Taking Stock of EU Military Conflict Management
Over the last decade, the EU has established itself as a player in the international field of conflict management. Both its civilian missions and military operations have played a significant part in this development. This article takes a closer look at the EU’s military endeavours in conflict management. It presents a theoretically grounded definition and a corresponding set of criteria for success in military conflict management and evaluates the operations accordingly. The article provides a comprehensive review of all the EU military conflict management operations to date. The analysis is structured and focused around the criteria for success, which provides a more nuanced picture of the Union’s operational achievements throughout its first decade in military conflict management.
The Strategic Planning of EU Military Operations - The Case of EUFOR TCHAD / RCA
On 28 January 2008 the European Union launched the military operation EUFOR in Chad and the Central African Republic. Its mandate was to contribute to the security of the civilian population, the numerous refugees from neighbouring Darfur and the local presence of the United Nations. This paper describes and analyses the planning process of this operation at the political-strategic and military-strategic levels with the aim of understanding how the military instrument was intended to generate the desired political effects. The paper argues that, from a military perspective, the EUFOR operation is based on the concept of humanitarian deterrence: the threat of military force is used to discourage potential spoilers from targeting the civilian population. As with any military operation, the planning of EUFOR was plagued by various elements of friction. At least some of this friction seems to flow from the mismatch in expectations between the political-strategic and military-strategic levels. The various political and military-technical constraints within which the operation was planned resulted in an operational posture that is less decisive than what the political ambitions would have suggested.
The ABC of European Union Strategy: Ambition, Benchmark, Culture. Egmont Paper, no. 16, October 2007
The adoption of the European Security Strategy (ESS) by the December 2003 European Council was a landmark event for the European Union (EU) as an international actor. Of course, the ESS was not handed down in the shape of stone tablets. It is not because something is written in the ESS that it necessarily will be so, nor is everything written in the ESS. But the simple fact that it is omnipresent – in EU discourse, in statements by European as well as other policy-makers, in the debate in think tanks and academia – proves that its importance should not be underestimated either. It is after all the first ever strategic document covering the whole of EU foreign policy, from aid and trade to diplomacy and the military. As such it is first of all a statement of the EU’s ambition as an international actor, and has therefore become the reference framework guiding the EU’s performance as well as the benchmark to judge it. Through its performance the EU at the same time is developing a strategic culture of its own, the maturation of which is helped forward by the ESS. Ultimately however, what really counts, and what determines the consolidation of the EU’s strategic culture, is whether the EU, through its policies and actions, is able to achieve results and realize its ambitions.