Europe has a strategy, but is the EU a strategic actor? (original) (raw)
Related papers
The European Security Strategy: a framework for EU security interests?
International Peacekeeping, 2004
USNS emphasises the notion of 'pre-emption', a unilateralist approach to international security; the ESS commits the EU to a multilateral approach to security challenges, embodied in international law and the UN Charter. Both the ESS and the USNSS embrace a 'comprehensive concept of security' in proposing to tackle common security threats by drawing on a developed toolbox. The ESS does prescribe an alternative approach to 'unilateralism'. However, it presently provides a benchmark to assess European responses to international security rather than describe a manifest new approach.
The Deficiencies, Mistakes and Contradictions of the New EU Foreign and Security Strategy
2016
CERPESC 16/E/03/2016 - 20 December 2016 ; The events of the last 20 years, the first operations and missions, show that the Common Security and Defense Policy, the CSDP (the European Security and Defense Policy: the ESDP, before 2009) does not exist only on paper. Europe must act to prevent wars and crises or to stop them. The European Union and its member countries are confronted with decisive choices for the future of Europe as a political entity. The external (and above all, energy) dependence of the Union is particularly emphasized by the European security strategies. The documents that function as strategies (the first, the 2003 ESS and the most recent, 2016 EUGS) of the European Union are quite poor in terms of content and objectives. They list the challenges, without drafting the places and means of the overall strategic presence. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the major development issues of EU strategic thinking during the period 2003-2016. Can we talk about development, stagnation, or devolution? Is the new strategy capable of fulfilling its role and can really serve as the basis of our ambitions?
Introduction: strategy in EU foreign policy
The point of departure for the special collection is provided by the observation that the growing complexity of the crises in the neighbourhood and the internal ones faced by the Union provides a sense of urgency to any type of strategic thinking that the EU might embrace. Against this backdrop, the recent shift towards geopolitics and strategic thinking is contextualized and the understanding of key aspects of ways in which the shift is translated into strategies by EU actors is put forward. The analysis recognizes the recent developments within the institutional dimension of EU’s foreign and security policy, yet it confirms the fundamental meaning of the member states’ willingness to invest resources and harmonize their foreign policy strategies at the EU level.
2018
The aim of the study is to analyze what kinds of understanding of security does the European Union have and what themes are linked to security. Additionally, the study aims to analyze the European Union as a power in international politics. The research material consists of two security strategies. The focus is on the Global Strategy for European Union's Foreign and Security policy, which was published in June 2016. This strategy is compared to the European Security Strategy of 2003 in order to detect new trends in European security policy. The strategies act as guidelines for the European security policy and thus represent the main actors and themes related to European security. Therefore, strategies provide interesting research material. The study was conducted through the method of political reading. Political reading (Palonen, 1988) aims to study how the political aspect appears in texts and what kinds of interpretations can be made from the political parlances. Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde's (1998) categorization of the areas of security was a useful tool when analyzing the security threats presented in the Global Strategy. When studying the European Union as a power, Toje's (2011) concept of small power was used alongside McCormick's (2007) work on superpower. Based on the results, the field of European security is quite versatile. Strongest emphasis in the Global Strategy is on European military and economic security. Political and societal security is in most cases overlapping other areas; the strong institutions and European values are in the core of European security policy. Despite the EU's role as a trendsetter for environmental awareness, environmental security is underrepresented in the Global Strategy of 2016. The study shows that the European Union has behavioral elements of both a small power and a superpower. It can thus be argued that the EU relies heavily on international institutions, such as the UN, in its global actions, but at the same time tries to achieve a position as an independent actor. Operational independency was especially a current theme in the material. According to the Global Strategy of 2016, the European Union is a small power that aims towards recognition as a great power.
in Antonio Missiroli (ed.), Towards an EU global strategy. Background, process, references, Paris, EU Institute for Security Studies, September 2015, p. 115-120, ISBN 978-92-9198-370-4, 2014
The volume explores the evolution of the European Security Strategy (or Strategies, considering the two successive versions of June and December 2003).
A Tragic Lack of Ambitions: Why EU Security Policy is no Strategy
Contemporary Security Policy, 2013
Tools of classical strategic analysis support distinctive explanations for the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union. Looking at the articulation between ends, ways, and means offers a perspective on the CSDP that is different from the approaches usually favoured by European Union specialists or even security studies scholars. In particular, it is argued here that the CSDP is no strategy, and little more than an institutional make-up for the lack of strategic thinking within the European Union. First, I show that the CSDP is not European security, and that the EU security policy is astonishingly absent from the security challenges facing Europe. Second, I argue that this situation stems from a lack of a political project within the European Union. I refer to the classical distinction made by Hans Morgenthau between pouvoir and puissance to show that, short of a political project, we will not see a strategic CSDP any time soon.
From the ESS to the EU Global Strategy: external policy, internal purpose
Contemporary Security Policy, 2016
Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper offers a brief stock-taking of the EU’s way of writing security from the European Security Strategy (2003) to the EU Global Strategy (2016). A concise exegesis of these documents exposes an interesting dynamic: as exercises in ordering the world, both strategic guidelines have turned out to be major exercises in ordering the self. The comparative snapshot shows the EU as increasingly anxious to prove its relevance for its own citizens, yet notably less confident about its actual convincingness as an ontological security framework for the EU’s constituent members over time.