mean that convergence on an underlying
mindset informing the objectives of ESDP is unlikely or impossible.
Nicole Gnesotto (2000) defined a common security culture extremely
broadly as: ‘the aim and the means to incite common thinking, compati-
ble reactions, coherent analysis – in short, a strategic culture that is
increasingly European, one that transcends the different national security
cultures and interests’. The European Security Strategy indeed calls for
the development of such a convergent ‘strategic culture’. If the debate is
framed less around issues of identity and more around capacity, objec-
tives and implementation, there are obvious grounds for concluding that
such a convergence is already taking place. Cornish and Edwards, updat-
ing their earlier definition (Cornish and Edwards 2001: 587), conceptu-
alize strategic culture as ‘the political and institutional confidence and
processes to manage and deploy military force, coupled with external
recognition of the EU as a legitimate actor in the military sphere’
(Cornish and Edwards 2005: 802). They conclude that, whatever its very
real shortcomings, CSDP has ‘developed markedly’ in a range of areas
central to trans-European convergence on key aspects of security and
defence policy (military capacity, reliability and legitimacy, civil–military
integration and a mutually acceptable working relationship with
NATO). These are features which we have examined in other chapters of
this book and my conclusions tally with those of Cornish and Edwards.
At this relatively practical level of EU achievement, the very fact that,
only six years after Saint-Malo, a wide range of different types of over-
seas missions were being mounted under an EU command and an EU flag
offers clear evidence that convergence is taking place. Other analysts,
working within the framework of strategic culture and therefore sensi-
tively attuned to the distinctiveness and durability of national cultures,
tentatively concur, even to the point of seeing signs of convergence
between, on the one hand, the Central and Eastern European states many
saw as irrevocably wedded to the US at the time of the Iraq war, and, on
the other hand, those Western European states that opposed the war
(Longhurst and Zaborowski 2004, 2005). However, without going to
the lengths of demanding – or waiting for the appearance of – a trans-EU
identity, there are more stringent criteria and tests that can be applied,
even from the constructivist perspective, to see whether, in reality, the

CSDP narrative that is emerging is one of convergence or of divergence.
Two major studies from the mid-2000s offer a more identity-driven
definition of strategic culture and concluded that convergence – albeit
limited and slow – was nevertheless taking place despite the absence of
any discernible progress towards an EU-wide identity. Bastian Giegerich
(2005; 2006) and Christoph Meyer (2006) illustrate the best and the
most imaginative in recent constructivist analysis of strategic culture.
Although each of their approaches, despite some overlap, is methodolog-
ically distinct, and although they focus to some extent on different coun-
tries, their conclusions are comparable and complementary. Giegerich
studied the impact of EU-level security policy on the strategic cultures of
eight EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, UK, Denmark, Ireland,
Spain and Sweden) and found that adaptation of those national cultures
to an emerging European strategic culture was ‘gradual and limited but
driven by constant interaction and the emergence of collective norms’
(Giegerich 2005: 238). Meyer compared the evolution of both public and
elite opinion in four countries (Germany, France, UK and Poland)
through an analysis of changing threat perceptions, mediatized crisis
learning, and institutional socialization and found ‘areas of shared
consensus and convergence, particularly regarding a more activist inter-
pretation of goals regarding humanitarian intervention, an increasing
support for the role of the EU as a military actor, and a growing concern
over domestic and international authorization’ (Meyer 2006: 169). Both
scholars stress that the process of convergence is limited and very slow
(this being a value which is both highly personal and relative) and that
the challenges to the emergence of a genuinely trans-EU strategic culture
remain strong. But both nevertheless detect clear although limited signs
of convergence. To the extent to which it is possible to generalize, this
was a kind of consensus among scholars working on strategic culture in
the mid-2000s. Ten years later, the picture is rather less clear-cut.
Both Meyer and Giegerich continue to push forward our understand-
ing of strategic culture. Bastian Giegerich, with his co-editors and collab-
orators, has attempted nothing less than a stock-taking and indeed a
general mapping of national strategic cultures across Europe, together
with an assessment of convergence and divergence (Biehl, Giegerich and
Jonas 2103). This is the most ambitious and the most revealing work yet
to have appeared on the complex topic of strategic culture and I am
happy to discuss it at some length. It offers a substantive empirical guide
to the specific national strategic cultures of 27 EU member states (includ-
ing Denmark) and Turkey. Since the authors of all these studies were
responding to the same set of questions, the overview allows us deep
insight into commonalities and differences. The book also involves a
policy-oriented dimension which offers insights into prospects of further
convergence. Finally, the book helps refine the very concept of strategic
culture. The editors recognize that there is no generally accepted defini-

tion of strategic culture, but they provide a working model for their
authors: ‘a number of shared beliefs, norms and ideas within a given soci-
ety that generate specific expectations about the respective community’s
preferences and actions in security and defence policy’ (p. 12). A number
of key contextual issues are addressed. The carriers of strategic culture
are recognized as the elites, but increasingly, the public may be included.
While not ‘monolithic’, strategic culture does tend to exist in each coun-
try in a dominant strain and dissenters have to work around this. Finally,
strategic culture is not static: it can change as a result of several factors,
including external shocks and internal friction. The questions the
authors of the country studies were asked to address were: (1) the level of
ambition in international security policy; (2) the scope of action of the
executive in decision-making – in other words, how much parliamentary
consultation; (3) the foreign policy orientation of each country – ques-
tions about priorities and preferences as between the EU and NATO;
(4) the willingness to use force.
The results allow the editors to offer a far more sophisticated under-
standing of the commonalities and distinctions of strategic culture in the
EU than is possible either from a ‘hands in the air’ resignation based on
the conclusion that the 28 member states are far too diverse ever to agree
on anything significant, or from a hope that ‘clusters’ of proximate states
might work something out together, or from an expectation that experi-
ence in the field will generate common understandings. The editors of
this volume present a number of themes which arose from the research
which were not implicit in the four main questions addressed. First,
neutrality does not imply reluctance to get involved. On the contrary,
Sweden and Ireland are two of the EU’s most active participants in inter-
national missions. On the other hand, several member states, keen to
appear to be taking a keen interest in CSDP have a discourse implying
‘punching above their weight’ which is at variance with their resources
and inputs. Second, there is no automatic correlation between executive
dominance of decision-making and actual deployment. The degree of
executive dominance is also in flux, several traditionally unconstrained
member states (France, the UK and Spain) having recently increased
parliamentary oversight. But even countries with powerful executives in
security decision-making are conscious of their voters’ preferences and
can prove as reluctant to deploy as those with tight parliamentary
involvement. As significant as the deployment itself, however, is the issue
of how forces are deployed (the controversial issue of caveats). Thus ‘it is
not only the structural setting of decision-making that shapes outcomes,
but, rather, how the respective structural settings are used [which] in
turn, is to a remarkable degree an expression of underlying cultural
patterns’ (p. 389). Third, there is considerable movement across member
states in terms of their preference for NATO vs CSDP – and this in both
directions (witness France and Poland). Interestingly, there is a general-

ized rejection of any notion of a division of labour (NATO ‘hard’ and
CSDP ‘soft’). While the Atlanticist–Europeanist dichotomy is still alive, it
is not particularly well and it is far from clear with what, if anything, it
might be replaced. Finally, the survey reveals very considerable differ-
ences in understanding what is involved in the use of military force, some
countries being far more willing to accept casualties than others.
All in all, the editors conclude that there are three basic patterns of
strategic culture in the EU. They recognize that devising these three
patterns does violence to some of the necessary subtleties that remain,
but at the same time they intend to take the discussion forward. The first
is defined as ‘security policy as a manifestation of statehood’. Mainly
small states with few resources see their involvement as a demonstration
of their seriousness of international purpose even if what they bring to
the table is minimal. They are more inclined to participate in civilian
missions than in military missions and prefer the EU framework to that
of NATO. The second group sees ‘security policy as international
bargaining’. Their aim is to ‘generate a mutual sense of obligation and
solidarity’ and to build up credit in case they ever need to call it in. The
Baltic states are a prime example of this approach. Within this same
approach one can situate other countries which actually hope to influ-
ence the decisions that are taken within the multilateral framework and
‘their engagement is a price willingly paid for a seat at the table’ (p. 392).
Countries such as Germany, Spain and Italy fit this template. Moreover,
they have no fixed views on whether their focus should primarily be on
territorial defence or on expeditionary missions. The countries in the
third group are most concerned with ‘protecting and projecting state
power’. Greece is an example of the former (protecting) while France, the
UK and Denmark epitomize the latter, with Sweden and the Netherlands
offering variants of this model. The way in which these three models are
exemplified by the answers to the four sets of questions addressed is
conveyed in Table 7.1.
Where does all this leave us with respect to the future of strategic
cooperation in Europe? The editors note that the model implicit in the
ESS is actually their third model, with which only a small minority of
countries – albeit the most extrovert ones – are comfortable. That
suggests that any hypothetical collective strategic culture will have to
take on board more of the features of the other two groups of countries.
The possibility of developing ‘clusters’ of like-minded countries, which
we explored in Chapter 3, offers both advantages (the members of each
cluster can make real progress in cooperation) and disadvantages (there
is a risk that huge gaps will open up between clusters based on different
strategic cultures). The challenge therefore is to promote clusters while
building bridges within and between them (p. 395). The editors note that
many ‘remarkable commonalities’ exist between the EU-27 at the level of
Table 7.1 Biehl et al. on strategic cultures in Europe
Security policy Security policy Protecting and

as manifestation as international projecting
of statehood bargaining state power
Dimension 1: Relatively high Low to medium High

