◄ | COMMON SECURITY AND DEFENCE POLICY |
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The EU's Common Security & Defence Policy
Introduction The aim of the CSDP is to give the EU a politico-military capability for European-led operations where the US and/or NATO do not want to be involved, for example, for peacekeeping and other military and security tasks, without undermining the importance of NATO as the provider of territorial defence for most Member States. This paper, which explains the background to the development of the CSDP, is complementary to the Senior European Experts paper on the Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP) and to a number of short papers on EU military operations. |
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Details of the new approach were fleshed out at the Helsinki European Council in December 1999 and have been developed since. They included ambitious force goals (a corps level - up to 60,000 troops - deployment capability by 2003, later postponed to 2010) and new command, control and politico-military structures (Military Committee, Military Staff, political control by the Political and Security Committee). They also included ambitious capabilities on the civilian (civ-mil) side to promote preventive action to forestall war as well as to win the peace. As with NATO, there is no standing army, only national units voluntarily assigned on each occasion for joint operations.
It was agreed that the EU in CSDP could act “where NATO as a whole is not engaged” and could either draw on NATO assets, including for operational planning, or act autonomously for small scale operations. Tasks could range from humanitarian relief operations through peace-keeping to peace-making (the so-called Petersberg tasks developed in the 1990s and incorporated into the EU Treaty in 2000). The EU’s European Security Strategy provides the agreed framework for policy in this area. The details of the strategy, originally adopted in 2003 and revised in the light of changing security circumstances in 2008, are summarised in a separate paper ‘The EU’s Security Strategy’. The importance of the strategy was that it set out the potential threats to EU Member States and what the EU could do, by means of co-operation amongst its members, in response. The five threats identified by the strategy are:
Territorial defence remains a matter for NATO for the majority of Member States - 22 of the 28 belong to NATO - and the Treaty explicitly states that the EU’s defence policy shall “respect the obligations of certain Member States, which see their common defence realised in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation”. [1] More recently the European Defence Agency was set up in 2004 (see below) and a concept of (mostly multi-national) battle groups developed, each consisting of some 1500 men. Two (out of eighteen agreed) must be deployable at any one time in a six-monthly rotation, at very short notice, for urgent and short operations. The British provided one of these battle groups in 2008 and a joint Anglo-Dutch battle group was on standby in 2010. The Lisbon Treaty made no fundamental changes to EDSP except to provide an obligation on Member States to come to one another’s defence in the unlikely event of armed aggression against one of them - but this is an obligation on Member States and not on the EU. The Treaty also renamed the EDSP the Common Security & Defence Policy (CSDP). |
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1] NATO members: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States
2] Cited in Surviving austerity: the case for a new approach to EU military collaboration, Thomas Valasek, Centre for European Reform, April 2011, p.1. |