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Contemporary Security Policy

Volume 34, 2013 - Issue 2

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Symposium: Explaining European Security Policy

A Tragic Lack of Ambition: Why EU Security Policy is no Strategy

Olivier Schmitt Correspondenceolivier.schmitt@kcl.ac.uk
Pages 413-416
Published online: 29 Jul 2013
 
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Symposium: Explaining European Security Policy

A Tragic Lack of Ambition: Why EU Security Policy is no Strategy

Abstract

Tools of classical strategic analysis support distinctive explanations for the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union. Looking at the articulation between ends, ways, and means offers a perspective on the CSDP that is different from the approaches usually favoured by European Union specialists or even security studies scholars. In particular, it is argued here that the CSDP is no strategy, and little more than an institutional make-up for the lack of strategic thinking within the European Union. First, I show that the CSDP is not European security, and that the EU security policy is astonishingly absent from the security challenges facing Europe. Second, I argue that this situation stems from a lack of a political project within the European Union. I refer to the classical distinction made by Hans Morgenthau between pouvoir and puissance to show that, short of a political project, we will not see a strategic CSDP any time soon.

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Notes

Lorenzo Cladi and Andrea Locatelli, ‘Bandwagoning, Not Balancing: Why Europe Confounds Realism’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 33, No. 2 (August 2012), p. 270; and Benjamin Pohl, ‘Neither Bandwagoning nor Balancing: Explaining Europe's Security Policy’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013), pp. 353–73.

Stephanie C. Hofmann, European Security in NATO's Shadow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

André Dumoulin, Histoire de la Dissuasion Nucléaire (Bordeaux: Argos, 2013).

Hubert Védrine, ‘Report for the President of the French Republic on the Consequences of France's Return to NATO's Integrated Military Command, on the Future of Transatlantic Relations, and the Outlook for the Europe of Defence’, 14 November 2012, available at www.defense.gouv.fr/content/download/190042/2094793/file/Rapport%20V%C3%A9drine_GBR_DEU.pdf (accessed 29 April 2013).

Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 18.

Hans J. Morgenthau, The Concept of the Political (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

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