The level of (often ‘punching (activities are
ambition in above its weight’) expected to lead
international to indirect
security policy effects
Dimension 2: Strong legislative Strong legislative High flexibility
The scope for rights rights for executive in
action for the most cases,
executive in strong informal
decision-making ties between
executive and
legislative in
others
Dimension 3: Tendency towards Functional: Strong advocates
Foreign policy EU NATO for for either EU or
orientation collective defence, NATO
otherwise EU
Dimension 4: Low High for defence High
The willingness purpose, lower
to use military for crisis
force management
Countries Austria, Cyprus Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark,
Finland, Hungary, Czech Republic, France, Greece,
Ireland, Luxem- Estonia, Germany, Netherlands,
bourg, Malta, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Sweden,
Portugal Lithuania, Turkey, United
Romania, Slovakia, Kingdom
Slovenia, Spain
Source: Heiko Biehl et al. (2013), Strategic Cultures in Europe (Wiesbaden:

Springer), p. 394.
values and democratic norms. Yet distinctions are deep and persist.
Therefore, ‘it seems reasonable to conclude that strategic culture on its
own will rarely be a driver of further European cooperation and integra-
tion in security and defence matters’ (p. 396). As the editors note, some
scholars, such as Janne Haaland Matlary, have argued that it is possible
to develop a common acceptance of an EU-level strategic culture based

on concepts of human security and peace support (Matlary 2006). This
allows Matlary to bring in her theoretical approach based on ‘two-level
games’ through which governments can play to several galleries at the
same time. Other scholars, such as Asle Toje, however, consider such
postmodern approaches to strategy as a form of ‘doctrinal idealism’
(Toje 2009). Taking another perspective, it seems unlikely that institu-
tionalism alone can generate commonalities, as Menon suggests, for the
simple reason that progress through institutions will depend crucially on
convergence around strategic aims and core interests. The bottom line is
that the EU, despite evidence of several signs of convergence between
proximate groups of states, remains as far from generating a collective
mindset as it ever has. Caution is the keyword in drawing conclusions. It
is unwise to make any grand predictions or to assume the existence of any
clear dynamic. This is also, basically, the conclusion reached by other
recent incursions into the mysteries of EU strategic culture.
A volume edited by Peter Schmidt and Benjamin Zyla (2013), which
initially appeared as a special issue of the journal Contemporary Security
Policy (32(3), December 2011), investigates both theoretical and empiri-
cal aspects of European strategic culture. Theoreticians from both the
realist and constructivist camps interpret the notion very differently but
arrive at similar conclusions – namely that the EU has difficulty ‘raising’
its strategic cultural ambitions above a certain civ-mil crisis management
capacity, from a constructivist perspective because this reflects the EU’s
‘preferred means’ (Norheim-Martinsen 2011), from the realists’ perspec-
tive because Europe is still haunted by the spectre of war (Rynning
2011a). The authors also explore strategic culture via an assessment of a
number of the EU’s military and civilian missions and broadly arrive at
the same conclusions: that there are real limits as to what the EU can
undertake because of the need to respond to a lowest common denomi-
nator strategic logic acceptable to all the member states. The overall
conclusion to the volume is that national interest and cultural diversity
‘bridge the gap between the EU’s security culture and behaviour on the
supranational level less convincingly than in the case of consolidated
nation states’. Thus, the future of EU strategic culture must be predicated
on ‘flexibility’ rather than on maximizing collective power (Schmidt and
Zyla 2013: 491–2).
The forging of an EU strategic culture is probably the greatest chal-
lenge facing CSDP. It is arguably only when significant elements of
convergence begin to happen (if ever) that a viable grand strategy can be
generated. The (now) 28 members of the Union have all experienced their
own history and their own national narrative. It is extraordinary that so
much of the substance of these national narratives assumes a disconnect
between its own content and the broader European canvass. It is as if
English, French, Italian, Polish or Slovenian history took place outside a
European context – the nation against its broader environment. The rest
of Europe as ‘the other’! The very notion of writing an inclusive
European history textbook, devoted to bringing out commonalities,
dates from only a few years (Roord 2009). And yet, the entire European
integration project is the living epitome of the need for that collective
memory. Those who have struggled with the challenge of theorizing an
emergent EU strategic culture have above all been faced with the brick
wall of European nationalisms – in the plural. How can a proud
European nation, which has forged its historical path by differentiating
itself from its predatory (or subservient) neighbours, simply abandon
centuries of glorious national endeavour and accept that the EU in 2014
(or 2030) will be faced with an external environment which ignores the
niceties (however bloody) of European national difference?
Concluding Thoughts: The Challenges Ahead
In addressing the annual conference of the European Defence Agency in

