The EUs Military Doctrine: An Assessment

G I O VA N N A B O N O

The EU has procedures for crisis management, but not a military doctrine as
Western nation states have. Instead of being derived from a security strategy,
the EUs military doctrine emerged between 1999 and 2003 from contradictory
dynamics in which NATO and leading European military powers exerted a disproportionate influence on its development. NATOs future has become dependent on establishing close links with the EUs economic, civilian and
humanitarian resources and the peacekeeping troops of EU member states.
While this external pressure may prevent the EU from developing an independent
military doctrine, it might contribute to the Europeanization of NATO.

Introduction
To what extent does the EU have a military doctrine? What are its key
characteristics and what factors have influenced its development? Has
it been derived from an agreed security strategy? In other words, has
the development of the EU military doctrine followed the normal
process of decision-making as practised in modern Western democracies?
What will be the future of the EUs military doctrine? Will it be independent of NATO, possessing its own distinctive features?
A military doctrine can be defined as a set of theories and principles
authoritative in nature but requiring judgment in application which
provides the military forces of a nation state or an international organization with a certain philosophy of leadership about how to fight militarily
to obtain specific goals. A military doctrine can also be defined as the
operational handbooks or tactical regulations prepared mainly by military specialists as guidance for the officer corps and troop training.1 An
example is the NATO military doctrine embodied in MC 400 and MC
317, two documents that outline how NATO will employ military
means to achieve its broader objectives both within and outside its area
of operation.2 A military doctrine influences the posture and structures
of an organization, its internal methods of training and command. In
many nation states, its key features are set out in publicly available
policy documents, White Book and budget commentaries.
International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.3, Autumn 2004, pp.439456
ISSN 1353-3312 print/1743-906X online
DOI:10.1080/1353331042000249037 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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A military doctrine is shaped by organizational and broader cultural

and political dynamics.3 In modern democracies, it is normally derived
from an organization or a countrys security and defence strategy,
which in turn is the result of intense consultations involving the executive
branch of the government (or of an international organization), elected
politicians and civil society.
To establish the extent to which the EU has a military doctrine and to
examine the factors underlying its development and future, I begin by
sketching the situation as of late 2003 and then explore its key dynamics
within the broader development of the European Security and Defence
Policy (ESDP) over the past four years.
The EU and its Military Doctrine
Since the establishment of the ESDP in 1999, which gave the EU direct
access to military structures and military forces, EU officials and national
policy-makers have become involved in developing a military doctrine. At
the end of 2003, the EU announced a Security Strategy (see the preceding
article); however, it cannot be said to have an officially agreed military
doctrine in the sense of a set of theories and principles that can be
found in a White Book or ascertained by reading a defence budget. Nevertheless the EU has acquired partly by taking over the Western European
Union (WEU)s acquis and partly through other developments explained
later in this article procedures for various types of military operations at
several levels of the Chain of Command4 (see Figure 1). As Catriona
FIGURE 1
M I L I TA RY D O C T R I N E AT D I FF E R E N T L E V E L S O F P O L I C Y M A K I N G

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Gourlay explains in her article, the planning for these operations has been
undertaken either autonomously or in cooperation with NATO. To date,
the EU has independently managed two police operations: one in Bosnia
(EU Police Mission, EUPM) and another in Macedonia (EU Police
Mission to Macedonia, EUPOL). Working closely with NATO, the EU
has completed a peacekeeping mission in Macedonia (Operation Concordia) and, with strong support from French national officials and planners,
it undertook a peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operation, Artemis, in
the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The procedures adopted for carrying out these operations form an
integral part of the EUs evolving military doctrine. It could be argued
that the main military acquis of the EU has remained confined to police
and light peacekeeping operations. For peace-enforcement operations,
there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which the EU is to
borrow NATO doctrine, or allow a lead nation or a group of countries
to undertake military operations on its behalf. There has also been
talk of empowering the EU to assume collective defence tasks, but such
ambitions were thwarted in the latest round of negotiations undertaken
within the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) (see below).
For many EU officials, the key distinguishing feature of the evolving
EU military doctrine lies in its integration of civilian and military tools
in external crisis management and its officially stated adherence to the
principles of international law as defined by the UN Charter. EU officials
have developed a concept of crisis management that involves combining a
number of tools: humanitarian, economic, military and legal5 (see
Figure 2).

