Autonomous defense? The role of military forces in EU external affairs

Abstract

Conclusion: The trend toward EU autonomy in defense matters may not be so ineluctable as it appeared in 1999-2000. The Kosovo war produced widespread political support for the French-British desire for a stronger European pillar, born out of frustrations with the US in the former Yugoslavia and also NATO’s inability to incite capability reform in Europe. From a convergence of state preferences followed the ESDP with a policy focused on Petersberg tasks, new institutions within the EU, and a separate force planning mechanism. However, the events of September 11, 2001 have exposed underlying tensions among European state preferences and the trajectory is likely to change, no longer moving toward autonomy but a new type of dependency. The US will offer little support for a security and defense policy that does not reinforce its new global strategy, and in this respect its revisionist stance vis-à-vis the European pillar will harden. The strategic design for European autonomy will suffer and reside mainly in a military design that French policy-makers support rhetorically or a more broadly based design for the EU as a “civilian power.” Military operations will occur in ad hoc coalitions that rely on both NATO and EU means, thus resulting in a type of institutional interdependence, but US superiority and European weakness will in the context of coercion create a new type of military dependency. This conclusion is based on an examination of how states respond to new power configurations and opportunities and seek to enhance their influence and the scope for their domestically rooted values and worldviews. States support institutions such as NATO and the EU depending on the affinity between the ideas that these institutions harbor and the interests of states. To the extent that these ideas evolve away from state interests, the institution will lose support. The US policy on NATO is intended to break what US policy-makers perceive as a trend toward irrelevance. Likewise, Western European governments are currently realizing the extent to which enlargement of both the EU and NATO have changed the rationale of these institutions and thus made strategic support for them difficult. The result is a vacuum of leadership and commitment and, as pointed out, new patterns of dependency. A new Messina summit may produce a slimmer European security pillar that can establish a new affinity between state power and institutional purpose. Messina I occurred ten years following the change of world order, in 1945. Messina II has been and will continue to be longer in the waiting. Show more