March 2013, President Van Rompuy drew attention to the title of that
event: ‘European Defence Matters’. He stressed: ‘It matters tremen-
dously. It matters for the security of our citizens and our home countries,
and to uphold our interests and values in the world. It matters because of
the jobs, the cutting edge technologies, the potential for growth’ (Van
Rompuy 2013). The latter sentence, directed at the many representatives
of the European defence industrial base present at the meeting, may well
have been foremost on the minds of the EU heads of state and govern-
ment as they assembled for the special defence summit in December
2013. Jobs matter. If the promotion of Europe’s defence industry is what
it takes to wake the EU out of its strategic torpor, then that is at least a
start. But it poses as many questions as it offers solutions. The EU’s role
as an international actor should not be driven by the armaments indus-
try! In order to have a clear idea of what sort of CSDP resources the EU
will need in 2030, we first need to have a much clearer idea of what sort
of international actor the EU wishes to become. We have addressed this
issue on several occasions in this book. The EU cannot be considered a
‘world power’ in any conventional sense. It lacks both political and
constitutional unity. It does not enjoy ‘sovereignty’ in the traditional
Westphalian sense, either internally or externally. Its ambitions, both
internal and external, are constrained by an ongoing tension between the
Union itself and its member states. It has no seat at the United Nations or
direct presence in any of the major intergovernmental organizations
except the WTO. It does not boast a standing army or the capacity to
project military force in ways which could affect the global balance of
power. In purely geo-political terms, Europe has a further in-built disad-
vantage. One part only of the smallest of the main continents, the EU
covers just 2.8 per cent of the earth’s land surface, yet contains no fewer
than 28 states. Europe has by far the highest ratio of separate political
units to surface area. In the globalized world of the twenty-first century,
this is not a recipe for maximum international impact. In addition, the
EU suffers from demographic decline, resource penury, energy depen-
dency and colonial baggage, all of which relativize both its power assets
and its normative message. The comparative advantages that allowed
certain European nation-states to dominate international relations from
the mid-sixteenth century onwards (trading, banking, navigational, tech-
nological and military superiority) had by the late nineteenth century
already been overtaken by other factors. The European nation-states
have for over a century been living on historical capital. The creation of
the EU was a visionary attempt to adapt to the new world order of the
post-1945 world. Further much-needed adaptation to the very different
world order emerging in the twenty-first century demands far-sighted
strategic vision.
Since the day the Berlin Wall came down, it has been clear that the
unconditional US commitment to European security that characterized
the Cold War decades would come to an end. Relative US military disen-
gagement from the ‘old continent’ has been inevitable. The message from
Washington, DC which resonated loudly and clearly throughout Barack
Obama’s presidency was that Europe must take much greater responsi-
bility for the security of its neighbourhood – what I have referred to as
‘the greater European area’. The US tilt to Asia is not a renunciation of
the Atlantic Alliance. It is recognition that the US cannot police the entire
globe. Washington has more urgent priorities in Asia (and in the Middle
East) than it does in Europe. With that tilt has come much greater clarity
in security circles around the world that multipolarity is a growing real-
ity. How many ‘poles’ will emerge as consequential players is a subject
for debate. But there is little doubt that the world will be structured by a
smaller number of larger units. The classic European-size nation-state
that dominated international politics from the eighteenth to the twenti-
eth century is too small a unit to weigh effectively against continental
scale powers. Bipolarity was a feature of the Cold War. It too has passed
on. Power transition is the order of the day but nobody can foresee what
features the new order will reveal. In that context, however, the interests
of the EU member states are – by any objective measure – far more
convergent than they are divergent. The only possibility for Europeans to
affect the outcome of global change is as a united player. The launch of
CFSP and CSDP is an explicit acknowledgement of that uncomfortable
reality. And yet, the EU member states seem to have a terribly hard time
coming to terms with that reality. But until they do – and until they
collectively decide to act on the consequences and implications of that
realization – the EU will remain what it has been for decades: a political
pygmy.
The CSDP project has insisted from the outset on being ‘autonomous’.
We should recall why that word, in the December 1998 St-Malo
Declaration, was so important. It was predicated on the belief that EU
member states would take security and defence more seriously (and
would be prepared to pay for it appropriately) through an EU agency
rather than through NATO – where the habit of free-riding was (and
remains) so deeply ingrained. It was also about the EU being able to
decide for itself what to do, where, when and with which instruments.
Those were important foundational principles. It was indeed crucial in
the early years to allow CSDP to grow in its own way, without being
micro-managed from Washington, DC. But has the EU actually delivered
on the promise of autonomy? In 2013, it remains hugely dependent on
NATO and on the US for more or less everything other than the very
simplest of missions. So was autonomy essentially about allowing the
Union to send a (largely ineffectual) police mission to Kinshasa (Court of
Auditors 2013)? Given the scale of ambition revealed to date, did auton-
omy really matter? Another reflection on autonomy has to do with the
ongoing relations between CSDP and NATO – which have always been
dysfunctional and are increasingly deleterious for both agencies. It is now
widely agreed, particularly since the Libya fiasco, that CSDP has to enter
into much deeper and intensive cooperation with NATO? But what does
that mean in practice? Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has engaged
in three important missions: in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Libya.
Will any one of those operations be recorded by history as a clear-cut
success? Both NATO and CSDP are currently in a state of existential self-
interrogation. What does it mean under those circumstances to insist that
CSDP should remain autonomous of NATO? To what end? As one who
initially argued in favour of autonomy in order for CSDP to breathe life
into itself, I now believe the EU should progressively merge with NATO,
in order to turn the merged entity into an effective and appropriate
regional actor for the stabilization of the greater European area. This
would have the associated benefit of allowing the Americans to concen-
trate on their own strategic priorities.
This is not to argue that the EU should seek to become a military
superpower. It should not. The US experience from Vietnam to
Afghanistan, via Iraq, demonstrates the very real limits to the usefulness
of military power in a world of complex social and political tensions.
Guns and warships were once necessary to conquer territory and peoples
and to subject them to imperial rule. But that era has passed into history.
Territorial conquest does not ‘work’ – and it cannot last. Failed and fail-
ing states pose greater problems than powerful ones. Destabilization and
insecurity have immediate regional spillover effects. And the ‘greater
European area’ is awash with such problems. From the Arctic (the latest
‘new frontier’) to the Baltic Sea, and from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
from the Caucasus to the Levant, and from the Suez Canal to the Straits
of Gibraltar, the EU’s immediate border is rife with insecurity and insta-
bility. Push deeper to the East and to the South beyond the immediate
borderland and the problems begin to multiply. Although the official
texts of CSDP suggest that the EU should consider itself to be a global
player in security and defence policy, the reality is that the vast majority
of its concerns are likely to be focused on its ‘near abroad’ (meaning the
direct neighbourhood and its extension). The challenges of the twenty-
first century are essentially challeges of regional crisis management. That
has been the story and the lesson of CSDP. Crisis management means
deploying a wide range of instruments both upstream and downstream –
and above all knowing how to interdigitate them. How does one do crisis
management in a lasting and effective way? The need for a strategic
approach to these conflicts and to their potential prevention is urgent.
The 2011 Arab Spring demonstrated how crucial it was (and still is) for
the EU to prioritize its commitments and to be able to anticipate events
before they happen. This is one of the most significant challenges facing
CSDP over the next two decades.
Crisis management is not necessarily synonymous with ‘intervention’,
of which there is much talk – whether of the pragmatic or the humani-
tarian variety. We need a reappraisal of intervention as an activity and as
a principle (Howorth 2013a). The Fall 2013 debate about Syria’s chem-
ical weapons and about a putative Western ‘punisment’ for Bashar al-
Assad was instructive in this respect. How can we be sure that, through
our intervention, we will be making matters better rather than worse – or
no different? That is the only question of any significance. There is also
much talk about CSDP being a ‘security provider’. But does the EU really
know what that implies or how to achieve it with any degree of durabil-
ity? Have the seven EU ‘interventions’ in the DRC ‘provided’ any signif-
icantly improved measure of ‘security’ for the residents of that
conflict-ridden country? Did the Western intervention in Libya result in
greater security for the Middle East and North African region? Libya is
currently awash with militiae (one sure sign of a failed or failing state)
and the outflow of weapons from former dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s
overstocked arsenals is having disastrous effects from Syria to Mauritania
and every point in between. The Sahel has become, in part as a result of
the Libyan intervention, the new breeding ground for Al-Qaeda. The
counter-argument might be that the revolution would have happened in
Libya anyway. Indeed it would. But the question for the EU (and more
generally for the ‘West’ or for the ‘international community’) is the one I
posed earlier: can we be sure that our intervention will make things better,
rather than worse, or no different. Of the thirty-some missions conducted
to date under the CSDP label, only a handful, according to the majority of
analysts, has really made a significant positive difference on the ground.
Of course, the ‘lessons learned’ exercises conducted by the European insti-
tutions invariably put a much more positive spin on the balance sheet.
One outcome that could usefully emerge from the December 2013
Council would be the creation of an independent strategic auditing unit
to appraise the EU’s performance to date and to make recommendations
for a more effective use of CSDP resources. Neo-realism tells us that what
matters in world politics is the number of powers and the distribution of
power among them. In a globalized world of structural interdependence,
such stark and parsimonious calculations require nuance. While remain-
ing highly sceptical about the reality or promise of ‘normative power’, I
believe that there are many other approaches to stabilizing the world
than the deployment of hard power. The EU exists in a geo-strategic
context marked by massive inequalities between and within neighbour-
ing states; migratory pressures of growing magnitude; trade negotiations
with potentially dramatic effects on European industry, agriculture and
fisheries; rising domestic tensions sparked by cultural factors inherited
from the sequel to colonialism; new threats such as cyber-warfare, terror-
ism, access to water and the effects of climate. A ‘comprehensive
approach’ to these issues goes way beyond ‘defending and projecting the
EU’s values’. It involves a calculated assessment of costs and benefits in
terms of overseas investments, trade agreements, tariffs, asylum and
immigration policy and access to markets. It involves subtle and constant
diplomacy and negotiation, which itself involves the recognition that
many trade-offs will be necessary. This is a tall order. But it is a vital one.
One further challenge is that of transparency. To date, few member
states have made the slightest attempt genuinely to explain CSDP to their
publics. This is paradoxical in that Eurobarometer polls regularly report
that popular opinion across the Union considers CFSP and CSDP to be
‘obvious’ areas where policy should be conducted at EU level. Instead,
most member states present the project as one in which national forces
play a positive role in stabilizing Europe. Most member states fight terri-
bly shy of any prospect or mention of a ‘Euro-Army’, which is used as a
populist scarecrow by the gutter press. And yet, whatever the most
appropriate label, what is increasingly being put together is an integrated
and interoperable European force, at the service of Europe. It does not
spell the end of national armed forces, but it does spell the beginning of
something very new. CSDP is struggling to find its being amid the persis-
tence of national defence policies. In the first edition of this book, I noted
that ‘Something is happening, but we are uncertain as to what’. I referred
to Samuel Johnson’s comment on the dog that walked on its hind legs: ‘It
is not done well, but you are surprised it is done at all’ (Johnson was
referring not to CSDP but to women preachers). However, his comment
is apt. Having recovered from the surprise that it is done at all,
Europeans must ensure that, from now on, the work in progress begins
to make significant qualitative advances. We are still only at the begin-
ning of a long, long road.
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Index
A-400M transport aircraft, 82, 87 Atlanticism/Atlanticists, 3, 16, 18, 29, 30,

