EU Security Strategies

Extending the EU System of Security Governance

Spyros Economides, James Sperling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315455273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume offers a coherent analysis of the European Union's security strategies within a comparative framework.

If the EU is to survive and prosper as an effective security actor, it requires that greater attention be devoted to taking a cohesive and common position on the relationship between EU foreign policy means and goals. The major claim of this edited collection is that there is a European grand security strategy that disciplines member state security strategies. That grand strategy has two distinct substantive goals: (1) the preservation and expansion of the EU system of security governance; and (2) the implementation of specific strategies to meet internal and external threats and sources of insecurity. The EU has sought to develop a grand security strategy that not only accounts for the proliferation of threats possessing a military or non-military character and differentiates between core and peripheral regions of interest, but also addresses the requirements to bridge the increasingly blurred boundary between internal and external security threats and the necessary reconciliation of the competing security preferences of its member states. The empirical contributions to this volume examine the EU security strategies for specific issue areas and regional threat complexes. These case studies assess whether and how those strategies have consolidated or expanded the EU system of security governance, as well as their successes and limitations in meeting the security threats confronting the EU and its member-states.

This volume will be of great interest to students of EU policy, foreign policy, security studies and IR.

1 The European Union and the grand security strategy for post-Westphalian governance

James Sperling

Introduction

Brexit and the election of Donald Trump may not necessarily pose an existential threat to the continued existence of the European Union (EU), but they have certainly complicated its ambition to emerge as a global security actor. Brexit poses a double problem: first, the British withdrawal from the EU could, if executed without causing a collapse of the British economy or the dissolution of the UK, serve as an attractive exemplar for other member states unhappy with the current trajectory of the EU; second, the non-participation of UK forces in the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) will rob the EU of any pretence to an out-of-area force projection capability necessary for stabilisation operations or the Petersberg tasks, the EU’s military and security priorities, more generally. The Trump administration’s frontal assault on the basic tenets of the US post-war foreign policy catechism, particularly the sordid transactional approach to NATO as well as an innate hostility to the EU among the America First caucus in the White House, could force individual European states either to choose ‘more’ Europe or strike bilateral deals with the United States. If the EU is to survive and prosper as a foreign policy actor, it would require greater attention to striking a cohesive and common position on the relationship between EU foreign policy means and goals. In other words, the changed context would seem to require the EU to acquire and implement a grand security strategy.

The EU has in fact done so with a strategy that is consistent with the national security assessments of the individual member states that share the characteristics of perforated sovereignty and severely circumscribed autonomous policy prerogatives. This claim has not found particular favour in much of the academic literature (Posen 2004: 37; Rogers 2009: 852–853; Howorth 2010: 464–465; Berindan 2013: 397; Stokes and Whitman 2013: 1106; Kornprobst 2015: 274–276), although the policy literature provides generally more forgiving assessments (Everts 2004: 40; Vennesson 2010: 74; Biscop 2015: 4; Cross 2016: 402; Grand 2016: 19–20). Analyses found in either body of literature, however, normally revolve around the limited nature of the EU grand strategy or the failure to meet fully the criteria of a grand strategy (Stokes and Whitman 2013: 1106; Duke 2014: 20; Mälksoo 2016: 379) or the still dominant role of the member states in defence policy (Howorth 2010: 465; Fettweis 2011: 318; Smith 2011: 146; Simón 2013: 37–38).

The lack of agreement within the literature on the presence, absence or sufficiency of a EU grand security strategy revolves around the claims of some that the EU has developed a set of security strategies that, when combined, constitute a grand security strategy and of others who claim that at best the EU has disjointed security strategies across regions and functional security categories. This debate reflects a number of disabilities facing the EU as a security actor. First, the EU’s lack of ‘stateness’ places severe limits on its ability either to formulate or to execute a coherent grand strategy (Simón 2013: 36; Kornprobst 2015: 283). Second, the divergence in national interests between the member states precludes a grand security strategy capable of disciplining national security efforts (de France and Witney 2013). Third, the EU lacks an integrated military capability that would allow it to function as a full spectrum military actor essential for a grand strategy ‘properly’ understood (Walt 1989: 6; Art 1991: 6; Posen 2007: 562; Stokes and Whitman 2013: 11). EU scholars reject this line of argumentation and claim instead that a robust military capability is merely a desirable rather than an essential condition for a grand strategy, particularly since the military instrument is increasingly irrelevant for preventing or responding to the critical threats facing Europe (see Fettweis 2011: 318; Wagner and Anholt 2016; Juncos 2017: 11–13). Fourth, the regional preoccupations of the EU security strategies belie its rhetorical claims to global leadership and capabilities, both of which are presumed to be essential for the EU if it is to develop a grand security strategy that deserves the name and disciplines the security strategies of its member states (Biscop 2012: 6; Berindan 2013: 402; Stokes and Whitman 2013: 1099; Mälksoo 2016: 380). And, finally, there is the oft-cited problem of the absence or underdevelopment of a common EU strategic culture that would enable Europe to act externally and thereby supply a necessary condition for the emergence of the EU as a strategic actor (Cornish and Edwards 2005: 817–818; Meyer 2011: 670). This complaint is grounded in the divided ‘loyalty’ of member states with respect to NATO and the EU as well as a narrow conception of what constitutes the scope of a grand strategy.¹