FIGURE 2
CRISIS MANAGEMENT CONCEPT

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The mixing of these tools became apparent in the handling of the

crisis in Macedonia, as the article by Catriona Mace explains. This
picture of crisis management, as outlined by EU officials, assumes that
the EU can act as an autonomous actor and has the ability to mix the
tools coherently. However, this has not always occurred, as the case
studies in this special issue demonstrate.
The reasons for the complexity of the EUs evolving military doctrine
can be found in the contradictory factors that have shaped and still influence the Common European Foreign Security Policy (CFSP) and the
ESDP. Let us briefly summarize these factors and dynamics.

Factors Shaping the Evolution of the ESDP

Among scholars and experts in European security there is some basic
agreement that the ESDP represents the rise of the military influence in
the EU, but they do not agree on its dynamics. This disagreement is not
expounded through the explicit adoption of different paradigms present
in the field of International Relations and European Studies: only exceptionally is the existing literature on the ESDP driven by theoretical concerns.6 Rather, until recently, the academic debate has focused on
the extent to which the ESDP is changing the civilian nature of the
EU project, the willingness of EU member states to give substance to
the ESDP by upgrading their armed forces, and the extent to which the
ESDP supports or undermines NATO.7
An attempt to situate the dynamics driving the CFSP and ESDP can be
found in the work of Michael Smith.8 His key contribution lies in the way
he captures the evolution of CFSP and ESDP as a constant framing and
reframing of a policy space, reflecting the interaction of endogenous
and exogenous factors. Through this method, he emphasizes the specific
configuration of factors at a specific moment in history. Smith identifies
three layers and three drivers in the development of EU foreign, security
and defence policy:
Layers:
.

Ideas, the shaping of attitudes and member state responsiveness to

them (this factor is supported by the literature on development of
shared understandings and consensus among EU policy elites).
Institutions (in the sense of procedures and treaty provisions, but also
the role of organizational factors).
Policy, defined as the relationship between the interests shaping a
national foreign, security and defence policy and its level of commitment

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and access to capabilities. (This latter layer is best captured by

traditional studies of a states foreign, security and defence policy).
Drivers:
.
.
.

Search for legitimacy.

Member state preferences.
Demands for environmental stabilization.9

Smiths analysis provides a framework for understanding the complexity of factors that have shaped the evolution of the CFSP and
ESDP. It is also useful because it demonstrates that there is no linear development, as is implicit in the assumption of a spillover effect from economic integration into the high realm of politics. However, Smith appears
to underestimate the relationship that was established between the negotiations for the development of the ESDP and the renewal of NATO forces
and integrated military structure. That is, he fails to take sufficient
account of the specificity of this one factor, which could be considered
as both endogenous and exogenous.
Thus, it could be argued that the decision to develop the ESDP was
in part the result of dynamics present throughout the European integration process, the process of overlay described by Smith. Thanks to
the efforts of the Franco German special relationship during talks on
the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties in the 1990s, a link was established between the EUs external role, and the peacekeeping and
defence tasks of the WEU. There was also some awareness, which
emerged especially from the experience of dealing with the Bosnian
conflict between 1992 and 1997, that the EU had its own unique
approach to tackling external crises, and that this should be developed
further.10
But the push for the evolution of the ESDP was due to the interaction
between two factors on the one hand, the transformation and renewal
of the NATO integrated military structure, and the impact of the Kosovo
crisis and, on the other, the unfinished negotiations to determine the
relationship between the EU and WEU. Many commentators have identified the bilateral Anglo French meeting at St. Malo in December 1998 as
the turning point in the development of the ESDP. The bilateral understanding between these two major European powers on the need for
high-level capabilities to undertake external military intervention was
part of a reassessment of the nature of external conflicts and of the exercise of lessons learned in the Balkans and Africa.11 The meeting
was important in that Britains new Labour government decided to act