Abbas, President Mahmoud, 173, 180 94, 109, 110, 118–20, 234, 239
Abkhazia, 177 atomic era, see nuclear weapons
Aceh, see CSDP overseas missions Australia, 72, 217
Aegean Sea, 131 Austria, 6, 12, 13, 65, 76, 77, 85, 86, 91,
Afghanistan, xi, 11, 12, 71, 95, 104, 105, 113, 120, 121, 160, 185, 224, 237,
107, 117, 119, 123, 124, 126, 132, 240
134–41, 144, 146, 147–9, 159, 160, autonomy, see CSDP
165, 168, 171, 173, 174, 183–7, 217, Aung San Suu Khi, 229
219, 221, 244 Aznar, José-Maria, 124
Africa, xii, 10, 11, 63, 96, 97, 103, 137,
144–7, 155–6, 160–3, 167, 168, 172, Bailes, Alyson, 227
175–6, 187, 188, 189, 216, 219, 225, Baker, James, 6
245 Bakoyannis, Dora, 58
African Mission in Sudan (AMIS), 125, balancing (against US), x, 15, 19–21, 54,
149, 153, 175–6 115, 125, 186, 193–5, 199
African Union, 164, 168, 175, 176 soft-balancing, 20, 194
Ahtisaari, Martti, 174 Balfour, Rosa, xiv, 64–7
air-to-air refuelling, 80, 83, 95 Balkans, xi, 6, 10, 11, 17, 23, 29, 50, 71, 76,
aircraft carrier, 81, 82, 89 110, 122, 130, 136, 137, 145–50,
Albania, 13, 155, 230 157, 158, 161, 169, 171, 178, 182,
Albright, Madeleine, 20–1, 109, 111–14, 185, 187, 218
136 Western, 71, 103, 147, 149, 158, 171,
Alema, Massimo d’, 58 187
Algeria, 202 Baltic/Baltic states, 7, 87, 90, 121, 239, 244
Alliances (military), 14, 90, 112, 115 Bamako, 167, 168
allies, xi, 3, 20, 32, 33, 72, 90, 109, 111–14, Banda Aceh, 174
126, 127, 134, 196, 229, 234 bandwagoning, 199
Al-Qaeda, 132, 146, 167, 190, 198, 219, Barnett, Thomas, 222
245 Barnier, Michel, 60
in the Islamic Maghreb, 167 Barroso, José Manuel, 57, 60, 61, 62
AMISOM, see Somalia Bàtora, Josef, 93–94
Amsterdam, Treaty of (1997), 7, 8, 36, 39, Battle groups, 81, 83–4, 90, 119, 182
121 behaviourism, 214
Anna, Kofi, 155 Belgium, 4, 5, 13, 20, 26, 28, 53, 75, 76, 77,
Aquinas, Thomas, 23 82, 84, 85, 86, 124, 160, 172, 185,
Arab Spring, xi, 12, 30, 60, 146, 216, 219, 224, 228, 240
230, 245 Berenskoetter, Felix, 122–3
arms control, 217 Berlin Plus (arrangements), 6, 76–8, 96, 119,
Arnould Claude France, xiv, 92, 95 131–2, 135, 155, 157, 164
Art, Robert, xiv, 20–1 ‘reverse Berlin Plus’, 135
ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Berlin Wall (fall of), 4, 5, 22, 111, 190, 194,
Nations), 164, 174, 175 243
Ashdown, Paddy, 169, 170, 171 Biehl, Heiko, 237–40
Ashton, Catherine, xi, xii, 25, 38, 50, 55, bipolarity, 217, 243
57–67, 96, 138 Bildt, Carl, 58
Asia, xi, 63, 72, 85, 107, 109, 111, 113, Biscop, Sven, xiv, 88
129, 134, 139, 147, 148, 187, 219, Black Sea, 244
225, 226, 243 Blair, Tony, 7–9, 16, 19, 22–3, 55, 59, 78,
Assad, Bashar al-, 245 96, 98, 112, 114, 118, 200, 213,
Asseburg, Muriel, 184–5 230
Atlantic Alliance, see NATO Boin, Arje, 187
291
292 Index
Bolton, John, 116 139–41, 165, 189, 193, 195, 198,

border assistance missions, see CSDP 213, 217, 226, 235, 244
overseas missions Combat Search and Rescue, 80
Bosnia-Herzegovina, xi, 6, 19, 22, 23, 105, Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTF), 28, 76
121, 123, 126, 130–3, 135, 136, 145, Command and Control (arrangements), 76,
148–9, 157, 168–70, 185, 213 90, 100, 112, 155, 164
Bosnian War, 6, 19, 123, 126, 169 Commissioner for External Relations, see EU
Brantner, Franziska, 61 Commission
Brazil, xi, 10, 72, 85, 217 Committee for Civilian Crisis Management
Britain (Great), see United Kingdom (CIVCOM), 40, 48–9, 101, 102, 203
Brok, Elmar, 62 Committee of Permanent Representatives
Brown, Gordon, 59, 160 (COREPER), 37, 43, 69, 203
Brussels, Treaty of (1948), 3, 4, 8, 41, Common Agricultural Policy, 227, 235
Brusselsization, 51, 69 Common Foreign and Security Policy
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 116 (CFSP), 4, 5, 8–11, 14, 36–40, 49–51,
Bulgaria, 13, 77, 86, 240 56, 63, 65, 69, 97–8, 106, 108, 178,
Bunia (DRC), 155–6, 183 203–6, 214, 227, 243, 246
burden-sharing, 110, 136, 137, 260, 262, Common Security and Defence Policy
268, 273 (CSDP)
Bush, President George H.W., 20, 22, 29, autonomy (EU ambitions for), 1, 6–8, 22,
109, 29, 33, 46, 75, 108, 111, 120, 126,
Bush, President George W., 11, 20, 29, 109, 131, 133, 167, 188, 244
110–14, 117, 122, 125, 127, 176 capabilities gap, 75, 76, 87
civil–military planning cell (CMPC), 96,
Cameron, David, 17, 119, 138, 139 106, 175
Canada, 72, 169, 172 decision shaping/making, 37, 44–7, 57,
Cato Institute (Washington, DC), 115 68, 126, 131, 203, 204, 208, 231
Caucasus, xi, 7, 103, 130, 147, 187, 218, funding arrangements, 98, 99, 105, 106,
225, 244 176
Central and Eastern European (states), 12, institutions of, 33–69
19, 25, 30, 76, 119, 120, 136, 236 military capabilities/capacity, 3, 9, 12,
Central European Defence Cooperation 28, 33, 70–108, 113–14, 132, 196,
(CEDC), 91 198
Chad, 47, 84, 96, 124, 146–51, 160–3, 164, military exercises, 74, 93, 98, 140
166, 175, 176, 182, 186 Common Security and Defence Policy
Chamberlain, Neville, 5 (CSDP) overseas missions, x, 31, 70,
Chatham House (Royal Institute of 84, 104, 135, 144–89, 227
International Affairs), xiv, 18, 65 border control and monitoring missions,
Checkel, Jeffrey, 204 174–7, 180–2; Aceh Monitoring
China, xi, 10, 61, 72, 85, 162, 197, 217, Mission, 147–50, 174–6, 187;
219, 220, 226, 228 EUBAM Libya, 148–53, 181–2;
Chirac, Jacques, 7, 19, 98, 126, 213 EUBAM Rafah, 148–53, 180–1;
Cimbalo, Jeffrey, 116 EUMM Georgia, 148–53, 176–7;
civilian actor (EU as), x, 2, 15, 98, 108, 142, Moldova/Ukraine border mission,
144–7, 184–6, 200, 206–7 144, 148–50, 181
Civilian Crisis Management (CCM), 71, military missions and military assistance
97–107 missions, 154–68; AMIS, 149, 153,
Civil–Military Planning Cell (CMPC), see 162, 163, 175–6; Artemis, 149–51,
CSDP 155–9, 163, 164, 166, 183; Atalanta,
Clinton, President Bill, 19, 20, 29, 109, 111, 30, 47, 148–51, 162–3, 164, 183,
113–14, 126 189; Concordia, 148–51, 154–5, 163,
Clusters (defence cooperation), xii, 88, 164, 166, 171; EUFOR–Althea, 105,
89–91, 108, 238 133, 145, 148–51, 158, 164, 166,
coalitions of the willing, 140, 196 171, 186; EUFOR–Chad/CAR, 47,
coercive power, 2, 196, 199 124, 151, 160–1, 163–6, 182, 186;
coherence (of policy), 2, 38, 43, 51, 56, 61, EUFOR–RD Congo, 148–50,
67–9, 101, 103, 111, 126, 161, 165, 158–60, 164; EUSEC–RD Congo,
171, 213, 216, 224, 227 148–50, 159, 172; EUTM–Mali,
Cold War, 2–6, 19, 20–2, 24, 26, 28, 30, 51, 148–51, 167–8; EUTM–Somalia,
70, 73–5, 107, 109–11, 116, 122–6, 148–51, 163
Index 293
police missions, 168–74; EUPAT, Diego Garcia, 227

