ABSTRACT
When, under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Tony Blair at the Franco-British summit held in St. Malo on 4 December 1998, the European Union’s two pre-eminent military powers agreed to launch a joint initiative that was to be turned into a common European project of the then 15 EU member states six months later at the Cologne European Council, and eventually enshrined in the 2001 Treaty of Nice, a more than 40-year deadlock over a genuine and autonomous European role in security and defence was broken. Even though the path towards a common European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) was an evolutionary, if arduous, highly contested and deeply controversial process, scholars and policymakers alike were quick to label the EU’s embrace of security and defence as a separate policy area ‘Europe’s military revolution’ (Andréani, Bertram and Grant 2001; Howorth 2007: 36). Since its inception, ESDP has indeed developed into one of the most dynamic policy
fields of the EU: a whole array of new institutions was added to the existing complex institutional framework. Catalogues and headline goals for military and civilian capabilities were adopted and – due to both a lack of implementation and the rapidly changing nature of the international system – constantly refined. A European Defence Agency (EDA) was set up to support the improvement of the military capability. The Brussels European Council of December 2003 approved the EU’s first European Security Strategy (European Council 2003; Biscop 2005). In addition, from January 2003 to March 2009, the EU launched no fewer than 23 operations. While the overall range of ESDP missions underlines the global nature of EU interventions, the majority of them were not military, were small in scope and – with the exception of Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina – were limited in size (Messervy-Whiting 2006; Howorth 2007: 207-41; Menon 2009). While it would be wrong to claim that the EU has emerged as a major new strategic actor in world politics, the positive impact of EU interventions seems undisputed. For many years, the scholarly literature concentrated on the diverse aspects of the EU’s
international relations (Hill and Smith 2005; Rees and Smith 2008). Since 1999, a lively academic debate has contributed to an ever-growing body of literature on the EU’s role in security and defence. Those more concerned with empirical studies suggested that ESDP had ended the age of ‘innocence’ of Europe as a civilian power (Deighton 2002:
728). They also cautioned against the militarization of EU policies (Lagendijk 2002; Manners 2006); warned that the ESDP was ‘misguided and dangerous for the [Atlantic] Alliance’ (Menon 2003: 203; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2003); or, on the contrary, emphasized the positive consequences for the EU itself and its relations both with NATO and with the US (Howorth 2003; Kupchan 1998, 2000, 2004-5; Sloan 2000). Echoing some of these sentiments, the various schools of International Relations
theory and of European Integration theory, while (still) struggling to explain the existence of ESDP, have either, in the structural realist tradition, referred to a supposedly (soft) balancing behaviour of the EU vis-à-vis US power (Posen 2004, 2006; Art 2005: 180-83; Walt 2005: 121, 129; Jones 2006, 2007); some, although contradicting neofunctionalist (Sandholtz and Sweet 1998) as well as (liberal) intergovernmentalist (Hoffmann 1966; Moravcsik 1998) predictions for the high politics of security and foreign policy, have suggested that the implementation of ESDP could be understood as the result of spillover effects driven not least by external events, of pressures from outside actors leading to the decision to pool resources in order to maximize efficacy (Smith 2004a: 241; Andreata 2005: 22; Ojanen 2006), or of a process of both the internationalization of European armed forces since the end of the Second World War and the Europeanization of foreign policy since the beginnings of the EU (Mérand 2008: 14f.); while others again, in line with constructivist explanations, have focused on the development of a genuine European strategic culture based on common beliefs, norms, values, ideas and patterns of behaviour (Cornish and Edwards 2001, 2005; Meyer 2005, 2006; Giegerich 2006). Although the respective arguments remain powerful in themselves, one school alone cannot explain the emergence of the EU as an, albeit limited, security actor in its own right with a range of instruments at its disposal. This chapter consists of three main sections. By looking at early efforts – and failures –
to anchor security and defence in the European integration process, the first section suggests that, although dependent on US protection for their external security and defence, the EEC was established and perceived as a nested security community. The second section focuses on the emergence and development of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) between national preferences and the institutionalization of cooperation. The third part highlights the driving forces that led to the creation of ESDP; it looks, however briefly, at some of the challenges inherent in the EU’s transformation from a ‘mere’ security community to a security actor; and it describes the slow emergence of a distinct EU strategic culture and security governance.