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decisively as a mediator between the United States and the EU to achieve a

compromise on how to proceed with the renewal of the NATO integrated
military structure and deal with the Kosovo crisis. In fact, Britain, with
the support of officials in the Clinton Administration, conceded to
French ambitions to give the EU a military role, although the intent
was never to allow the EU to establish political and military institutions
that could undermine NATO. The Blair governments concern was
always focused on military capabilities to be put at the disposal of
NATO or ad hoc coalitions of the willing.12
The St. Malo declaration contributed to a process of negotiations that
was to follow a far more complex path than originally envisaged in
London and Washington. The talks took a different turn because of the
impact of the Kosovo crisis on EU member states perceptions of their
role in European security. Most member states felt extremely frustrated
at their powerlessness to shape the negotiations between Serbia and
Kosovo a limitation which they saw as resulting from the inability to
use military means for redress. Hence they came to support the French
position that the St. Malo declaration should be taken a step further,
so that most of the WEUs political and military structures would not
only become integrated within the EU (under the second pillar), but
could also be given an autonomous role (that is, independent of
NATO). In addition, some EU member states added to the Headline
Goals essentially a plan for acquiring military capability for power
projection agreed at St. Malo, a new set of civilian targets to
strengthen conflict prevention measures. In other words, an agreement,
driven by competing visions of the EUs role in security and defence,
came to be reached because of frustrations with the Anglo American
handling of the Kosovo crisis. The St. Malo process assumed a dynamic
of its own, shaped by a complex trade-off driven by competing national
and institutional agendas.
Because of the fragile and complex nature of the compromise reached
on ESDP between 1999 and 2000 along with the unfinished discussions
about the overall reform of the EU the advent of the George W. Bush
Administration in 2001 and US reactions to the attacks of 9/11 have
resulted in a sharpening of the contradictory dynamics shaping the
ESDP. On the one hand, these events have accelerated agreement about
the nature of the ESDP in that this policy was becoming a sub-club
for certain European countries, with defence aspirations, to manage
European and international security issues. This can be read from
the demands, discussed below, for structured co-operation in ESDP, as
put forward in the 2003 round of IGC negotiations. On the other hand,
the events have intensified the subordination of the ESDP to NATO and

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US ambitions. These ambitions aim to foster a link with EU postreconstruction capabilities (humanitarian and development aid, police
forces, civil administrators), along with closer links with the peacekeeping
forces of selected EU member states. The United States would like to coordinate these capabilities within a new European security framework in
which ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by selected military powers
would retain overall political and military control over external security
engagements. In this framework, both NATO and the EU would become
suppliers of services and of political legitimacy, but without full control
over the day-to-day political and military conduct of operations.
Since 9/11 and the US reactions to it, three phases can be discerned in
the responses of the EU and its member states. In the period between
September 2001 and the spring of 2002, the EU unconditionally endorsed
the approach taken by the United States to fight terrorism. New measures
were quickly introduced in the areas of justice and home affairs, including
a European policy to combat terrorism (often termed the Action Plan),
with measures to stop the funding of terrorism (money-laundering directive); a EU-wide arrest warrant, with the promotion of cooperation
between the operational services responsible for combating terrorism
(Europol, Eurojust, the intelligent services, police forces and judicial
authorities).13 At the same time, many EU countries sent troops to
back the US war in Afghanistan and took the largest share of the reconstruction effort.14
In the second phase, from summer 2002 to spring 2003, the approach
of the EU member states was more ambiguous. This period represents the
very low ebb in trans-Atlantic security relations. The French and German
governments led opposition to the US and British drive toward war
against Iraq, gaining much public support in so doing. The EU became
split between what Donald Rumsfeld described as the old Europe (referring to some of the founding members: France, Germany and Belgium)
and the new Europe (meaning the new Eastern European candidate
countries, along with Italy and Spain). The disappointment felt by
some EU countries over the handling of the Iraqi crisis surfaced during
the negotiations for the Constitution of Europe and resulted in several
key proposals that would deepen the ESDP. These measures include:
the broadening of the scope of the ESDP to include the fight against
terrorism; the introduction of structured co-operation that would
allow a group of countries to go ahead in defence (on the model followed
for the introduction of the euro); the proposal that ad hoc coalitions of
member states can act on behalf of the EU in the security and defence
areas; a new solidarity clause and the creation of an agency to strengthen
common military capabilities.15