148–51, 171–2; EUPM (BiH), 101, Dijkstra, Hylke, 206–7
148–51, 158, 168–71; EUPOL discourse, discursive institutionalism, 25,
Afghanistan, 148–52, 173–4, 186; 196, 208–11, 221, 238
EUPOL COPPS, 148–53, 173; ‘discrimination’, 112, 158, 171
EUPOL–Kinshasa, 148–53, 168, DRC, see Congo
172–3, 244; EUPOL RD Congo, Dunkirk, Treaty of (1947), 3
148–51, 172; Proxima, 149–51, 154, ‘duplication’, 9, 20, 85, 87, 96, 112, 114,
171–2 141, 224
rule of law missions, 177–80; EU–JUST ‘constructive duplication’, 112
Lex Iraq, 178; EU-JUST Lex Kosovo, Dyson, Tom, 195–6
49, 103, 148–53, 178–9, 186; EU-
JUST Themis, 177–8 East Timor, 23, 144
complex interdependence, 120, 200, 217, Eastern Europe, xi, 10, 12, 19, 25, 30, 76,
221 119, 120, 131, 136, 144, 176, 236
comprehensive security/approach, 29, 70, Edwards, Geoffrey, xiv, 236
101, 103, 104, 105–8, 159, 161, 183, Egypt, xi, 55, 67, 148, 180, 182
185, 199, 201, 218, 222, 246 Ekengren, Magnus, 187
conflict myopia, 197 Engberg, Katarina, 163–6
conflict prevention, 38, 80, 99, 101, 102, Erreira, Gérard, 7
187, 218, 245 Estonia, 13, 76–7, 85–6, 90
Congo, Democratic Republic of, 46, 122, ‘Euro-Army’ (European army), 15, 17–18,
124, 144, 148–52, 155, 158–60, 166, 25, 246
168, 171–2, 228 European Commission, 10, 38, 39, 45,
conscription, 75–6, 235 51–69, 95, 98, 99, 100–5, 138, 171,
Constitutional Treaty, x, 40, 41, 50, 57, 59, 174, 176, 202, 206, 207, 228, 232,
80, 91, 117, 174 235
constructivism, 31, 32, 35, 195–7, 205, 208, European Council (see also Presidency of the
209–12 European Council), xii, 5, 7 8, 9, 10,
Convention on the Future of Europe (2003), 14, 28, 31, 36–40, 42, 47–8, 52–62,
12, 40, 57, 59 64–9, 70, 79, 81–2, 91, 97–100, 103,
Cooper, Robert, xiv, 14, 235 106, 113, 128, 138, 145, 158, 162–3,
COPS, see Political and Security Committee 167, 171–3, 176, 185, 202–6, 217,
Cornish, Paul, 236 222–3, 233
Council of Defence Ministers, xii, 9, 28, 61, European Council on Foreign Relations
82, 88, 92, 233 (ECFR), 185, 224, 234
criminal justice system, 152, 173, 177, 178 European Council General Secretariat, 29,
criminality/organized crime, 38, 102, 107, 37, 43, 45, 48, 51, 62, 63–9, 99–102,
154, 158, 169, 170–1,181, 218 106, 168, 203 206, 207
Croatia, 13, 23, 77, 84, 86, 91, 169 European Defence Agency (EDA), xii, 21,
Cross, Mai’a, 46–9, 203 26, 81–2, 87–8, 91–95, 203, 205
Cyprus, 13, 26, 76, 77, 86, 131–2, 187, 240 European defence industry, 9, 24, 92–5, 112,
Czech Republic, 5, 13, 41, 77, 86, 87, 88, 162, 242
90, 91 224, 240 European External Action Service (EEAS), 9,
10, 26, 38, 56, 61, 62–6, 67, 69,
Darfur, 147, 149, 153, 160, 161, 168, 146–9, 230, 231, 232–3
175–6 European Global Strategy, xii, 224–5
Dayton agreement (1995), 151, 157, 168, European identity, x, 17, 50, 77, 209, 234,
170 235–7
Déby, Idriss, 161 European Neighbourhood Policy, xi, 11, 61,
‘decoupling’, 20, 112 98, 107, 141, 177, 188, 218, 224
defence budgets/spending, 11, 28, 47, 75, European Parliament, 38, 52, 61, 62, 66, 97,
85, 98, 107 125, 182, 227, 228, 238
De Gaulle, General Charles, 1, 74, 125, 126, European Political Cooperation (EPC), 2,
233 36
De Hoop Scheffer, Jaap, 58 European Security and Defence College
democracy (promotion of), 5, 76, 161, 178, (ESDC), 64, 82
187, 224, 227, 228 European Security and Defence Identity
Denmark, 5, 13, 26, 30, 76, 77, 84, 86, 90, (ESDI), 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 26, 70, 75–8,
95, 117, 118, 154, 185, 237 79, 111, 113, 114
294 Index
European Security Strategy (ESS document, 194–8, 212, 217, 220, 224, 231–4,
2003), x, 101, 102, 107, 144, 147, 237, 239–40
169, 175, 217–20, 229, 236 Ghent Framework, xii, 28, 87, 88
Report on the Implementation of the ESS Giegerich, Bastien, 122–3, 237, 238
(2008), 219 Ginsberg, Roy, xiv, 166, 182–4
European Union Institute for Security global public goods, 218
Studies, 129, 206, 249–63 globalization, 136, 218, 235
European Union Military Committee Gnesotto, Nicole, xiv, 236
(EUMC), 40, 47, 48, 203 Gordon, Philip, 113
European Union Military Staff (EUMS), 40, Gowan, Richard, 185–6
48, 106, 231 Grand Strategy, 31, 149, 195, 217–33
existential security/threat, 1, 17, 18, 30, 85, Greece, 5, 13, 72, 76, 77, 82, 6, 96, 131,
129, 138, 140, 141, 235, 244 137, 224, 239, 240
expeditionary warfare, 89, 239 Grevi, Giovanni, xiv, 179
extraordinary rendition, 227 Gross, Eva, xiv, 187
Guillaud, Edouard, 138
Fabius, Laurent, 128 Gulf of Aden, 148, 162
federalism, 18, 25, 216 Gulf War (1990–91), 5, 74, 122, 123, 126
Finland, 8, 12, 13, 26, 76, 77, 86, 90, 113, Guttenberg, Karl-Theodore zu, 87
117, 120, 160, 174, 185, 224, 240
Fischer, Joschka, 58 Habré, Hissène, 161
flexibility, 197, 207, 240, 241 Hague, William, 97
Foreign Affairs Council (FAC), 36, 53, 56, Hamas, 173, 180
61, 63, 97, 138 Headline Goal 1999 (Helsinki), 28, 79, 80,
Foreign Policy Analysis, 213 99, 145
Fouchet Plan, 3 Headline Goal 2010, 28, 81, 83
Fox, Liam, 17, 119 Headline Goal 2008 (Civilian), 83, 102–3,
France, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 175
18–19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 35, 36, 39, 41, Headline Goal Task Force, 79,
42–3, 47, 52, 54, 60, 72, 74–6, Headquarters (military – OHQ), 66, 80, 81,
81–97, 117, 120, 124–8, 137–9, 141, 83, 96–7, 141, 160, 162, 181, 232
155–61, 167, 172–6, 185–6, 195, Headquarters (civil military), 106
197–8, 212, 217, 219, 220, 223–6, hegemony/hegemonic power, 20, 22, 25, 29,
228, 231–3, 237–40 108, 116
Defence White Paper (2013), 88, 222 Helsinki Final Act (1975), 218
Opération Serval (Mali 2013), 139, 157, High Representative, x, xi, xii, 10, 26, 38,
231 41–2, 47, 48, 51, 55–9, 62, 92, 97,
Franco-British (relations), 15, 79, 89, 139, 130, 138, 146, 158, 170
145, 155, 198, 233 historical institutionalism, 34, 35, 206–8
Franco-British Treaty (2010), 28, 89–90 Hoffmann, Stanley, xiv, 197, 200, 226
Free Aceh Movement (GAM), 174 Hofmann, Stephanie, 207
Freedman, Lawrence, 198–9 Holbrooke, Richard, 126
FYROM, see Macedonia Hollande, François, 125, 127
Hughes, James, 187
Gabon, 158–9 Hulsman, John, 116
Gaddafi, Muammar, 137, 167, 182 human security, 129, 218, 229, 241
Gaddis, John, 220 human rights, 22, 38, 98, 101, 102, 129,
Ganashia, Jean-Philippe, 160 158, 167, 171, 173, 174, 218, 222,
Gates, Robert, xi, 12, 138, 139, 142 224, 227, 228–9, 235
Gaullism, 19, 126 humanitarian assistance/intervention, 22,
Gaza, 148, 153, 180–1, 184, 185 25, 56, 61, 75, 79, 80, 83, 98, 99,
General Affairs Council (GAC), 37, 64–5, 102, 107, 150, 155, 160, 161, 162,
68, 72, 76, 88 165, 167, 175, 178, 182, 230, 235,
General Affairs and External Relations 237
Council (GAERC), 36, 37, 43 Hungary, 13, 53, 77, 86, 90, 91, 234, 240
Georgia, 12, 144, 147, 148–53, 176–7, 183, Hunter, Robert, xiv, 20
213, 219 Hutton, John, 60
Germany, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 20, 25, 26, 52, 54, Hyde-Price, Adrian, xiii, 193–5, 197
72, 75, 76, 77, 81–91, 96, 97, 108,
118–19, 122–7, 138, 158–60, 185–6, Iceland, 13, 90, 169
Index 295
ideas (role of), 34, 35, 46, 64, 66, 208, Keohane, Robert, 221
209–11, 219, 225, 232, 238 Kirchner, Emil, 211
identity (European), see European identity Kissinger, Henry, 39, 52, 125
Ikenberry, John, 226 Klein, Nadia, 187
immigration, 163, 169, 227, 246 Konstadinides, Theodore, 195–6
India, xi, 10, 11, 72, 85, 162, 217, 219, 220 Korea, South, 72, 85, 162
Indonesia, 46, 144, 149, 153, 174, 175, 217, Korea, North, 12
220 Korski, Daniel, 185–6
inductive analysis, 191, 214, Kosovo, xi, 7, 11, 19, 22, 23, 30, 39, 49, 70,
institution-building, 33, 34, 170, 206 80–3, 103, 121, 123, 126, 132,
institutionalism, 205–8 135–6, 145, 147–53, 177–80, 183,
Instrument for Stability, 38, 98 186, 206, 230, 234, 244
intelligence, 9, 76, 82, 126, 132, 172, 231 KFOR, 121, 179
inter-agency tensions, 45, 93, 94, 105, 213 Kouchner, Bernard, 58
intergovernmental, 8, 18, 26, 36, 38, 40, 44, Krahmann, Elke, 211
48, 49, 61, 68, 92–6, 165, 167, 193, Kratochwil, Friedrich, 210–11
194, 200–5, 214, 242 Kupchan, Charles, 115, 226
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) crisis, 3 Kurdistan, 22
International Criminal Court (ICC), 176 Kurowska, Xymena, 210–11
International Crisis Group (ICG), 155, 156, Kuwait, 5
161, 169 Kyoto protocol, 227
international law, 2, 50, 126, 129, 197, 196,
218, 221, 229, 235 La Guardia, Anton, 67
interoperability, 81, 82 95, 100 Laeken Declaration (2001), 40, 101, 145,
intersubjectivity, 204 Latvia, 13, 58, 77, 86, 119, 240
intervention (military), 2, 19, 22, 23, Le Drian, Jean-Yves, 128
70–107, 121–3, 126, 137, 138, 156, Leakey, General David, xiv, 104, 106, 157,
164–5, 173, 175, 176, 187, 189, 211, 158
218, 227, 229–30, 235, 245 leadership, 4, 22, 25, 51, 52, 57, 61, 64–7,
Iran, 12, 72, 162, 197 80, 111, 122, 134, 139, 140, 142,
Iraq, xi, xii, 5, 11, 17, 20, 71, 72, 96, 101, 160, 206, 213, 221, 233
105, 107, 109, 110, 116–19, 121, ‘leading from behind’, see United States
123–7, 132, 134, 136, 138, 144–52, League of Democracies, 140
155, 159, 160, 177–8, 186, 195, 197, Lebanon, 11, 163, 164
198, 204, 217, 221, 230, 236, 244 legal personality (of the EU), 50–1
Ireland, 5, 12, 13, 49, 58, 75, 77, 85, 86, legitimacy, 12, 35, 68, 161, 218, 230,
113, 117, 120, 121, 154, 160, 185, 236
187, 224, 237, 238, 240 Lewis, Jeffrey, 204
IRSEM (Strategic Research Institute), 223 liberal intergovernmentalism, 200–4
Islam, 138, 146, 167, 182, 188, 225, 226 liberalism, 199–203
Israel, xi, 11, 72, 95, 180–1 Libya, xi, xii, 10, 17, 29, 84, 97, 110, 117,
Italy, xii, 4, 5, 6, 13, 72, 76, 77, 82, 84–6, 124, 125, 128, 137–42, 147, 148–53,
96, 97, 108, 137, 172, 185, 195–8, 161, 163, 164, 167, 181–2, 206,
223, 224, 231, 233, 239, 240 244–5
Ituri province (DRC), 155, 156 Lindley-French, Julian, 197–8
Lisbon Treaty, 9, 10, 12, 26, 28, 36, 38, 41,
Jackson, General Sir Mike, 175 43, 49–62, 80, 121, 146, 150, 203,
Janjaweed (Sudan militia), 161, 175 222
Japan, 72, 85, 162 Lithuania, 13, 77, 86, 119,120, 240
Jones Parry, Emyr, 7 logistics, 76, 83, 95, 102, 112, 155, 156
Jonge Oudraat, Chantal de, 16 Lugar, Richard, 140
Joyce, James, 1 Luxembourg, 4, 5, 13, 20, 23, 26, 74, 75,
judges, 28, 71, 100, 102, 104 124, 154, 224
Juncos, Ana, 44–5, 187
just war theory, 229 Maastricht European Council (1991), 5, 36,
Justice and Equality Movement (Sudan), 175 50, 203
Justus Lipsius (building), 48 Macedonia (FYROM), 84, 135, 154–5, 171,
183
Kempin, Ronja, 184–5 Madrid, terrorist attacks (2004), 125
Kennedy, Paul, 220 Maghreb, xi, 7, 146, 167
296 Index
Mali, xi, 84, 97, 128, 139–42, 146, 147–53, Military Committee, 19
157, 167–8, 231 NATO Response Force (NRF), 123, 136,
Malta, 13, 75, 77, 84, 86, 132, 137, 224, 137
240 North Atlantic Council, 130, 131
Mandelson, Peter, 58, 60 Partnership for Peace, 132
Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Prague Summit (2002), 136, 140
Aircraft (MPRA), 162 ‘right of first refusal’, 113, 136
Matlary, Janne Haaland, 212, 240 Rome summit (1991), 111
Mattelaer, Alexander, 13, 164–6 SACEUR, 78, 130
McCain, John, 140 ‘separable but not separate’ forces, 6, 76,
Mearsheimer, John, 193 113
Médecins sans Frontières, 156 Strategic Concept, 30, 74, 111, 135, 136,
Mediterranean (security), 11, 55, 218, 225 137, 198, 222
Menon, Anand, xiv, 21, 207–8, 213, 225, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers
241 Europe (SHAPE), 96, 136, 139, 155
Mérand, Frédéric, xiv, 201, 212 Washington summit (1999), 88
Merkel, Angela, 18, 54, 60, 123 neighbourhood, see European
Messervy-Whiting, General Graham, 147 Neighbourhood Policy
Meyer, Christoph, xiv, 210, 237 neo-functionalism, 201
Middle East, xi, 4, 11, 63, 67, 71, 85, 103, Netherlands, 5, 13, 26, 30, 41, 72, 75–7, 81,
129, 130, 138, 147, 187, 219, 243, 85–8, 118, 120, 124, 160, 172, 174,
245 185, 195, 224, 231, 239–40
milieu goals, 195, 226 network-centric warfare, 80
Missiroli, Antonio, xiv neutrals, neutrality, 12, 32, 49, 91, 113,
Miliband, David, 60 120–2, 161, 170, 234, 238
military capacity, see CSDP New Labour, 7, 16, 118
Ministry of Defence (MOD), 79, 163, 224, ‘new world order’, 4, 5, 22, 28, 110, 123,
233 129, 217, 225, 226, 243
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), 37, New York, 11, 190
41–5, 64 New Zealand, 85,
missile defence, 11, 74, 80 NH-90 helicopter, 90
Mitterrand, François, 19, 126 Nice, Treaty of (2000), 26, 36, 40, 41, 50,
Moldova, 144, 148–53, 181 55, 56, 120
Moravcsik, Andrew, 200, 216 Nigeria, 176
Mugabe, Robert, 228 non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
Muller-Brandeck-Boquet, Gisela, 39 106, 156, 211
multiculturalism, 235 non-nuclear states, 3, 12, 89, 125, 219, 234
multilateralism, 5, 107, 126, 147, 176 non-state actors, 129, 184
multi-polarity, 194 Nordic Defence Cooperation
Munich Security Conference, 55, 117, 135 (NORDEFCO), 90
mutual assured destruction, 1 Norheim-Martinsen, Per Martin, 183–4, 212
normative approaches, 3, 15, 22, 23, 25, 98,
Nash, Patrick, 160, 161 123, 133, 134, 184, 186, 194, 209,
nation-building, 29, 63, 64, 81, 104, 105, 218, 228, 235, 243, 246
107, 165, 177, 199, 205 North Korea, 12
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Norway, 13, 16, 20, 30, 72, 77, 84–6, 90,
Organization), 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 112, 118, 131, 169
13–15, 18–19, 22, 26, 29, 30, 33, 36, Nowak, Agnieszka, xiv, 201
38–9, 42–43, 47, 53, 58, 59, 72, 73, nuclear, biological and chemical defences, 80
74–83, 85, 87, 89–91, 96, 105, nuclear deterrence, 126, 141
109–43, 154–7, 160, 162, 163, 164, nuclear weapons, 38, 73, 74, 126, 217, 219,
165, 167, 171, 176, 178, 179, 182, 234
187, 188, 196, 207, 219, 229, 230, Nye, Joseph, 221
232, 236, 238, 239, 240, 244
AF-South (crisis), 167 Obama, Barack, xi, 29, 30, 52, 53, 109 113,
Allied Command Transformation, 127 129, 138–9, 219, 243
Deputy Supreme Commander Europe Odessa, 181
(DSACEUR), 78, 130 Ojanen, Hanna, xiv, 27, 201, 214
enlargement, 136, 137 operational planning, 48, 83, 92, 96, 106,
flexible response, 110 136, 139, 155, 165, 224, 231, 232
Index 297
OHQ (European), 66, 96–7, 141, 162, pre-emptive warfare, 11, 123, 147
232 Presidency of the European Union (see also
opt-outs, 44, 90, 95, 96, 117, 121, 158, 195, European Union), 28, 37, 41, 42–4,
197, 214 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 81, 82, 87, 97–9,
Organization for Security and Cooperation 120, 160, 174, 213, 243
in Europe (OSCE), 100, 101 121, Presidency of the Council (see also Van
123, 168, 171, 181 Rompuy), 10, 26, 51, 52–5, 232
Osland, Kari, 169 proliferation (weapons), 38, 107, 217
Ossetia, South, 177 Putin, Vladimir, xi
O’Sullivan, David, 62
Quadrennial Defence Review (USA), 11,
Palestine, 147, 152, 168, 171, 173 232
Papandreou, George, 58 Quai d’Orsay, 7, 42
Parry, Emyr Jones, 7 qualified majority voting (in EU), 36
Patten, Chris, 57, 58
partnership, xi, 98, 110, 111, 115, 117, 128, Rafah crossing (see also CSDP overseas
132, 134, 137, 159, 225, 232 missions), 148, 150, 153, 180–1
‘peace dividend’, 4, 28, 75 rational choice, 44, 199–209
peace-keeping, 13, 19, 70, 73, 75, 79, 80, rationalism, 205, 207
122, 156, 166, 170, 185 Reagan, Ronald, 29, 213
peace-making, 75, 79, 80 realism, neo-realism, structural realism, 31,
peace-support operations/capabilities, 102, 193–7, 246
121, 147, 157 referendum, 76, 119, 120, 124
Peen Rodt, Annemarie, 165–7 Reflexion Group on the Future of the EU,
penitentiary officers, 28, 100, 104, 178 222–23, 230
Penksa, Susan, 166, 182–4 Rehn, Olli, 58
permanent structured cooperation (PESCO), Republika Srpska, 158, 170
28, 143 research and technology, 87, 93, 93
Perruche, General Jean-Paul, xiv Reynolds, Christopher, 44–5
Petersberg Tasks, 75, 79, 80, 121, 145 Rhinard, Mark, 187
Pohl, Benjamin, 186, 197 risk management, 13, 129
Poidevin, Estelle, 39 Risse, Thomas, xiii, 201–2
Poland, xii, 13, 72, 76–7, 85, 86, 90, 91, 97, Robertson, Lord, George, 33, 34, 67, 155
108, 110, 117, 119–20, 124, 138, Robinson, Mary, 58
160, 195, 223, 224, 233, 237, 239, Rodman, Peter, 116
240 Romania, 13, 77, 86, 160, 185, 240
police forces (see also CSDP police missions), Rompuy, Herman Van, see Van Rompuy
13, 28, 71, 83, 98–102, 104, 144, RPAS (drones), see UAVs
145, 148–55, 157–60, 168–73, 176, Ruger, Carolin, 39
178–9, 184–5, 244 rule of law, 5, 30, 83, 99, 100, 102, 103,
Policy Unit, 39 144, 146, 149, 150, 158, 173, 177–9,
Political Committee (PoCo), 37, 41, 51 186–9, 196, 224
Political Directors, 7, rule of law missions, see CSDP overseas
Political and Security Committee (COPS), missions
xiii, 37, 40, 41–7, 51, 69, 130, 131, Rumsfeld, Donald, 30, 107, 109
203, 231 Russia, xi, 10, 67, 72, 76, 85, 91,160, 162,
Nicolaidis Group, 43 169, 176–7, 179, 181, 197, 217, 219,
permanent representatives (ambassadors) 225, 228
to, 37, 42, 43 Russo-Georgian War (2008), 213
Politico-Military Working Party, 43 Rynning, Sten, 194–7
pooling and sharing, xii, 28, 83–91, 95, 128,
201 Saakashvili, Mikheil, 177
Poos, Jacques, 23, 74 Saddam Hussein, 5
Popowski, Maciej, 63 Sahel, xi, 140, 145–6, 148, 150–3, 219, 225,
Portugal, 5, 10, 13, 77, 86, 91, 118, 120, 245
172, 224, 240 Saint-Malo (Franco-British summit,
Posen, Barry, xiv, 115 December 1998), 7–15, 16, 20, 22,
post-conflict reconstruction, 165, 169 24, 26 33, 34–40, 41, 47, 48, 69, 78,
power transition, 219–20, 226–8 80, 98, 108, 109, 112–13, 118, 145,
precision-guided munitions (PGMs), 81 200, 208, 213, 236
298 Index
Saint-Malo Declaration, 7, 8–9, 15, 16, 24, Strickmann, Eva, 210

