Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the inception of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), the Council commended the success of this policy which saw the deployment of some 70 000 personnel in 22 ESDP missions and operations, of which 12 are ongoing, in support of international peace and security. (Council 2009, November 17)
[CSDP] missions ‘are deemed to be successful’ from the moment the decision about the deployment has been taken. Hence, there is only one conceivable scenario in which the Council might publicly criticise its deployments, namely if it decided to re-engineer the ESDP, say, the way missions are planned and run. In such a case, the criticism of mission performance would function as a means to justify major institutional change. (Kurowska 2008, 37–38)
One of the reasons that prompted me to explore the European Union’s (EU’s) peace missions was the incredibly disproportional attention paid to the means versus the ends of these missions. Even in cases where the ends were emphasised, the stress fell on how a particular end would affect the EU’s capability to act on the international stage. I felt that the discussions reified the EU’s identity by totally disconnecting the debate from the target(s) of these missions. Furthermore, the frequent encounter with the commonsensical argument that the CSDP offered more of a short-term toolbox and was hence justified to have as blinkered a view of the particular “goods” its missions were supposed to offer as it pleased further pushed me to enquire for whom the CSDP operations were meant.
With this concern in mind, I investigate within this book the European Union’s identity as a provider of peace missions, that is its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) identity. 1 The prime purpose is to critically disturb the nature of the EU’s peace missions by asking what they offer, whom they serve and how they go about it. The supplementary questions underline the significance of the following aspects: (i) who is able to script peace, (ii) how the EU affects/is affected by the liberal peace, (iii) to what extent does the EU appraise its missions and finally (iv) what are the real-life effects of conceptualising the EU peace missions in the way they are presently imagined. Liberal peacebuilding, representing the received approach to conflicts among the international community (IC), inescapably affects the way the EU’s peace missions are imagined. Concurrently, the CSDP arm of the EU’s external policy allows to shape—and/or reinforce—the preponderant way of doing peacebuilding. Moreover, as much as the EU’s missions are about solving problems, they are in the first instance about defining the problems we are allegedly facing (see ESS 2003). The EU has identified itself as a peace project and articulated its aspiration to widen the zone of peace and security, to promote a ring of well-governed countries, to bring stability. It is vital to bear in mind that throughout the EU’s CSDP career the substance of its missions has been pushed into the background. Hence, when Solana is asked about the future developments of the CSDP in 2005, his argument is “no concept, however beautiful or sophisticated, can be a substitute for practical improvements” (Council 2005, December). The rub is that the way CSDP missions are envisioned—cookie-cutter predilection aside—is not the only way to think about them, but rather a very particular way of thinking and understanding (cf. Viktorova Milne 2009; Autesserre 2010, 2014). Put differently, EU’s peace missions are loaded with particular conceptual energy, pivoting on how they make sense of the ultimate goods the missions should offer. Therefore, with some thirty missions under the EU’s belt it is indispensable to examine the “peace” the EU has offered. By investigating EU’s CSDP identity from a critical standpoint, as opposed to the more common problem-solving one, this work offers new perspectives on the CSDP. The book not only explores the solutions offered through the EU’s missions but also scrutinises how the problems are presented in the first place as requiring specific solutions. Furthermore, through questioning the CSDP identity, the overall coherence of the EU’s identity is brought under scrutiny. Approaching the CSDP in this manner does not intend to offer the “whole story”—it rather zooms in on aspects that have previously remained peripheral, with the intention of questioning the received image of CSDP.
The Council’s excerpt to this introduction demonstrates the manner in which the EU measures the success of the CSDP. The EU utilises quantified metrics that are more tilted towards the EU’s internal factors, such as the number of troops, number of operations deployed, 2 rather than analysing the effect of the operations on the ground. Indeed, it can be noted that the majority of policy-oriented literature and academic writing on CSDP missions are guided by problem-solving frames that have focused their energy on the effectiveness and efficiency of CSDP missions rather than interrogating the substance and purpose of these missions. Conversely, this book focuses on the substance matter, not seen as something that is natural and commonsensical (cf. Kurki 2013), but rather something that is pregnant with certain assumptions and visions of how a better life can be brought about.
The goods, such as security, the rule of law, support of international peace and security (see the quote introducing this chapter), and others that the CSDP offers are very often utilised as taken-for-granted articles of peacebuilding, where debate on them is made redundant. Indeed, as many authors have pointed out, there is a specific template that international actors follow, i.e. the liberal peace model (e.g. Mac Ginty 2008, 2011). While the Commission’s side of the EU’s externality has been successfully brought into the discussions of the critical strand of peace and conflict studies literature, the same cannot be said about the CSDP. Pogodda et al. (2014, 2) argue that the EU as a whole does not have an “explicit peacebuilding strategy”, yet a number of recurrent motifs emerge within the EU’s speech acts communicating particular goods (e.g. the rule of law) and policies (e.g. the rule of law missions). In all, Pogodda et al. note that rhetorically the EU subscribes to conflict resolution and peacebuilding themes, yet in practice the EU seems to oscillate between liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding models (ibid. 15, 17). Within this work, the emphasis is placed on one element—the CSDP missions—of the EU’s peacebuilding framework (EUPF), a concept relating to the overall EU presence in peacebuilding (see Björkdahl et al. 2011). 3
The next paragraphs will tap into a selection of state-of-the-art literature on the CSDP, in order to better locate my own approach—which will offer a significant contribution to a critically informed study of the CSDP, since critical approaches to the CSDP are rather sparse. In 2010, a group of researchers mapped the prevalent topics and approaches to the CSDP (see Freire et al. 2010) and divided the literature on European peace missions into three thematic groups: (i) European Union cooperation with other international organisations in crisis management; (ii) decisions and planning; and (iii) the evaluation of missions (ibid. 2010, 3). The first two topics in this group are definitely more predominant when it comes to research on the CSDP. Also, the mapping exercise reveals—even if this is not explicitly stated—that positivist frameworks and logics have been applied more often (cf. Manners and Whitman 2016), whereas there is a dearth of critical frameworks in the study of the EU’s peace operations. As Kurowska notes, research on CSDP “is said to be notoriously undertheorised” (2012, 1; see also Bickerton et al. 2011). In particular, as the mapping exercise manifests, the evaluation part of CSDP has been patchy and “highly subjected to individual interpretations” (Freire et al. 2010, 40). More often than not, the evaluation process is not conceptualised: it is executed implicitly, which does not provide a solid grounding for the evaluation itself. Furthermore, the study refers to the problem...
