European Security and Defence Policy

Michael Merlingen, Rasa Ostrauskaite, Michael Merlingen, Rasa Ostrauskaite

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134083541
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Security and defence is the area in which the EU has advanced most in recent years. A principal element of this process is the proliferating number of military and civilian crisis management missions in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Clearly, Europe has come a long way since the disappointments and frustration in the 1990s, when, in light of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, analysts argued that the EU foreign and security policy was 'neither common, nor foreign, nor dealing with security, nor (could) be called a policy.' Since then the newly developed European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) has become the necessary framework for the formulation and implementation of effective European security policy.

This book is the first-ever in-depth inquiry of the ESDP in action. It analyzes the implementation of military and civilian missions in the Balkans, Southern Caucasus, Africa and Asia and asks what impact they have on the ground. The EUJUST Themis in Georgia, the Aceh Monitoring Mission in Indonesia as well as EUSEC-R.D. Congo and EUPOL Kinshasa are examined in

The European Security and Defence Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, security, European studies, foreign policy, peacekeeping and transatlantic relations.

1
Introduction

The European Union in International Security Affairs

Michael Merlingen and Rasa Ostrauskait

¹

The literature on European foreign policy has grown gradually since the 1970s when the members of the then European Communities agreed to coordinate their foreign policies through European Political Co-operation. During the decades that followed the topic was a kind of domaine réservé. Only true aficionados devoted their research to what, to many non-specialists, looked like a marginal activity.

In the last ten years or so, this has changed, reflecting the Union’s emergence as an important international political and security actor. In particular, the new millennium has seen an impressive expansion of publications on what, since the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, is called the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). There are general overviews, theoretical and historical treatises (Carlsnaes, Sjursen and White, 2004; Hill and Smith, 2005; Peterson and Sjursen, 1998; Nuttall, 2000; Smith, K.E., 2003; Tonra and Christiansen, 2004; Zielonka, 1998).

Much of the remaining scholarship falls into one of two broad streams, which overlap at the margins. Simplifying slightly, one stream centres on the operation of the European foreign policy system and its inputs while the other examines the international relations of the EU (Biscop and Andersson, 2007; Giegerich, 2006; Hill, 1996; Holland, 1997; Knodt and Princen, 2003; Manners and Whitman, 2000; Meyer, 2006; Smith, M.E., 2004; Tonra, 2001; White, 2001). The former analyzes what goes on and why within the European Union (EU) and the member states when foreign policy is made. Attention is thus given to, say, the actors involved in this field, the governance structure (material and ideational) and processes through which policy is made and shaped, the effect of national preferences and/or societal identities on common external actions and the Europeanization of national foreign policies, ministries and cultures.

The second stream inquires, among other things, into the policy output of the CFSP, its embeddedness in transatlantic relations and the Union’s impact, as a presence or as an actor, on the structure, processes and issueareas of world politics.

Finally, there are researchers who seek to bridge levels of analysis. Broadly informed by the agent-structure debate in international relations theory, they analyze how the EU governance system influences, and in turn is influenced by, the conduct and identity of the EU on the world stage (Bretherton and Vogler, 1999; Elgström and Smith, 2006; Ginsberg, 2001; Lucarelli and Manners, 2006). The impressive scope and depth of recent research into European foreign policy notwithstanding, little sustained attention has been given to its international security dimension and hence to what is emerging as a key area of the Union’s international relations – the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). Our book is part of current efforts to rectify this shortcoming and to add to our collective knowledge of the ESDP (Howorth, 2007; Howorth and Keeler, 2003; Merlingen with Ostrauskait

, 2006).

Security and defence is the area in which the EU has advanced most in recent years. A principal element of this process, which stands out in the general malaise that has befallen European integration, is an ever-growing number of military and civilian crisis management missions in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. Clearly, Europe has come a long way since the disappointments and frustration in the 1990s, when, in light of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, analysts argued that EU foreign and security policy was ‘neither common, nor foreign, nor dealing with security, nor [could] be called a policy’ (Rummel and Wiedemann, 1998:53). Since then the newly developed ESDP has become the necessary framework for the formulation and implementation of effective European security policy.