33, 78, 80, 109, 111–12 structural realism, see realism/ neo-realism
Saudi Arabia, 5, 72, 74, 85 structured cooperation, 143, 194
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 19, 54, 60, 117, 127, 138, Sudan, 146–53, 161, 175–6, 182
139, 176, 213 supranational(ism), 2, 14, 36, 38, 48, 49, 57,
Schilde, Kaija, 95 68, 69, 92, 94, 202–5, 214, 241
Schmid, Helga, 62 Sweden, xii, 12, 13, 26, 76, 77, 86, 90, 113,
Schmidt, Peter, 241 120, 121, 155, 156, 160, 163, 174,
Schmidt, Vivien, xiv, 208 185, 195, 223, 224, 231, 234,
Schroeder, Gerhard, 123, 135 237–40
security culture, 25, 31, 122, 183, 210, Switzerland, 158, 160, 169
233–42 Syria, xi, 11, 67, 128, 219, 245, 256, 257
security sector reform, 71, 82, 83, 101, 159, systemic pressures, 194, 195, 197, 198
169, 182, 187, 188
Selbstverzwergung, 52 Taiwan, 72
Serbia, xi, 23, 81, 149, 170, 178, 179, 230 Talbott, Strobe, 18, 113
Slovakia, 13, 77, 86, 90, 91, 119, 240 territorial defence, 17, 73, 121, 222, 234,
Sloan, Stanley, 111 239, 244
Slovenia, 13, 23, 26, 77, 86, 91, 160, 224, terrorism, 11, 38, 81, 105, 107, 132, 146,
240, 241 180, 190, 196, 197, 218
smart power, 200–1 Tervuren, 96
Smith, Michael, E, 206 Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence, 80
smuggling, 158, 181 threat perception, 91, 218, 237
socialization, 35, 44, 45, 49, 204–10, 237 threats, 13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 28, 38, 81, 83,
sociological institutionalism, 34, 35, 44, 47, 85, 91, 99, 104, 105, 107, 115, 128,
192, 206–9 129, 140, 144, 162, 197, 198, 211,
soft power, 20, 71, 117, 183, 194, 200–2, 218, 222, 224, 225, 229, 232, 235,
227 237, 246
Solana, Javier ( High Representative for Thucydides, 1
CFSP), x, xiv, 38–40, 42, 57, 59, 71, ‘tilt to Asia’, see United States
99, 124, 155, 157, 158, 161, 219, Timor, East, 23, 144
228 Toje, Asle, 208, 241
Somalia, 22, 30, 145, 147–53, 162–3, Transatlantic relations, xii, 12, 29, 30,
167–8, 185 109–43, 198, 211
AMISOM, 153, 162, 163 Transnistria, 181
Somali National Armed Forces (SNAF), treaty/treaties see under name of treaty
167 Trybus, Martin, 92–3
South Africa, xii, 155, 217 Tuaregs, 167
sovereignty, 1, 2, 15, 23, 50, 87, 88, 91, 94, Turkey, 13, 20, 30, 72, 76, 77, 84, 86, 112,
142, 191, 193, 201, 214, 229, 231, 119, 130–3, 138, 157, 158, 162, 169,
242 172, 237, 240
space capabilities, 80, 82, 93
Spain, xii, 5, 10, 13, 26, 53, 72, 75–7, 81, Uganda, 155, 163, 167
84–86, 91, 97, 124, 160, 196, 223, Ukraine, 144, 148, 150, 153, 169, 181–2
224, 231, 233, 237, 238, 239, 240 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR),
Special Operations forces, 80, 82, 100, 155 29, 30, 125, 150, 153
Sperling, James, 211 United Kingdom, 3, 8, 16, 60, 73, 75, 89,
spillover, 201–2, 244 118, 119, 208, 231, 240
Stabilization and Association Agreement, Strategic Defence Review (1998), 73
155, 157 United Nations, 12, 13, 22, 105, 107, 116,
Steinmeier, Frank-Walter, 58 147, 158, 164, 168, 179, 185, 188,
Stelzenmuller, Constanze, 216 228, 229, 236, 242
strategic planning/thinking, 9, 48, 80, 88, Chapter VII mission, 155, 158
105, 232 MINURCAT, 162
strategic culture, 89, 105, 122, 183, 197, MONUC, UN mission in Congo, 151,
199, 210, 217, 218, 233–42 155, 158
strategic lift, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 135, 155, World Food Programme, 162
176 UNMIK, 179
strategic vision, 10, 31, 59, 62, 65, 80, 105, United States, x, xi, xiv, 3, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15,
130, 216, 222, 223, 226, 233, 243 19, 20, 24, 25, 61, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76,
Index 299
108, 109–43, 144, 164, 168, 179, Warsaw Pact, 19, 73

