Failing forward in the EU's common security and defense policy: the integration of EU crisis management

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed renewed efforts to advance integration in the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), including in the domain of military and civilian capability development. The adoption of a Civilian CSDP Compact (CCC) and the creation of a European Peace Facility (EPF) are prominent examples of recent steps taken towards further integration. Still, despite recent progress, CSDP reforms have often been slow to materialise, lag behind the reform ambitions of key EU foreign policy actors, and fail to address important shortcomings experienced by CSDP. This article addresses why this might be by exploring the evolution of CSDP crisis management through a failing forward approach, which charts the course of integration dynamics, identified by neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, through time, revealing its cyclical nature. Our case studies of the EPF and the CCC demonstrate how the long-term integrative dynamics in EU military and civilian crisis management are marked by a cycle of crisis followed by incomplete institutional reforms, policy feedback, experiential learning and subsequent, yet again incomplete, efforts to remedy institutional shortcomings and policy failure.

KEYWORDS:

• CSDP
• crisis management
• failing forward
• neofunctionalism
• intergovernmentalism
• learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this special issue for very helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of the article. This article is based upon work from COST-Action ENTER (CA17119), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; Project Number: P 30703).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 More ambitious reform efforts also faced legal hurdles, as the Commission argued against the legality of providing weapons and ammunition through EU budgetary funds (interviews 2, 6, 13, 17).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julian Bergmann

Julian Bergmann is a post-doctoral researcher at the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in Bonn. His research interests include the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy, EU development policy, conflict management, and international mediation.

Patrick Müller

Patrick Müller is Professor of European Studies at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and at the Centre for European Integration Research at the University of Vienna. His research interests include the EU's external relations, the EU's role in global governance, EU-Mediterranean relations, and EU conflict resolution.