Setting the Tone
The 2013 French defence White Paper presents a strategic analysis and capability assessment that address the pressing concerns posed by austerity cuts to defence budgets, instability in Europe's neighbourhood, and US rebalancing towards the Asia-Pacific. It proposes ways in which France – and Europe – can remain strategically relevant in this changing environment. In doing so, argues Luis Simón, the White Paper provides a useful blueprint for the European Council meeting in December 2013.
CSDP, Strategy and Crisis Management: Out of Area or Out of Business?
The EU's ineffectiveness vis‐à‐vis Libya and the southern Mediterranean crises more broadly is largely explained by the CSDP's narrow mandate centred on crisis management. The EU's emphasis on external crisis management was strategically sound given the geopolitical context of the 1990s. CSDP's quiet drift towards a ‘softer’ kind of crisis management from the middle of the first decade of the 2000s was also instrumental in highlighting the EU's differences from post‐11 September US unilateralism. That said, (soft) crisis management has become progressively obsolete in the light of a rapidly changing geopolitical environment characterised by an overall retreat of Western power globally, a weakening of America's commitment to European security, an increasingly tumultuous European neighbourhood, and Europe's financial troubles. In order to meet the demands of a changing geopolitical environment, CSDP must break away from its distinctively reactive approach to security to include all the functions normally associated with the military including, chiefly, deterrence and prevention. This would allow the EU to actively shape its regional and global milieu.
From NATO to ESDP: A Social Constructivist Analysis of German Strategic Adjustment after the End of the Cold War
This article addresses the question why Germany invested in what became the European Union's Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), a potential competitor to NATO. In addition to highlighting Germany's role in the development of ESDP, the paper offers a social constructivist explanation for this investment based on the concepts of friendship, estrangement, and emancipation. It develops the argument that (1) states gain ontological security by investing in international institutions to negotiate and pursue ideas of order with friends; (2) deep and enduring dissonance between friends signifies a process of estrangement and poses a threat to ontological security; and (3) if states cannot restore resonance with the old friend-institution configuration, they choose a strategy of emancipation by investing in an alternative. Applied to an analysis of German strategic adjustments between 1990 and 2009 in the context of U.S.-led interventions in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, the article suggests that Germany invested in ESDP to offset enduring dissonance with the United States and NATO about appropriate mandate, missions, and means, with France and ESDP emerging as a suitable alternative. With this, the article offers valuable insights into the parameters guiding German security policy and the structure of transatlantic relations and also provides a theoretical alternative to the realist balancing proposition.