EU Foreign Policy and Crisis Management Operations

Power, purpose and domestic politics

Benjamin Pohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134697151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores the drivers of the EU's recent forays into peace- and state-building operations.

Since the Union's European (now Common) Security and Defence Policy (ESDP/CSDP) became operational in 2003, the EU has conducted more than 20 civilian and military operations that broadly served to either deter aggression in host countries, and/or to build or strengthen the rule of law. This sudden burst of EU activity in the realm of external security is interesting from both a scholarly and a policy perspective. On one hand, institutionalised cooperation in the field of foreign, security and defence policy challenges the mainstream in IR theory which holds that in such sovereignty-sensitive areas cooperation would necessarily be limited. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of operations suggests that the ESDP may represent a potentially significant feature of global governance.

In order to understand the drivers behind CSDP, EU Foreign Policy and Crisis Management Operations analyses the policy output in this area, including the operations conducted in the CSDP framework. Up until now, many studies inferred the logic behind CSDP from express intentions, institutional developments and (the potential of) pooled capabilities. By mining the rich data that CSDP operations represent in terms of the motives and ambitions of EU governments for the CSDP, this book advances our understanding of the framework at large.

This book will be of much interest to students of European Security, EU policy, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and IR.

1 Introduction

In the singular form, the term ‘European security and defence policy’ would long have been considered an oxymoron. Security and defence traditionally epitomise sovereignty and the modern nation-state, and European history provides ample evidence of intra-continental rivalry and violent conflict that prodded individual countries to think about external security in mutually antagonistic terms. The end of the Cold War thus raised concern regarding whether Western European states, in the absence of a unifying outside threat, would fall back into security competition. Yet instead of moving ‘back to the future’ with great power competition spreading instability across Europe (Mearsheimer 1990), the European security architecture underwent a change towards closer collaboration and deeper integration. Not only did European states continue to accept the political constraints arising from collective territorial defence, but they increasingly complemented them with collective ‘out of area’ interventions. In assuming such tasks, European states also eventually decided to supplement (but not replace) their existing transatlantic framework of security cooperation, NATO, with a new institutional construct embedded into the European Union (EU): the European Security and Defence Policy, later re-baptised the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).¹

The puzzles of EU security policy cooperation

Institutionalised cooperation in the field of security and defence is historically a rare phenomenon. Although the past reveals numerous incidences of cooperation in this policy area, notably in the shape of military alliances, these were generally ad hoc, intended to counter threats from third parties and therefore contingent on these threats. Yet the CSDP came about (only) after such a direct menace in the shape of the Soviet Union had just collapsed. Although new threats have emerged, as identified in the European Security Strategy, these seem certainly less than existential by comparison (cf. European Council 2003). Indeed, the end of a necessity for a defensive alliance had prompted some academic analysts to predict the imminent demise of NATO. The latter’s dogged persistence might be attributed to organisational tenacity, but why, in the absence of any pressing need, would sovereign states go further in voluntarily binding themselves? Why would European governments forgo their free hand in a field as sensitive to national identity and sovereign status as security and defence?

Some observers might argue that the collective foreign policy that CSDP embodies is the result of the unique features of the process of European integration. Yet for a long time, theories devoted to European integration were explicit in predicting the absence of integration in the field of security and defence (Ojanen 2006). Within this field, traditional intergovernmentalists, stressing the self-interested behaviour of national governments, argued that the ‘high politics’ of security and defence would remain outside the remit of economically driven integration because of its zero-sum nature (Hoffmann 1966; Moravcsik 1998). And even neo-functionalism, the theory predicting a gradual transfer of sovereignty to the European level as the result of functional spill-over, assumed that integrationist pressures would halt before the core of sovereign statehood (Ojanen 2006).

The apparent conundrum of a new security arm for the European Union (EU) not only represents an interesting anomaly for those interested in theorising on international and European politics, it also embodies a potentially important component of the global security governance system. Since the CSDP became operational in 2003, the EU has initiated more than 20 crisis management operations within this framework. The character of these operations ranges from military stabilisation operations to civilian rule of law missions designed to prevent the outbreak of conflict.² In line with the ambitious title of the 2003 European Security Strategy, ‘A secure Europe in a better world’, these operations have taken place on three continents. The document itself proclaims that ‘the European Union is inevitably a global player’ (European Council 2003: 1). In view of the sheer number and the geographical spread of crises that the EU has committed itself to addressing, the CSDP’s theoretical salience is thus complemented by policy significance. In short, and as the amount of recent scholarly work on the subject attests, the CSDP is intriguing for political scientists and practitioners alike.