The security preoccupations of the EU member states, particularly the effective interchangeability of security and defence, have vastly complicated European efforts to create a common grand security strategy. The EU, as a post-Westphalian construct conjoined to the greatly broadened and partially demilitarised security agenda that has emerged in the past three decades, has sought to develop a grand security strategy that not only accounts for the proliferation of threats possessing a military or non-military character, but also sought to capture the increasingly blurred boundary between internal and external security threats and policy responses as well as the increasing recognition that security is a public good that member states cannot achieve in isolation.

The major claim of this introductory chapter is that there is a European grand security strategy that disciplines member state security strategies and that it has two distinct substantive goals: (1) the preservation and expansion of the EU system of security governance; and (2) the implementation of specific strategies to meet internal and external threats and sources of insecurity. In order to lend this claim plausibility, the chapter will first establish why the EU has emerged as a legitimate and authoritative security actor and then proceed to define the essential characteristics of the EU system of security governance that serve as both the mechanism for securing Europe in a manner consistent with European principles and norms as well as the major security referent for the EU and its member states. Once the purpose and legitimacy of the EU as a security actor have been established, it is then possible to determine the criteria for assessing whether the major EU security statements – the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS), the 2010 Internal Security Strategy (ISS), the 2015 European Agenda on Security (EAS), and the 2016 EU Global Security Strategy (EUGS) – constitute jointly or individually a grand security strategy. The conclusion seeks to answer the question: Does the EU have a grand security strategy?

The European Union as a security actor

The transformation of the EU from an agent acting on behalf of the member states to a principal setting a EU security policy framing that of its members has progressed haltingly, but accelerated with the turbulence occasioned by the Cold War’s end. Six interrelated factors account for the emergence and prominence of the EU as an increasingly autonomous security actor. First, only the EU can aggregate national financial, diplomatic and military capabilities, thereby facilitating the economies of scale that currently elude any individual European state, and thereby release Europe’s latent diplomatic, economic and military-strategic power in the service of European security interests. Second, as the EU acquires a credible foreign policy and security identity, some member states increasingly view the evolution of the EU as a security actor critical to leveraging effectively European security preferences in international fora or in bilateral and small-n multilateral negotiations, particularly vis-à-vis the United States and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Third, the EU provides a European institutional framework enabling the member states to coordinate and harmonise their security strategies, particularly with respect to regional stabilisation and policies to mitigate threats with a pronounced trans-boundary component. Fourth, the very variety of security challenges confronting Europeans today presents an acute collective action problem owing to the absence of an uncontested leader or even a stable leadership duopoly or oligopoly willing to compensate for free-riding by less capable member states. Only the EU can credibly claim to identify threats and craft policies relevant to the whole of Europe; unlike the major member states (e.g. France, Britain, Germany or Italy), the EU is better positioned to identify collective threats and to fashion policies that maximise effectiveness and minimise free-riding. Fifth, the structural changes in the character of European states has made it difficult, if not impossible, for those states to achieve many of their security objectives autonomously; as a consequence, EU member states are as compelled by structure as by volition to transfer increasing levels of sovereign authority to the EU in order to alleviate acute vulnerabilities to external forces and mitigate the problem of collective action in the absence of a stable and willing oligopoly of ‘leading states’. A final explanation is located in the institutional imperative of those in Brussels – and those Europeanists populating the attentive foreign policy elites – to propose a grand security strategy as a means – or sign of progress – towards furthering and consolidating the European project (see Mälksoo 2016: 383).²