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Parallel to discussions about the European Constitution, in April 2003

France, Germany and Belgium announced that they would deepen their
level of cooperation in security and defence.16 They also announced
their intent to develop a brand-new headquarters for the European
Union. This gave a new dimension to the transatlantic row over Iraq.
This third phase, which includes the current period, has been characterized by the crafting of a new trans atlantic compromise. By the summer
of 2003, the Bush Administration had realized that to be able to deal with
the situation in Iraq it needed additional European support, and hence
worked along with Britain to find a compromise toward the demands
of old Europe. This change of policy might have been partly inspired
by the level of cooperation that continued throughout the second phase
in Afghanistan. In fact the row over Iraq did not have an impact on EU
countries support for the US efforts in Afghanistan in that on 11
August 2003 NATO took command of the International Stabilization
Force (ISAF).17 At the highest diplomatic level the transatlantic compromise was initially agreed during President Chiracs visit to Britain in
November 2003 and then at the periphery of the failed IGC one month
later, though diplomatic efforts are still underway at the time of
writing. Initially, the deal squashed the idea of new EU headquarters:
instead, greater cooperation was proposed for operational planning and
operations between the EU and NATO by establishing a small EU cell
at SHAPE and allowing NATO to set up liaison arrangements at the
EUMS.18 The officers in the new cell will be responsible for the following tasks:
.

.
.
.
.

Link work across the EU on anticipating crises, including opportunities for conflict prevention and post-conflict stabilization.
Assist in planning and coordinating civilian operations.
Develop expertise in managing the civilian/military interface.
Do strategic advance planning for joint civil/military operations.
Reinforce the national HQ designated to conduct a EU autonomous
operation.19

The military headquarters, to be used for either NATO-led or EU autonomous operations, will consist of the existing national headquarters
of Britain, France, Germany and Italy or Greece.20 Only when these
headquarters are not available will other headquarters be created.21
And even in that case, what will be established is merely an operations
centre, working independently of the strategic role of the EUMS under a
designated Operation Commander.

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However, at the time of writing, and as explained in Gourlays article,

