Identity, strategic culture and the limits of the European Union Common Foreign Security and Defense Policies

Identity, strategic culture and the limits
of the European Union Common Foreign Security and Defense Policies

After more than two decades from the birth of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and later of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), its instrumental hand, and more than 28 CSDP missions enacting a variety of the Petersberg tasks (which somehow arbitrarily delimitate the scope of permissible crisis management actions), the European Union (EU) seems to have exhausted the high ambitions inserted in the Lisbon Treaty of becoming a world actor[1] capable of a true external action. More concretely the EU has been accused of having failed to live up to its declared aim of tackling external action problems/issues through a “Comprehensive Approach“ joining soft (diplomatic, civilian, normative) and hard power (military/security) effectively.

Far from this ideal, EU’s CSDP action looks today increasingly disjoined from the CFSP strategies; looking more like a patchwork of ad-hoc and diverse operations/missions responding less to a common European Foreign Policy approach and rather disconnected to the other tools of the EU panoply, and more to the particular foreign policy and/or strategic interests of its most activist Member States. In turn those Member States contribute the most to those operations while the other EU partners sit on the fence, applauding or criticizing as convenient, or providing token support (to stay although laterally on the game). Simultaneously to such disjuncture between the EU action as civilian power and that its (non or miss) use of “hard“ power, some perspicacious observers have pointed to the shifting foreign policy and strategic stance of Member States of the EU, in particular France and UK, in what some[2] qualify as the “return to geopolitics“ or “self-fulfilling geopolitics“; this being the proximate cause of such failure.

The puzzle that this article attempts to explore can be spelled out as follows: What explains the failure of the EU to implement effectively its Comprehensive Approach thus living up to her ambition of becoming a world player/actor? Does this failure indicate that the process of EU integration in the foreign policy and security domain has finally clashed against the wall of sovereignty? Is this failure linked, and if so in which way, to the suggested “return of geopolitics“ into the European domain? Or is it because of this failure, resulting from fundamental divergences in Member States foreign policy identity and strategic cultures that we see such a “return to geopolitics“? What do these trends indicate for the future of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defense Policy?.