The accelerated securitisation processes at the Cold War’s end have fundamentally changed the contemporary security environment, particularly with respect to the altered relationship between the agents and the targets of threat (Kirchner and Sperling 2002). The intractability of the security threats today arises from the status of non-state actors as the chief antagonists in the international system. Traditionally, states have had the option of using military force against a well-defined enemy, another state. War was conducted on battlefields between opposing armies; civilians (in theory, if not in practice) and the economic infrastructure were only secondary theatres of war. States are no longer the sole target or agent of threat, threats are now more likely to originate in dysfunctional societies or failing states far removed from Europe geographically. Non-state actors are more likely to wage ‘war’ against civilians and societal infrastructure, rely upon terrorism to do so, and often pursue a non-negotiable agenda. Yet, traditional forms of conflict still persist along Europe’s perimeter and beyond. In response, the EU (and its member states) have not only developed a broad array of policies tailored to counter the expanding number of internal and external security pathologies, but have endeavoured to strike a politically sustainable balance between the sovereign prerogatives of the member states and the necessary abnegation of those prerogatives to meet collective threats.

The problem confronting the EU – and its member states – is that the contemporary security challenges represent a very broad range of impure public goods. Thus, as the private component and the heterogeneity of security increase, so too does the hesitancy of states to act on the principle of solidarity or to vest sovereign authority in the EU. As the public component of a security threat rises, there is a greater willingness to turn to the EU and lend it greater latitude in shaping and executing security policy. Generally, the milieu-shaping security goals in the ‘neighbourhood’ – e.g. the stabilisation of the European perimeter, particularly in the Balkans and Mediterranean basin – manifest a high degree of publicness, offer few incentives or opportunities for free-riding, and are essential to the preservation and expansion of the EU system of security governance. But when EU-mandated external security policies require the expenditure of blood and treasure, or internal security policies transparently alter the domestic social contract, then the cohesion and effectiveness of EU security objectives embedded in a grand security strategy will fall afoul of national electorates, who would then insist that political elites retain sovereign prerogatives despite the technical superiority of collective action.

EU security policies are framed and predicated upon two categories of principles: the constitutional (solidarity, subsidiarity and sovereignty) and the operational (effective multilateralism, preventive engagement or pre-emptive peace, principled pragmatism and resilience). The principles of solidarity and subsidiarity have created the functional, legal and structural conditions enabling the emergence of the EU as a security actor as an agent; they reveal the erosion of member state sovereign authority, its acquisition by the EU, and the process of collective identity formation that has, in turn, contributed to the emergence of the EU as a principal. Yet, the counter-indicative principles of solidarity and sovereignty shape and constrain every policy initiative, lending the EU greater diplomatic and military autonomy externally and greater resiliency internally.

Article 42.7 and Article 222 of the Treaty on European Union and Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, respectively, have lent solidarity a constitutional status. Solidarity is both a cause and effect of the alignment of member states’ security interests and the willingness to vest sovereign authority in the EU. The solidarity principle acknowledges an underlying collective responsibility for supplying security jointly. It entails a positive obligation in the event of an attack to ‘mobilise all instruments at their disposal, including military resources, to assist a member state or an acceding State in its territory’ (EU 2016a, 2016b). This principle of conduct nonetheless defers to national prerogatives when it comes to the assessment of a member-state’s interest: the nature and quantity of assistance provided to a member state experiencing an attack are non-specified and voluntary. The subordinate ‘principle of mutual responsibility’ complements solidarity: states accept that their national security policies should not be confined ‘to maintaining their own security, but focus also on the security of the Union as a whole’ (Council of the EU 2005: 2.2). This principle, which places a positive obligation on member states to consider the EU-wide security ramifications of national policy decisions, contributes to a common definition of threat and necessitates coherent and actionable EU security strategies.

The subsidiarity principle mediates the horizontal division of labour between member states and the EU. The subsidiarity principle, as applied prior to the Lisbon Treaty, effectively delegated primary responsibility for internal and external security to member states. The Lisbon Treaty left relatively untouched member state authority for the conduct of military operations, but it broadened the competencies and authority of the EU Commission and European Court of Justice with respect t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviation
• 1 The European Union and the grand security strategy for post-Westphalian governance
• PART I Geopolitical contexts and strategies
• PART II Sectoral security strategies
• Index