the exact nature of structured co-operation is under formulation. Significantly, the United States seems to be painfully condescending to the idea
that a group of member states runs Artemis-type operations and that a
core group of EU countries builds a rapid reaction unit within the EU
with the ability to dispatch around 1,500 troops to undertake crisis
management within 15 days at UN request.22
The Impact of the ESDPs Dynamics on the EU Military Doctrine
How have these dynamics and events influenced the evolution of the EU
military doctrine? From the beginning, there have been competing strategies pursued by actors, with different long-term aims.
Between 1999 and early 2001, EU military staff and officials built
on the acquis gained by the WEU in planning for the Petersberg
Tasks.23 In fact the WEU already had experience in undertaking police
operations and sanction monitoring activities such as the police mission
in Albania: the Multinational Advisory Police Element (MAPE).24 The
WEU had a thoroughly developed concept for civilian military relations
along with procedures to coordinate assigned military forces from WEU
member and associate states, the so-called Forces Answerable to the
WEU.25 As for the EU, its Military Staff had inherited a set of procedures
from the experience of many EU countries in taking part in peacekeeping
activities under NATOs Partnership for Peace Programme.26
However, the Headline Goals (HG), which had been agreed in 1999
and which EU Military Staff were required to develop, redefined the
WEUs acquis: implicit in the HG was the assumption that forces
should be ready to undertake combat-type operations. In other words,
according to the HG, forces allocated to the EU should be able to
conduct operations above and beyond the peacekeeping, policing and
sanction-monitoring activities that the WEU had until then undertaken.27
Some member states, particularly France, Britain and Italy, were in favour
of setting the HG to plan for peace-enforcement operations. However,
there was disagreement at the highest political level about the extent to
which the EU should become involved in planning for military operations
at the higher end of the conflict spectrum.
As a commissioned report on the national interpretations of the Headline Goals explained back in 2001, a basic consensus existed around the
low end of the scale of the Petersberg tasks rescue and traditional
peacekeeping tasks; but there were major differences when combat
forces were involved. France and Italy had the most expansive definition
of such tasks, to include operations on the model of Operation Desert

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Storm, conducted during the 1991 Iraq war. The UK and the Netherlands
were more cautious in their assessment of the upper limit of the Petersberg Tasks, though they acknowledged that some element of combat
power would be necessary. Germany and Sweden had the most restrictive
definition, focused on traditional peacekeeping. Whereas Swedish officials were ready to acknowledge that peace enforcement might be
involved in peacekeeping, German officials were more cautious.28
These divergences of opinion are due to differing security and defence
traditions among the 15 EU member states, particularly toward the use of
force. Three traditions can be identified.29 Some countries, such as Britain
and France, have a history of involvement in international security affairs
and feel no qualms about taking unilateral action. The situation is different for certain other large countries such as Germany, Italy and to a
certain extent Spain because of their fascist past, which discredited
their use of armed forces in external engagements during the post-war
period. Thus, for example not until the 1990s did Germany take part
in UN peacekeeping operations. Finally, there is a third group of
countries which includes Ireland, Finland and Sweden that throughout the post-war period has gained considerable experience in undertaking peacekeeping operation under the aegis of the UN. These countries,
together with Austria, have traditionally been sceptical of attempts to
accord the EU a defence role.
Significantly, the HG and the peer-review process imply a synchronization of the defence and security cultures of EU member states, to
include the neutrals. Moreover, the HG represents an attempt to ensure
that EU countries will contribute more actively to the process of force
generation that NATO has initiated. In fact the Headline Goals and the
planning for military forces within the EU were closely linked to
NATO requirements, along with those of Britain and France, rather
than to an agreed EU vision of its role in security and defence.
The acquisition of the military capabilities outlined in the HGs
closely resembles the targets set in the Defence Capability Initiative
(DCI) agreed by NATO member states in April 1999. European
defence experts argue that up to around 70 per cent of the DCI initiative,
which identified several areas in need of improvement,30 has some
#relevance to possible EU missions, even at the lower end of the
Petersberg task spectrum.31
If the HG and the process of military transformation of NATO were
closely intertwined, after September 11 and the evolution of the new US
security strategy, the linkage between these two processes became subject
to renewed political difficulties. These in turn have a contradictory impact
on the evolution of the military doctrine.