The growing Brusselization of security policy notwithstanding (Allen, 1998), there is, as Robert Cooper (2005:189) has pointedly remarked, no member state for which the ESDP is central to its defence and security policies. While an impressive amount of national foreign policy objectives is channelled and filtered through the EU (Ginsberg, 2001), security policy remains either more national in orientation, say, with regard to weapons procurement, or displays a high degree of multilateral co-operation, but under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The latter point leads to another observation. The ‘S’ in ESDP refers mostly to soft security – ethnic conflict, post-violence stabilization, political stability and organized crime. The case studies assembled in this volume clearly reflect this ‘bias’. However, there is a sense in which the development of military and civilian intervention capabilities, although too modest to be used for the purpose of homeland defence – the ‘D’ in ESDP – makes the Union a bit more state-like and a bit less post-modern. However, this point should not be pressed too far. Our volume documents that there is a kind of ‘self-styled logic’ at play in the implementation of the ESDP (cf. Ginsberg, 1989). Importantly, this is a post-Westphalian logic that has little to do with the pursuit of material interests or the sovereign imposition of universal(ized) values and norms on third countries.

Incidentally, the implication of the priority given by the Union to soft security is that the ESDP constitutes an ‘integrated European interventionism’, at the core of which is the projection of power abroad to achieve civilian ends (Howorth, 2004:213; see also Charillon, 2004).

This volume, then, reflects the growing empirical importance of the ESDP. It goes beyond the debate on whether the EU needs the ESDP or whether the ESDP is good for Europe (Howorth, 2003; Menon, 2003; Sangiovanni, 2003). Rather, it examines the credentials of the policy both by examining how it is put into operation and how it addresses the security challenges of host countries. Implementation research is an established strand of EU studies. It concerns itself with questions such as what is the effect of institutions and interests on the enactment of EU policies and law (cf. Falkner et al., 2004; Knill, 1998). The principal concern of this volume is somewhat different. It centres on the processes of organising and running ESDP missions, their interaction with local authorities and international actors on the ground, including other EU bodies, and on mission outputs and outcomes. The overarching research question guiding the contributions is the following. How has the new security and defence actor that emerged at the European Council summit in Helsinki in December 1999 been employing its new military and civilian crisis management capabilities and to what effect?

Many of our contributors analyse the implementation of EU military and civilian missions in Europe and beyond and ask whether they make or made a difference on the ground. Others explore different aspects of the political and institutional contexts of the ESDP. Together their studies take stock of the value that the operational capabilities and roles of the ESDP add to EU foreign and security policy; identify strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of missions; assess their practical achievements; investigate whether the operational experiences gained so far shaped the institutional evolution of the ESDP; ask how such operations are perceived by locals; and inquire into the interaction between, on the one hand, the ESDP and, on the other, the European Commission, NATO, the USA and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

It has been said that there are more academics writing about the ESDP than people trying to make it work. We avoid this problem, or at least do not aggravate it, by bringing together a unique mix of policy-shapers and academics/policy analysts. The latter bring their research-based expertise of the ESDP and its contexts to the project, the former, many of whom have publication records of their own, their unrivalled knowledge of the missions or topics they write about.

Theoretical and methodological considerations

To ensure a coherent volume and to allow a comparison of the assembled case studies on ESDP missions, we established a common framework that contributors were asked to employ in their analyses. To begin with, we selected a number of key issues – the preparation, launch, start-up and organization of the operations as well as their activities and impact – to give a clear focus to the chapters. We also designed a set of generic questions on mission implementation to structure the policy narratives and the evidence marshalled in their support (cf. George, 1979). We provided similar guidelines for those chapters that contextualize the ESDP. Finally, we extensively edited each chapter with a view to ensuring that the disciplines we imposed were leaving their mark on the investigations. However, we did encourage authors to add any further insights that could shed light on the intricate workings of operations and EU security policy more generally. At this point, we want to pause for a moment to express our gratitude to our contributors for being patient with us and putting up with what to some may have looked like a never-ending flow of comments, revisions and requests for changes.

