ABSTRACT
If anybody had 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, they would have been regarded by most serious analysts as wildly optimistic dreamers. The years 1997 and 1998 probably represented a low-point in European hopes of establishing a military capacity allowing the Union to engage in peacekeeping and crisis management missions independently of the United States (Gnesotto 1998; Gordon 1997). In 1999, the brief campaign in Kosovo demonstrated to all and sundry that, compared with the US military, European forces could hope to do little more than play a facilitating or back-up role (Brawley and Martin 2000; Bozo 2003). The Franco-British summit in Saint Malo in December 1998, which effectively kick-started the drive towards a serious European security and defence project, was immediately followed by the chaotic and ineffectual conference at Rambouillet, co-chaired by France and the United Kingdom, which signally failed to avert the Kosovo war, for which the Europeans were so manifestly unprepared. Yet in late 2001, the European Council declared its objective of being able to field operational combatready troops by 2003. The reaction from strategic experts around the world was one of serious scepticism (Centre for Defence Studies 2001; International Institute for Strategic Studies 2001: 283-91). Yet the 2003 deadline was met and by 2006 the European Union had launched sixteen missions in as many countries on three continents. Six of those missions were primarily military. This massive transformation of the European Union’s intervention capacity was achieved in a context in which, on both sides of the Atlantic, critics tended to view the European Union as woefully unprepared to face the test of military engagement, let alone the harsh strategic reality of the post-9/11 world.2