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Since 9/11, the United States has moved faster than EU member states
in embracing a new military doctrine, central elements of which are the
concepts of power-projection and the fight against terrorism.32 This has
had a significant impact on NATOs posture and military doctrine.
Initially the US government did not make full use of the support that it
obtained from European governments when they evoked article 5 of
the NATO Treaty an article that describes an attack against one as
an attack against all. However, since then, US policy-makers have interpreted the article as a mandate for NATO to take on the task of fighting
terrorism in the broadest sense of the term. Hence there has been renewed
interest in NATO decisions, agreed at the Prague Summit in December
2002, to develop a Rapid Response Force,33 its involvement in running
ISAF operations in Afghanistan, along with its proposed latest ambitions
to manage some military operations in Iraq.34 NATO has also accelerated
the restructuring of its headquarters to render them better suited to power
projections: it replaced the fixed mobile headquarters with nine Rapid
Reaction Headquarters. It has launched a programme to deal with the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and taken measures to
strengthen its role in intelligence sharing, to include home security
in Europe and North America.35 At the same time, the United States
has favoured the establishment of ad hoc coalitions of the willing over
traditional multilateral arrangements an approach summed up in US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfelds assertion that it is the mission
that determines the coalition and not the alliance that determines the
mission.36
Thus, although most EU governments have remained committed to
the HGs and to long-term ambitions of power projection, in the short
term they are not fully persuaded that the fight against terrorism should
become central to their own national defence planning and military doctrines. Moreover, since it is apparent that the United States is in the
process of picking and choosing allies in external military adventures,
officials in Washington can no longer act as integrator of European
defence.37 This is one reason why the process of peer review created
with HGs is inadequate for keeping countries in line and there is a
desire for ad hoc groupings of countries to lead in European defence, as
the notion of structured co-operation and Operation Artemis exemplify.
Nevertheless, the agreement reached in December 2003 on EUNATO
cooperation further strengthens NATOs influence on EU military
doctrine. This influence is exercised not only through the operational
planning that it had available for the Partnership for Peace, but also
through current and future planning for Peace Support Operations
(PSOs). NATOs PSO doctrine is characterized by three elements:

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blurring of the distinction between traditional peacekeeping and peace

enforcement, heavy reliance on civil military relations, and the end of
the need for a UN mandate for undertaking external military
engagements.
NATOs PSO doctrine not only shapes the long-term requirements,
established in HGs, for developing EU military forces and capabilities,
but it is also already forcing non-NATO countries as well such as
Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden to restructure their forces and
acquire additional military capabilities. At the same time, and as previously argued, the success of NATOs PSO doctrine is partly dependent
on establishing a closer link between NATOs planning process and the
civilian and peacekeeping capabilities that the EU coordinates. For
NATO this is extremely important because it does not have procedures
for coordinating the external economic, humanitarian and civilian
resources of 15 member states in the way that the EU has. Since EU
member states include the neutrals, with well-established traditions in
peacekeeping, through the NATO-EU framework the United States
hopes to persuade these countries to join ad hoc coalitions of the
willing in post-war reconstruction efforts.
In this sense, the operational planning link between the EU and
NATO is not purely a technical matter: it has become essential to the
ability of the Alliance to undertake external security engagements and
is an integral aspect of the George W. Bush Administrations vision of
the New World Order. The United States might pursue a unilateralist
strategy in the fight against terrorism; but it cannot successfully manage
the post-war conflict situation, because it lacks the skills, experience
and legitimacy that the EU and some individual European countries have.
Is the EU Military Doctrine the Product of an EU Security
and Defence Policy?
The evolution of the EU military doctrine has not followed the normal
procedures of liberal democratic states. Normally, national security
defence and international security policies are based on politicians
agreeing on certain established political guidelines regarding the nature
of the military threat and the role of military forces. From this, the military are then asked to derive their own strategic and operational plans.
Such procedures have not been pursued in the development of ESDP
because of the complexity of dynamics that shaped its development, as
explained in the previous sections.
In fact, the EU military doctrine began to be formulated before there
existed any agreed security strategy or EU defence policy. The Security

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FIGURE 3
I D E A L P O L I C Y- M A K I N G S C E N A R I O F O R A N E U M I L I TA RY D O C T R I N E

