Copyright material – 9780230362352 Contents List of Illustrative Material ix Preface to the Second Edition x List of Abbreviations xv 1 Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ 1 Security and Defence Policy: A Special Work in Progress 2 The Saint-Malo Revolution 7 Controversial Origins 14 Misleading Allegations 15 The Fundamental Drivers behind CSDP 21 Public Policy and Public Opinion 25 The Basic Structure of the Book 26 2 Decision-Making: The Political and Institutional Framework 33 The Pre-Saint-Malo Framework 35 The Post-Saint-Malo Institutions 40 The Post-Lisbon Institutions 49 Conclusion 67 3 The Instruments of Intervention: Generating Military and Civilian Capacity 70 Transforming EU Military Capabilities 73 From Headline Goal 2010 to Pooling, Sharing and Specialization? 83 The European Defence Agency 91 The Contentious Issue of Operational Headquarters 96 Civilian Crisis Management: The Continuation of Politics by Other Means? 97 Conclusion 107 4 Selling it to Uncle Sam: CSDP and Transatlantic Relations 109 US Reactions to CSDP 110 European Approaches to the NATO–CSDP Realtionship 117 The CSDP–NATO Relationship: Zero or Positive Sum? 129 CSDP and NATO after Libya and Afghanistan 137 Conclusion 141 vii Copyright material – 9780230362352 viii Contents 5 The EU as an Overseas Crisis Management Actor 144 CSDP Military Operations 154 Non-Military Missions 168 Monitoring and Assistance Missions 174 Rule of Law Missions 177 Border Assistance Missions 180 Scholarly Analyses 182 Conclusion 187 6 Empirical Reality and Academic Theory 190 Applying Theory to CSDP 192 Substantive Theories 193 Methodological Approaches 205 Alternative Theoretical/Methodological Approaches 211 Conclusion 214 7 Conclusion: The Major Challenges Ahead 216 A Grand Strategy for CSDP 217 Forging an EU Strategic Culture 233 Concluding Thoughts: The Challenges Ahead 242 Bibliography 247 Index 291 Copyright material – 9780230362352 Chapter 1 Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ The notion of a ‘work in progress’ is particularly appropriate for Europe’s efforts to emerge as a security actor. The phrase was used by James Joyce as the working title of his novel, serialized over 20 years and eventually published in 1939 as Finnegan’s Wake. In it, he insisted on the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious in his unprecedented attempt to break with literary tradition and to create an entirely new literary para- digm, appropriate for the twentieth century. Unconsciously, or semi- consciously, Europeans are moving towards a new security paradigm. They have not yet achieved full consciousness of where they are trying to go or what they are seeking to achieve. They have been conscious since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War that the guarantee of their collective security hangs in an uncomfortable balance between depen- dence and autonomy, between the hand of fate and freedom of manoeu- vre. Between 1949 and 1989, dependence and fate held Europe’s security hostage to the imponderables of the American nuclear umbrella in a standoff with the Soviet Union based on ‘mutual assured destruction’. ‘Defence’ was an existential zero-sum game. There was little space for autonomy or freedom of manoeuvre. At the same time, unconsciously, Europeans have sought, in a variety of ways, to create a new practice in international relations, to break with a murderous past which dictated the course of war and peace in depressingly stark realist terms ever since Thucydides first noted that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Europeans have long sought, often only semi- consciously or experimentally, to transcend the zero-sum logic of ‘defence’ and to embrace ‘security’ as a positive-sum game (I cannot feel secure so long as my neighbour feels insecure). Charles de Gaulle, the very incarnation of France’s resistance against the German occupation, embraced Franco-German reconciliation as the surest way of breaking the vicious circle of war and revenge. This was an unparalleled act of states- manship. The entire story of European integration is one of inchoate and experimental efforts to transcend the Westphalian iron-law of sovereignty (see Box 1.1). For the first time in human history, a number of sovereign states elected to gamble on the semi-conscious proposition that the whole would prove to be preferable to the sum of the parts. The EU is still fully engaged in that original ‘work in progress’. 