From Words to Deeds: Strategic Culture and the European Union's Balkan Military Missions

Abstract

Evidence that the European Union has acquired a distinctive strategic culture must be sought in the realms both of ideas and of action. Elements of a declaratory European Union strategic culture are to be found in the 2003 European Security Strategy and the subsequent reflections of officials and academics. A supplementary but perhaps more reliable guide to its central features may lie in how the European Union has conducted itself in the 24 European Security and Defence Policy missions, both military and civilian, that it has created since 2003. Overviews of these missions reveal some consistent themes and patterns of behaviour roughly congruent with the discourse of EU strategic culture. A closer analysis of the two Balkan military operations – Concordia in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Althea in Bosnia-Herzegovina – gives a richer and more nuanced picture of the relationship between words and deeds. The aim in studying strategic culture should be not to reveal causality as much as to explore consistency between ideas and action.

Notes

European Communities, ‘Treaty on European Union’, Brussels-Luxembourg, 1992, Article B.

European Union, ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy’, Brussels, 12 December 2003.

For the new language agreed at Lisbon, see European Union, ‘Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union’, Brussels, March 2010, Article 42, paragraphs 2 and 6. This article uses the earlier designation, ESDP, since both military missions to be discussed were initiated before Lisbon.

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.viii.

From the collapse of the initiative for a European Defence Community in 1954 until the end of the Cold War, a common defence was virtually a taboo topic for the architects of European integration. On its re-emergence, see Anand Menon, Anthony Forster and William Wallace, ‘A Common European Defence?’, Survival, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1992), pp. 98–118.

Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1977), p. 8.

European Union, ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy: Providing Security in a Changing World’, Brussels, 11 December 2008.

Sven Biscop and Joel Coelmont, ‘A Strategy for CSDP: Europe's Ambitions as a Global Security Provider’, Egmont Paper 37, Academia Press for the Royal Institute for International Relations, Gent, October 2010.

EU, ‘European Security Strategy’ (note 2), pp. 3–5.

Ibid., pp. 11–14.

Paul Cornish and Geoffrey Edwards, ‘The Strategic Culture of the European Union: A Progress Report’, International Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4 (July 2005), p. 802.

Charles Grant, ‘Is Europe Doomed to Fail as a Power?’, CER Essays (Brussels: Centre for European Reform, July 2008), p. 18. On the military diffidence of some EU members, see also Biscop and Coelmont (note 8), pp. 22–23.

Alvaro de Vasconcelos (ed), ‘A Strategy for EU Foreign Policy’, Report No. 7, European Union Institute for Security Studies, Paris, June 2010, pp. 3, 9–10.

Alastair Iain Johnston, in Cultural Realism, Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), views strategic culture as distinct from, and potentially accounting for, foreign policy behaviour, while Colin Gray takes behaviour to be part of culture. For comment on this debate, see Colin Gray, ‘Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January–February 2007), pp. 2–3, and David G. Haglund, ‘What Good is Strategic Culture?’, in Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M. Kartchner, and Jeffrey A. Larsen (eds), Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into Comparative National Security Policymaking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 15–31.

For concise accounts of these missions, see Giovanni Grevi, Damien Helly and Daniel Keohane (eds), European Security and Defence Policy: The First Ten Years (1999-2009) (Paris: European Union Institute for Strategic Studies, 2009).

On ‘civilian power’, see Christopher Hill, ‘European Foreign Policy: Power Bloc, Civilian Bloc, or Flop?’, in Reinhardt Rummel (ed), The Evolution of an International Actor: Western Europe's New Assertiveness (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 31–55, and Alex Lofthouse and David Long, ‘The EU and the Civilian Model of Foreign Policy’, Journal of European Integration, Vol. 19, Nos. 2–3 (1996), pp. 181–96.

Including the anti-piracy mission EUNAVFOR off the Somali coast and counting the Support To AMIS mission in Darfur as half-military gives a total of 5½ military and 4½ civilian missions in Africa.

For a critical view of the EU's response to Libya, see Ana Gomes, ‘Was EUFOR Libya an April Fool's Joke?’, EUObserver, 13 July 2011; a more optimistic view can be found in Thomas Valasek, ‘What Libya says about the Future of the Atlantic Alliance’, CER Essays (London: Centre for European Reform, July 2011). Valasek's essay is partially a response to the criticism of NATO Europe voiced in June by the outgoing American Secretary of Defence. See ‘Transcript of Defense Secretary Gates's Speech on NATO's Future’, The Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2011.

For an earlier assessment of Operation Concordia, see Annalisa Monaco, ‘Operation Concordia and Berlin Plus: NATO and the EU Take Stock’, NATO Notes, Vol. 5, No. 8, International Security Service Europe, Brussels, December 2003. On Operation Althea, see Frank Kupferschmidt, ‘EU and NATO as “Strategic Partners”: the Balkans Experience’, in Peter Schmidt (ed.), A Hybrid Relationship: Transatlantic Security Cooperation Beyond NATO (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 127–46.

See International Crisis Group, ‘Macedonia: No Room for Complacency’, European Report, No. 149, 23 October 2003; for the broader context see Misha Glenny, ‘The Kosovo Question and Regional Stability’, in Judy Batt (ed), ‘The Western Balkans: Moving On’, Chaillot Papers, No. 70, EUISS, Paris, October 2004, especially pp. 92–94.

EU authorization was by Council Joint Action 2003/92/CFSP, 27 January 2003.

A concise account of the Berlin-Plus agreements can be found in the NATO Handbook (Brussels: NATO Public Diplomacy Division, 2006), pp. 248–9.

Eva Gross, ‘EU Military Operation in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Concordia)’, in Grevi, Helly and Keohane, European Security and Defence Policy (note 15), pp. 175–7.

Ibid., pp. 177–80.

Ibid., p. 174.

See Arnold Kammel's article, ‘Putting Ideas into Action: EU Civilian Crisis Management in the Western Balkans’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011) for details.

On the establishment of Althea, see Thomas Bertin, ‘The EU Military Operation in Bosnia’, in Michael Merlingen and Rasa Ostrauskaite (eds), European Security and Defence Policy: An Implementation Perspective, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 61–77.

On the debate over NATO's future, see Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier, ‘Global NATO’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 5 (September–October 2006), pp. 105–14.

Council Joint Action 2004/803/CFSP, 25 November 2004.

Daniel Keohane, ‘The European Union Military Operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Althea)’ in Grevi, Helly, and Keohane, European Security and Defence Policy (note 15), pp. 216–7.

Ibid., pp. 217–8.

On the success and prospects of EUFOR, see Kupferschmidt, ‘EU and NATO as “Strategic Partners” (note 19), pp. 130–3, and Keohane, ‘The European Military Operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (note 30), pp. 218–20.

See EU, ‘Report on the Implementation of the ESS’ (note 7), pp. 9–12, and de Vasconcelos, ‘A Strategy for EU Foreign Policy’ (note 13), pp. 4–5 and 16–17.

See, for example, de Vasconcelos, ‘A Strategy for EU Foreign Policy’ (note 13), passim.

Ibid, pp. 15–19. On interests and values in EU foreign policy see also Albert Bressand, ‘Between Kant and Machiavelli: EU Foreign Policy Priorities in the 2010s’, International Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 59–85.

Cornish and Edwards, ‘The Strategic Culture of the European Union’ (note 11), pp. 802–6 and 810–14.