Strategy was signed in December 2003; military planning began in 2000

and the first operations were launched in early 2003. From 1999 to 2002,
the EU pursued a bottom-up and incremental approach, undertaking
small operations in order to set legal, military and political precedents
for future negotiations.
This method poses challenges for democratic accountability practices,
because it makes it extremely difficult for national parliaments and European assemblies (WEU Assembly and European Parliament) to scrutinize
and influence the policy-making process.38

Visions of the Future

Will the EU develop its own autonomous military doctrine
and strategy culture?
As some articles in this special issue argue, there is evidence that the EU
possesses its own acquis in handling external crises, particularly in mixing
preventive diplomacy with a package of economic deals. But how one
answers the question above depends on how the word autonomous is
interpreted. The EU has the capabilities to run autonomous peacekeeping and policing operations not only in its own backyard but also in
distant lands. The EU could, with political agreement, synchronize its
economic and humanitarian tools more closely with its soft
military assets. However, the EUs military doctrine will never be fully
independent of the competing visions of the security and defence of its

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member states, and it will continue to come under pressure from the
United States to provide support for its war against terrorism.
Demands have been expressed from some quarters for the EU to take
on a collective defence role. However, it is difficult to see how these tasks
could be fully implemented without first dismantling the NATO integrated military structure or transferring most of its assets to the EU, or
creating new security arrangements.
The idea of autonomy also assumes that the integrationist dynamics
that have been present in Europe since the end of the Cold War are still
strong. But the results of the December 2003 IGC show that the search
for the holy grail of European integration is no longer able to create
common visions and plans for actions. Unless the United States should
engage in a totally illegitimate series of attacks on sovereign states, it is
unclear where the dynamics for a hard core of European states can
come from.
Is the future of EU security and defence to be left to ad hoc coalitions?
There is a possibility that the EU military culture will be shaped by the
competing dynamics of a number of ad hoc coalitions of the willing,
with various degrees of EU, NATO or UN legitimacy. On the one
hand, the coalition assembled to fight the war against Iraq could formulate an agreement with the EU. Brussels-based institutions could provide
additional cash for humanitarian aid, post-war reconstruction and security sector reform, while EU member states, including France and
Germany, could take on peacekeeping and policing tasks in Iraq and
expand further their roles in Afghanistan. In exchange the EU might be
given the chance to have more influence over Afghanistan and Iraqs
road to democracy. If such a deal could be reached, it would imply
that, in the near future, the ESDP would allow a more equal distribution
of burden sharing, with a repartition of the global order between Europe
and the United States.
On the other hand, some European countries might form separate ad
hoc coalitions. They might choose to follow the example set by the United
States and Britain, and seek to emulate them by launching operations
outside EU, NATO and UN frameworks. Alternatively they might
follow the Artemis prototype. In such a case, the EU would grant political
legitimacy to those external military operations, but national headquarters and national governments would retain control over the operations.
The former option would have difficulties in gathering other
European countries, in that it does not offer anything fundamentally
distinct from what the United States and Britain can already provide.
The second option could gain support among member states wanting a

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new legitimacy for their external security policies or wishing to make the
EU an international military actor.
Conclusions
The EU does not have a declared military doctrine in the sense that nation
states do, but it has a number of procedures for crisis management. At
the military level, it is able to plan for policing and light peacekeeping
operations; for the conduct of peace-enforcement operations it relies
heavily on NATO or the assets of its largest member states.
The EUs military doctrine was not derived initially from a security
strategy because the EU came to assume defence tasks due to contradictory dynamics and competing national perspectives. For this reason,
from 1999 to 2003, the EUs approach to the development of a crisis management doctrine was mainly capability driven and followed an incremental approach.
Despite the recent formulation of an EU Security Strategy and the
experience gained by the EU in running policing, peacekeeping and
peace-enforcement operations during 2002 and 2003, it remains questionable to what extent the EU will acquire a fully autonomous and
coherent military doctrine. Even in the area of light peacekeeping and
policing there will be constant pressure from the United States and individual member states to tie these resources to the political and military
requirements of ad hoc coalitions of the willing. The current agreement
between the EU and NATO regarding operational planning allows the
Western Alliance disproportionate influence over EU military thinking,
since NATO has far more advanced procedures for peace support operations than the EU. To a certain extent, behind the much-publicized transAtlantic political rows, NATO and the United States seem to be slowly
gaining access to the civilian and peacekeeping resources that the EU
and its member states have at their disposal for peacebuilding and the
occupation of foreign countries. At the same time there is an attempt
on the part of some EU member states to seek to Europeanize NATO
by linking operational planning between the two organizations and
then bargaining on a case-by-case basis for the use of NATO-held
resources.
Despite this strategy, the search for an autonomous EU military doctrine cannot be fulfilled in the short term without challenging the dominance of NATO in European security or developing alternative models
of European and international governance. This is why, in the context
of the current diluting of the European integration process, the ongoing
war on terrorism and the lack of citizens political engagement at the