1 Copyright material – 9780230362352 2 Security and Defence Policy in the European Union Box 1.1 The Westphalian System The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years War, and posits four basic principles: 1. the principle of the sovereignty of nation-states and the associated fundamental right of political self-determination; 2. the principle of (legal) equality between nation-states; 3. the principle of internationally binding treaties between states; 4. the principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of other states. For these reasons, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is crucial in the history of international relations. It formed the basis for the modern international system of sovereign nation-states. It marked the beginning of an interna- tional community of law between states of equal legal standing, guaran- teeing each other their independence and the right of their peoples to political self-determination. For over 40 years (1957–99), the European Union remained an essen- tially ‘civilian’ actor. By this expression, scholars have indicated the Union’s focus on the core policy areas of trade and economics, its exis- tence as an institutions-driven project rooted in international law, and its total absence from the arena of military ambition or coercive diplomacy (Whitman 1998; Manners 2005; Telo 2007). These features lay at the heart of the original EU work in progress. To the extent to which the member states attempted, from the 1970s onwards, to coordinate their foreign policy preferences and maximize their coherence, this was essen- tially done through the relatively informal channels of European Political Cooperation (EPC – Nuttall 1992) in which consensus-seeking and lowest common denominator decision-making were the order of the day. EPC, it should be stressed, took place entirely outside the formal institutions of the EU and never ventured into the world of security and defence. The latter, throughout the Cold War, was considered to be the exclusive domain of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On this, there was simply no discussion. Security and Defence Policy: A Special Work in Progress The security and defence dimension of European integration has recently emerged alongside and within the broader EU story as a somewhat sepa- rate work in progress, once again mixing the conscious and the uncon- scious. Its main chapters have been written since the fall of the Berlin Copyright material – 9780230362352 Introduction: CSDP – A ‘Work in Progress’ 3 Wall, but its earliest manifestations predate 1989. In one of the first published studies of what eventually became CSDP, I noted that: ‘the story of European integration began with defence’ (Howorth 2000: 1). This story chronicles the European Union’s constantly frustrated attempts to forge a coordinated defence capacity, beginning with the negotiation of the Franco-British Treaty of Dunkirk (1947), via tentative plans for a Western Union (1947–8), through the Brussels Treaty (1948), the European Defence Community (EDC 1950–4), the Fouchet Plan (1962), the relaunch of the Western European Union (WEU 1973). All these early efforts were couched within the stark context of the Cold War and constituted largely hypothetical – and ultimately unworkable – alter- natives to outright dependence on the USA (Howorth and Menon 1997; Duke 2000; Andréani et al. 2001; Cogan 2001; Quinlan 2001; Duke 2002; Hunter 2002; Salmon and Shepherd 2003; Bonnén 2003; Dumoulin et al. 2003; Mérand 2008). That Europe should have sought to maximize its own inherent secu- rity and defence capabilities seems logical enough. Why then did all the above attempts fail? At this point, suffice it to say that the most signifi- cant factor which stymied these early efforts was the contradiction between the respective positions of France and the UK. For 50 years (1947–97), Britain and France effectively stalemated any prospect of seri- ous European cooperation on security issues by their contradictory inter- pretations of the likely impact in Washington of the advent of serious European military muscle. Elsewhere, I have called this the Euro-Atlantic Security Dilemma (Howorth 2005b). London tended to fear that if Europe demonstrated genuine ability to take care of itself militarily, the US would revert to isolationism. The British fears were exacerbated by a belief in London that the Europeans on their own would never be able to forge a credible autonomous defence (Croft et al. 2001). Paris, on the other hand, expressed confidence that the US would take even more seri- ously allies who took themselves seriously. Both approaches were based on speculation and on normative aspirations rather than on hard strate- gic analysis. Yet as long as France and Britain, Europe’s only two serious military powers, remained at loggerheads over the resolution of the Euro-Atlantic Security Dilemma, impasse reigned. At the height of the Cold War, the security and defence dimension of the work in progress failed even to get off the ground. However, the 1980s began to see the emergence of a trans-European