So what exactly is the Common Security and Defence Policy? At its most basic, the CSDP is less a policy than an institutional structure within the European Union for taking and implementing collective decisions pertaining to civilian and military crisis management. As such, it forms part of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the Union’s ‘second pillar’ created by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. The Nice Treaty of 2000, whose provisions were applicable during the timeframe covered in this study, set out in Article 17 that ‘[t]he common foreign and security policy shall include all questions relating to the security of the Union, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy’. Article 17.2 further specified that ‘[q]uestions referred to in this Article shall include humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks and tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking’. Decision making in the second pillar is intergovernmental, i.e. it is formally controlled by the governments of EU member states united in the Council of the EU. Since the Lisbon Treaty took effect in December 2009, the EU’s ‘pillar system’ has in principle been abolished, but decision making in the realm of the CFSP remains far more intergovernmental than in other domains of EU cooperation (cf. Dinan 2010: 98). In a nutshell, the CSDP is a tool for managing (potentially) violent conflicts outside of the EU’s borders.

Explaining CSDP (operations)

How can we explain the Union’s newly-found will to collectively engage in external conflict management? In order to understand the drivers behind the CSDP, this book will analyse the policy output in this area, i.e. the operations conducted in the CSDP framework. Hitherto, many studies inferred the logic behind the CSDP from express intentions, institutional developments and (the potential of ) pooled capabilities (see, for example, Posen 2004; Art 2004; Hyde-Price 2006; Jones 2007; Anderson 2008; Mérand 2008; Selden 2010; Weiss 2011; Hofmann 2013). By contrast, there is hardly any systematic, theory-driven examination of what the EU has actually done, i.e. the operations undertaken within this framework. By mining the rich data that CSDP operations represent in terms of the motives and ambitions of EU governments for the CSDP, it advances our understanding of the framework at large, in a way that no other study has thus far.

Studying the drivers behind the CSDP via that framework’s operational record implies a shift in focus from the aspirations that the framework’s initiators (may have) had to the tangible results they eventually pursued. That shift is inspired by the idea that CSDP actions constitute a better proxy of its underlying purpose than the political rhetoric surrounding the policy. There clearly is a difference between the drivers behind CSDP operations and those behind the framework at large. Yet these operations embody the logic of the CSDP to the extent that they represent the specific purposes to which EU governments could agree to put the CSDP. Underlying intentions are impossible to directly observe, and the discourses used to characterise and justify the CSDP diverged and shifted, often representing formulaic compromises. The objectives and results of specific foreign policy action by contrast are more tangible, and represent more expensive signals of underlying purposes than do declarations of intent. Whereas the CSDP’s original ambition was the capacity for credible and autonomous military action, in practice it has undertaken far more civilian than military operations. The resulting gap between intentions and operational reality invites a re-examination of the logic behind the CSDP based on what actually happened.

In order to understand the drivers underlying the CSDP, this book thus analyses why the European Union has decided to deploy various crisis management operations. Since decision making in the CSDP is intergovernmental, this puzzle raises the question of why EU governments initiated and/or formally agreed to these operations. To address that question, this book examines the diplomatic history behind these operations. Under which conditions did member states decide to dispatch and participate in CSDP operations? Who wanted what, when, how much and why? In short, what are the drivers behind CSDP operations?

In attempting to understand the forces driving EU crisis management operations, this book will rely and expand on explanatory patterns prevalent in international relations (IR) theory. Analysing EU governments’ aims in repeatedly agreeing to collective interventions in foreign crises, it links the specific policy objectives they sought to underlying and more generic motivations. For this purpose, the next chapter will sketch an analytical framework that compares the most often invoked underlying drivers. These propositions suggest that the purpose behind CSDP operations might be: first, the desire to balance the world’s preponderant power, the US, by creating an alternative pole of power; second, an expression of the EU’s conception of its own role as a ‘normative power’ – that is, by attempting to project domestically held values into its environment; third, a means for achieving ‘closer union’ within the EU by way of a traditional nation-building technique – that is, by fashioning a collective security identity; or, fourth, that they might serve to improve governments’ domestic political position by offering them a framework for ‘doing something’ in response to domestic expectations. As the next chapter will show, these potential purposes are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive, but they do represent a useful starting point for systematically investigating the drivers behind the CSDP.

This study hence seeks to uncover which categories of motivation in terms of internal or external power and purpose were important in determining governments’ positions. This objective implies a number of sub-questions: why did member states decide to deploy a mission in a specific environment; what kind of missions did they decide to deploy, i.e. what kind of mandate and resources did they equip these missions with; and why did they do so within the framework of the CSDP? In order to answer these questions, this study will analyse the stated objectives of these operations; the reasons and justifications pivotal actors evoked, publicly as well as privately; the congruence between stated and insinuated objectives on the one hand and the strategy they employed on the other; and the contributions different member states made to these operations, as one way of scrutinising whether they put their money where their mouths were.

