The Limits of Strategic Autonomy for European Security
Many of the calls for European strategic autonomy emanating from Brussels after the flawed Western evacuation from Kabul revolved around missing capabilities. The EU’s de facto foreign minister, Josep Borrell Fontelles argued that the Kabul evacuation showed the need for an EU rapid reaction force of 5,000 soldiers. Capacities mean nothing without the willingness and ability to use them. If a coalition of the EU’s willing member states is serious about developing a pooled security capacity, then the EU needs a common, clearly articulated stance on the EU’s security aims and timely, decisive decision-making processes when acting on the world stage. That means confronting and working through willing member state’s differing strategic cultures and rethinking the EU’s decision-making culture, at least in this competency area.
EU integration typically depends on ambiguity because conceptions of the EU’s end-state and even of the intermediate steps vary wildly between the poles of federalism and intergovernmentalism. So it is with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), where efforts like PESCO or EU Battlegroups try to fill gaps in military capabilities without the supporting context of the strategic ends to which those capabilities will contribute. Should PESCO projects and joint EU forces orient themselves towards high-intensity Great Power competition, lower-intensity stabilization of failed states, or both?
A semblance of an answer to this question is on its way: the EU is preparing a Strategic Compass for Security and Defense to define its strategic ends. However, that document is unlikely to bridge the EU’s East-West divide in threat perception. The Eastern Europeans prioritize deterring and defending against Russian revisionism, and the Western Europeans, especially France, prioritize counterterrorism and addressing failed states in the EU’s southern periphery. In an earlier post on CNAS’s Transatlanticist blog, I argued that the EU and NATO should explicitly divide their responsibilities. NATO would return to solely deterring Russian revisionism, and an empowered EU would expand its stabilization and peacekeeping role to subsume all of NATO’s peacekeeping and stabilization responsibilities that NATO took up after the end of the Cold War. In this scenario, the EU would prioritize plans like Borrell’s rapid reaction force and use PESCO and the EDF to build up its aerial refueling, tactical lift, and ISR capabilities. Unfortunately, neither a Strategic Compass document nor a clearer division of responsibilities between NATO and the EU would, on their own, suffice to make the EU a credible geopolitical actor.
Without streamlined decision-making processes, the EU cannot be taken seriously as a geopolitical actor. Currently, when making decisions within the framework of the CFSP and the CSDP the EU’s member states must decide unanimously. Consensus dilutes decisiveness. For example, presenting a common EU stance towards Russia requires consensus between states that rightly fear Russian bellicosity, those that profit from economic ties, and those that praise Russia’s illiberalism. The result is vague statements like when the EU responded to the Solar Winds hack by noting Russian involvement once before generically pronouncing that “All actors must refrain from irresponsible and destabilising behaviour in cyberspace.” Unlike the EU, the U.S. explicitly connected the Solar Winds hack to Russia’s broader campaign against the Western liberal democracies. Unanimity meant that the EU’s stance on this issue was defined by its lowest common denominator. Undoubtedly, a foreign actor could pressure a smaller EU member state into driving that race to the bottom. Until the EU eliminates these dynamics, it cannot present itself as a credible actor on the world stage.
The solution to the EU’s flawed foreign policy decision-making is familiar: qualified majority voting (QMV). Over time, member states allowed for QMV when handling other EU competencies; they should accelerate that process of integration for the CFSP as well. Although exceptions to unanimity in the CFSP exist, they are rarely used. Expanding QMV then would be a two-fold process: first, a drive to establish a norm against consensus decision-making in the CFSP; second, a shrinking of the competencies where unanimity reigns. The first track would allow the EU to adopt a tougher strategy on controversial topics like Russia or China without dashing on the rocks of Hungarian or German opposition. The second track would allow the EU to act on its tougher strategy but would require, unlikely as they are, changes to the treaties. Treaty revisions should allow QMV in CFSP areas like the levying of sanctions and the approval of defense projects under PESCO. In other words, situations that do not risk the lives of member states’ citizens. Merely including those provisions in a future treaty, regardless of whether they are immediately used, would signal the EU’s geopolitical ambitions more than any strategy document ever could. If Europeans aspire to act credibly and decisively on the world stage, they need to demonstrate that they can and will speak with one voice on controversial topics.
