E Pluribus Unum? Military Integration in the European Union. Egmont Paper, no. 7, May 2005 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Managing the Civil-Military Interface in the EU: Creating an Organisation Fit for Purpose
2010
The establishment of European Security and Defense Policy /Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1999 has been accompanied by the anticipation that the European Union will represent a unique strategic actor because of its ability to mix civilian and military crisis management instruments as part of a comprehensive approach. But to what extent is this characteristic reflected in the EU's civil-military organisation? The EU is clearly not a state, but it does embody certain non-intergovernmental characteristics that set it beyond a "normal" inter-state organisation or alliance, the expansion of the role of the administrative level being one of them. The development of a well-functioning civil-military organisation is important in this regard, but appropriate benchmarks for what such an organisation would look like are missing from the current EU debate. A problem is that, when focusing on the novelty and uniqueness of the EU's comprehensive approach, institutional change is often treated as a good in itself. However, by contrasting and using two classical models for organising civilmilitary relations -Samuel Huntington's so-called "normal", or separated model, and Morris Janowitz' "constabulary", or integrated model -as benchmarks, the article shows that institutional innovations have largely sustained a separation of the civil-military interface, despite the stated objective of developing an EU "culture of coordination". This situation reflects the inherent tension between a traditional civil-military culture with deep roots in the Member States, on the one hand, and an evolving "in-house" civil-military culture within the Council Secretariat, on the other. When it comes to ESDP/CSDP, certain Member States have used institutional reform as a way to push through national agendas, producing frequent but often ineffective institutional change. At the same time, there has been a lack of attention inside the Council Secretariat paid to effective measures for breaking down professional and cultural barriers between military officers and civilian personnel.
Prospects and Challenges of the European Defence & Security Cooperation.
2019
The enduring and ambitious aspiration of a common European Army has instilledawe to academics, political theorists and visionaries since before the establishment ofthe European Communities. Its immoderate fundament has been part of a paramountpolitical process towards a fully integrated European State that would secure aninviolable peace between national actors and beyond. However its perennialinadequacies have always been the outcome of unbending national interests andstructural characteristics of the international order. The changing nature of integration,political conservatism and the eroding international system are providing the groundsfor a systematization of flexible solutions in European cooperation and a new sectoraldomain for security and defence, the Industrial and Technological base. The mandate ofSaint Malo for autonomous action provided a path that is currently leading the EU to aStructured Cooperation and a Defence, Technology and Industrial Strategy that couldn’tbe more alienating towards the prospect of a coherent cooperation that will direct acollective effort in implementing a 21st century security and defence union. Without thepolitical consensus for strategic implementation and the shared threat perceptionsregarding human security and its externalization through foreign policy, the newsecurity environment that is emerging won’t be pre-empted by the rather ambitious anddubious means of the current rationale.The end of the bipolar world and the emergence of a multipolar environment haveadvanced the prospect of an integrated European defence as a response to conventionaland asymmetric threats of the 21st century. The launch of the permanent structuredcooperation in 2017 stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon signifies a pivotal change of pacein Europe’s integration as it sets forth a process that reaches the boundaries set bynational sovereignty. The political, financial and institutional capacity that PESCOrequires have raised arguments concerning it’s pragmatism and whether it’s only ameans to an end, in order to achieve a higher level of integration. The absence of apolitical bedrock and the formation of new intergovernmental barriers towards astrategic autonomy status, are leading to a fragmented and disparate process that isdirected towards a military and defence industry coil. Without the necessary politicalconvergence PESCO will remain deficient and drifting between selective few anddecentralized interests. Prioritization of goals, strategic communication and a societaland human security perception can direct a collective effort in implementing a 21stcentury defence union.
'In defence of EU Armed Forces', in Twelve Stars Initiative Bertelsmann Stiftung (ed.) Twelve Stars - Philosophers Chart a Course for Europe (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2019), available here., 2019
The European Union has for some time claimed that the organization possesses comparative strength vis-à-vis other organizations in regards to conducting comprehensive peace support operations with a focus on civil-military interaction. This study sets out to investigate how far the European Union has reached in implementing a Comprehensive Approach to its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations. This is done by examining the institutional and conceptual conditions for civil-military interaction within the EU. The report concludes that even though substantial institutional development has taken place, the organization has not fully managed to take advantage of all its potential to apply a Comprehensive Approach. The main reason for this is the continuous transformation that the organization has undergone, which has made long-term strategic approaches towards civil-military interaction difficult to establish. The reforms of the Lisbon Treaty provide the EU with new opportunities to establish and implement comprehensiveness. Once the current state of transformation has settled, the organization needs to focus its attention on developing conditions for long-term strategic civil-military interaction. In addition to the institutional conditions, this also applies to the conceptual situation. The development of conceptual capability for the implementation of a culture of coordination has currently lagged behind operational requirements. It is however an area of much importance if the EU is going to be able to implement a Comprehensive Approach to its peace support operations. Keywords: Civil-military interaction, Comprehensive Approach, Civil-military relations, Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), Common Foreign and security Policy (CFSP), Peace Support Operations, European Union, Civil-Military Coordination (CMCO)