188, 191, 198, 199, 218, 225 weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 38,
disengagement from Europe, 22, 129, 73, 107, 218
190, 194 Weimar (Five), xii, 91, 97, 233
‘leading from behind’, 139 Weiss, Moritz, 212–13
’tilt to Asia’, xi, 109, 111, 119, 134, 139, Western European Union (WEU), 3, 4, 5–6,
225, 226, 243 7, 9, 26, 36, 75–8, 103, 121–3, 130,
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), 89, 95 207–8
Westphalian system, 1, 2, 22, 23, 129, 193,
Valasek, Tomas, 89 217, 225, 229, 242
values competititon, 228 White Paper (European), xii, 222, 223
Van Daele, Frans, 52 Whitman, Richard, xiii, 186
Van Rompuy, Herman, 26, 51–5, 223, 242 Witney, Nick, xiv, 92, 94, 224
Védrine, Hubert, 110, 125, 127–8, 141 Wolfers, Arnold, 226
Verhofstadt, Guy, 62 Wolff, Stefan, 186
Vershbow, Alexander, 33
Vietnam, 5, 221, 244 Yom Kippur War, 110
Vike-Freiberga, Vaira, 58 Youngs, Richard, 228
Villepin, Dominique de, 19, 230
Vimont, Pierre, 63 Zaborowski, Marcin, 134
Visegrad (countries), xii, 90 Zapatero, José Luis Rodrigo, 53, 125
Zyla, Benjamin, 241
Walt, Stephen, xiv, 20–1