Linking CSDP operations and EU foreign policy

In order to be able to delve in some depth with respect to motives and decision making behind CSDP operations, this study needs to narrow its focus in several ways. Because these choices depend in part on the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2, they will be justified in detail after explaining that framework. At this point, suffice it to say that this book will systematically analyse, on the one hand, the interests and motivations of three of the 28 EU governments: those of the UK, France and Germany. Those three were chosen not only because they were presumed to have been particularly influential, but also because they nicely reflect the range of stances EU governments have taken with respect to the most important cleavages differentiating European security policies. On the other hand, this study will focus on four operations from an overall population of 29. Specifically, this book will reconstruct the diplomatic history behind the military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chad/Central African Republic, the police mission in Afghanistan, and the rule of law mission in Kosovo. While Chapter 3 will provide a more detailed justification, those four operations were again chosen for their importance and for the spread they embody in terms of geography as well as the nature of their tasks and chains of command.

This book thus assesses the purpose behind the CSDP by examining and comparing the relative explanatory power of the examined drivers for these four specific CSDP operations. The underlying premise might be challenged insofar as some might argue that either the institutional structure of the CSDP in itself constituted the objective of the homonymous policy or that enhancing European (military) capabilities formed the true policy goal. Yet not only is ‘what the EU does’ ultimately ‘more important than mechanisms by which it does it’ (Menon 2009: 228), when it comes to capabilities, ‘feverish attempts to devise capabilities improvement schemes have failed to deliver much practical progress’ (ibid.: 233; cf. Witney 2008). To somewhat overstate the case, little capability development has happened within the CSDP framework, various capability initiatives such as the EU Battle Groups notwithstanding. Although the question of (lacking) European military capabilities may have spurred the development of CSDP, neither have these capabilities significantly improved nor can such improvements, where they have occurred, be convincingly linked to CSDP.³ This study therefore assumes that the Union’s crisis management activities have in practice figured as the CSDP’s raison d’être, an assumption that was confirmed by most officials who were interviewed for this book.

One more caveat is in order. In assessing the drivers underlying EU security policy through CSDP operations, this study considers only one of the wider gamut of EU foreign policy instruments. It thereby leaves aside other diplomatic or coercive foreign policy measures such as aid conditionality, trade agreements and multilateral negotiations, collective demarches and declarations, or sanctions, all of which may complement or substitute EU action in the CSDP framework. It equally does not analyse crisis management missions carried out in other institutional settings that, depending on the circumstances, may be preferred to the CSDP by EU member states, such as operations in the framework of NATO, the UN, the OSCE, by individual member states or in other coalitions. This limitation should not be interpreted as implying that CSDP operations should or even can be analysed in total isolation. Two research questions raised in the last section – namely, why states decide to intervene in the first place, and why they do so in the CSDP setting – imply that they cannot. This book therefore discusses the impact of related, non-CSDP operations where and insofar as they directly impacted on the four selected CSDP operations. It is important, however, to bear in mind that the CSDP represents but one aspect of the foreign and security policy of European states. It might be skewed or even manipulated towards conveying a specific public message, and thereby misrepresent the ‘cumulative reality’ of the EU and the sum of EU member states’ foreign policy.

The rest of this book

The argument will proceed as follows. Surveying existing explanations of the CSDP, Chapter 2 develops an analytical framework comprising four classes of potential purposes that may have motivated EU governments to adopt their respective positions. The principal categories within which these drivers are organised relate to whether foreign policy behaviour was primarily intended to generate effects within or outside of the EU; and whether it served to pursue political power as such or those ideational purposes most frequently attributed to the Union in the literature. Linking this framework to the IR theoretical literature, Chapter 2 describes and elaborates on four related propositions with respect to the drivers behind CSDP operations and specifies the sort of foreign policy motivations, justifications and behaviour we would expect to find in order to consider the respective proposition plausible.

Chapter 3 subsequently starts out by introducing the reader to the historical and institutional context within which the CSDP has come to be embedded. Building on this overview, it describes the choices underlying this study in terms of research design. Specifically, this chapter explains why this book systematically compares British, French and German preferences, and why and how the four case studies were selected. It concludes by discussing the conceptual and methodological issues raised by the research design.

Chapters 4 to 7 s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in European Security and Strategy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 CSDP operations and international relations theories
• 3 Studying CSDP operations
• 4 Bosnia
• 5 Kosovo
• 6 Afghanistan
• 7 Chad
• 8 CSDP operations and cross-national preferences
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index