Fail to plan, plan to fail: European security and defence by Ian Bond
If you are building a house, there is no point in collecting a pile of bricks, buying state-of-the-art household equipment and then waiting for a structure to emerge. First you plan, then you build. When the European Council discusses defence at its meeting in December, however, the focus will be on why Europe is not buying enough dishwashers. Designing the house will not be on the agenda. This is a mistake. The closest thing the EU has to a blueprint for security and defence policy is the ‘European Security Strategy’ of 2003, lightly revised in 2008. Since then, the member-states have made limited progress towards their goal of being “able to act before countries around us deteriorate, when signs of proliferation are detected, and before humanitarian emergencies arise”. They can point to some successes when reacting to acute problems – for example, the EU naval operation set up when piracy off Somalia became too serious to ignore. But taking into account all the resources the EU and its members have, they have done too little to shape their security environment in a time of change. A number of European countries, including Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden, want a new security strategy. With their encouragement, several European think-tanks jointly published a report in May 2013 entitled ‘Towards a European Global Strategy’, which contains many good ideas and has been the basis of a continuing programme
of policy analysis and recommendations. But the official paper by the EU High Representative and the Head of the European Defence Agency, drafted in preparation for the December European Council, contains only a short section on “the strategic context”. This section will not be discussed or endorsed at the meeting. The UK, France and Germany have all been unenthusiastic about revising the 2003 strategy. France fears that a new strategy would no longer justify Europe’s ambitious Headline Goals (targets for the military capabilities that are needed for EU missions) and Capability Development Plan (though in an age of austerity these seem out of reach anyway). Germany, after a period in the 1990s when it was willing to defend European values robustly, for example in Kosovo, seems at present to want to pretend that military force has almost no place in international relations. The UK, on the other hand, wants the EU to concentrate on increasing military capability, not