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THE EUROPEAN UNION SERIES

General Editors: Neill Nugent, William E. Paterson

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

The author has asserted his right to be identified

First edition 2007

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

ISBN 978-0-230-36234-5 hardback

Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey

List of Illustrative Material ix

1 Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ 1

2 Decision-Making: The Political and Institutional Framework 33

3 The Instruments of Intervention: Generating Military and

4 Selling it to Uncle Sam: CSDP and Transatlantic Relations 109

5 The EU as an Overseas Crisis Management Actor 144

6 Empirical Reality and Academic Theory 190

7 Conclusion: The Major Challenges Ahead 216

3.1 World military expenditure, 2012 72

1.1 Support for a common defence and security policy among

1.1 The Westphalian System 2

5.1 European Union: EEAS completed missions and

crisis erupted, focusing policy-makers’ attention massively on private

outpouring of scholarship in the chapters that follow. The authors whose

Paris JOLYON HOWORTH

AMIS African Mission in Sudan

CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy

GAC General Affairs Council

MPRA Maritime Patrol and Reconnaisance Aircraft

UNMIK United Nations Interim Administration Mission in

Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in

The notion of a ‘work in progress’ is particularly appropriate for Europe’s

Box 1.1 The Westphalian System

1. the principle of the sovereignty of nation-states and the associated

For over 40 years (1957–99), the European Union remained an essen-

Security and Defence Policy: A Special Work in Progress

The security and defence dimension of European integration has recently

Box 1.2 The Western European Union

a distinctive European pillar within the Atlantic Alliance (Howe

France and Germany but eventually sponsored by eight other nations,

The Saint-Malo Revolution

Around three o’clock in the morning on Friday 4 December 1998, offi-

Box 1.3 The Saint-Malo Declaration

British–French Summit St-Malo, 3–4 December 1998

which, for decades, had prevented the EU from embarking on security

Source: Rutten (2001: 8–9).

work in progress in that it was assumed to constitute the final stage of

maximized through association with the EU (Thorhallsson and Wivel

the concomitant crises of United Nations legitimacy and European unity;

Box 1.4 EU and NATO memberships, 1994–2013

Date EU and NATO Non-NATO EU %* Non-EU NATO

1994 UK, France, Germany, Ireland 92 Turkey, Norway,

* Percentage of EU member states which are also members of NATO.

understand that, unlike NATO, CSDP is not a response to a sense of exis-

planning and organizational realities. This book will attempt to bring in

In order to begin to answer the question of CSDP’s fundamental

Neither a Mistake nor Irrelevant