We hope that the readers will agree with us that the ensuing contributions are rich in detailed empirical observations, highlighting both more general and idiosyncratic features of the ESDP. Many record evidence that is unavailable to outsiders, even those who do extensive interviews, and that would be lost to scholars unless it is written down by those who participated in the deployments. In conceptual terms, the analyses of operations and their contexts are pre-theoretical. Instead of being self-consciously theoretical, we asked our authors to be deliberately self-reflective. The result is carefully constructed maps of the political settings, actions, interactions, challenges and impact of missions. Of course, these maps do not register an unproblematic reality. The concept-dependency of facts makes the empiricist ideal of pure observations a chimera.

In the case of the chapters centred on individual ESDP operations, this epistemological point has a particular ramification (cf. Hollis and Smith, 1991). All these case studies provide insider views whose accounts of what went on in the operations are based on participant observations and interpretations, i.e., to use Knud Erik Jørgensen’s (2004) felicitous phrase, on acts of self-observation; in one instance, the inside story is constructed on the basis of extensive interviews with field staff. Among other things, these policy narratives cast light on the rules (formal and informal), reasons and understandings on which mission leaderships draw/drew in their day-to-day efforts to work toward their mandated objectives. Yet such inside stories, while highlighting facets of the ESDP that would otherwise remain opaque, have an obvious theoretical drawback. They do not address how the perceptions and interpretations of practitioners are themselves shaped by factors beyond their control or even knowledge. For instance, our contributors emphasize the importance attached by missions to the notion of local ownership, and they argue that this is a feature that sets the EU apart from many other international actors. What they do not take into account is how this feature is shaped by broader discourses and practices of global governmentality that mobilize, classify and organize subjects with the aim of forging alignments between their personal projects, desires and conduct and the objectives of authorities (Abrahamsen, 2004; Merlingen, 2006). This ‘bias’ of inside stories notwithstanding, we believe that there are good reasons at this stage in research on the implementation and impact of the ESDP to privilege them. There is simply too little known about this dimension of European foreign policy to theorize it. The latter demarche would run the risk of abstract academic work running ahead of actual developments. Theorybuilding and testing has to wait for further empirical research. However, in the concluding chapter we mobilize a number of theoretical concepts to offer, informed by the empirical observations made by our authors, some tentative generalizations about the ESDP.

Organization of the book

The book is designed to fall into four parts. The next two chapters deal with the history, structures and capabilities of the ESDP and the formation on the part of the EU of an international security policy role conception. In Chapter 1, Maria Raquel Freire discusses the origins of the ESDP and charts its trajectory. She analyses its institutionalization, provides an overview of the current CFSP decision-making structures and capabilities and explores the political and administrative governance of the ESDP. Freire also draws attention to broader political challenges, related notably to the transatlantic relationship and EU-NATO interaction, which have been limiting Europe’s voice in international security affairs. Before concluding her chapter with a discussion of the limitations of security policy made in Brussels, she situates the ESDP in the panoply of EU first- and third-pillar foreign policy instruments. In the chapter that follows, Xymena Kurowska explains the reasons for the proliferation of ESDP missions, especially civilian ones. She argues that they have become a major vehicle for the EU Council to reshape the Union’s foreign policy role. Her argument emphasizes the importance of what she refers to as the Solana milieu in this strategic moulding and branding of the ESDP. Furthermore, she brings into focus the tensions and rivalries between these policy entrepreneurs and the European Commission, which has itself evolved into an influential foreign and security policy actor. Kurowska goes on to inquire into the grammar that structures the discursive framing of operations and the manner in which they are represented by the Council Secretariat to member states and the European Commission through such mundane formats as lessonslearned papers. She concludes with a discussion that interrogates the claim that the ESDP suffers from a democratic deficit.

Thesecondpartofthevolumecomprisesaseries of process-oriented descriptions and in-depth analyses of ESDP operations. They bring into focus the multiple realities of EU crisis management and peacebuilding. These chapters have the same structure. They begin by situating the intervention in its issue-specific and broader political environment in the host country. Following a discussion of the political and organizational aspects of the operation, including its raison d’être, mandate, preparation, deployment, internal management and co-operation with other international actors, the authors proceed to analyze i...