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European level, the EUs military doctrine will be autonomous only to the
extent that a few key powers will allow it to be.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the European
Communitys Human Potential Programme through the ESDP democracy project for the
research and writing of this article.

NOTES
1. I am grateful to Stale Ulriksen for his help on this definition. Peer Helmar Lange,
Understanding Military Doctrine, in Changing Threat Perception and Military Doctrines, London: Macmillan, 1992, pp.1 17.
2. For the US definition of a military doctrine, see Joint Publication 1 02, DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, accessed at www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict.
3. There is controversy in the social sciences about the sources of military doctrine. For
competing approaches see Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France,
Britain and Germany between the World War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1984; Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between
the Wars, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
4. This sketch was obtained through interviews with EU Military Staff at EU Headquarters during April 2002.
5. Ibid.
6. Brian White, Expliquer la defense europeenne: un defi pur les analyses theoriques, La
revue internationale et strategique, No.48, Winter 20023, pp.8997; Michael Smith,
The Framing of European Foreign and Security Policy: Towards a Post-Modern Policy
Framework?, Journal of European Public Policy Vol.10, No.4, 2003, pp.55675;
Helene Sjursen, Understanding the Common Foreign and Security Policy: Analytical
Building Blocs, in M. Knodt and S. Princen (eds.), Understanding the European
Unions External Relations, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.3544; Giovanna Bono,
European Security and Defence Policy: Theoretical Approaches, the Nice Summit
and Hot Issues (Research and Training Network, ESDP and Democracy, February
2002), accessed at www.esdpdemocracy.net/7_publications.htm. Section 1.
7. For example: Simon Duke, CESDP: Nices Overtrumpted Success?, European Foreign
Affairs Review, Vol.6, 2002, pp.15575; Karen E. Smith, The End of Civilian Power
EU: A Welcome Demise or Cause for Concern?, The International Spectator, Vol.35,
No.2, 2000, pp.11 28.
8. Smith (see n.6 above)
9. Ibid., pp.5578.
10. For an overview of the EUs role in the Balkans, see Dimitries Papadimitriou, The EUs
Strategy in the Post-Communist Balkans, Journal of Southeast European and Black
Sea Studies, Vol.1, No.3, September 2001, pp.6994.
11. Thierry Tardy, French Policy towards Peace Support Operations, International Peacekeeping, Vol.6, No.1, 1999, pp.5578.
12. Jolyon Howorth, Britain, France and the European Defence Initiative, Survival,
Summer 2000, pp.3355. For additional analyses of the British position at St. Malo
and on the ESDP, see Jolyon Howorth, Britain, NATO and CESDP: Fixed Strategy,
Changing Tactics, European Foreign Policy Affairs Review, Vol.5, No.3, 2000,
pp.377 96; and Julian Lindley-French, La politique de securite britannique et le
role des structures militaires europeennes de securite, Defense, Vol.90, Dec. 2000.
For the French position towards ESDP, see A. Treacher, Europe as a Power Multiplier

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13.
14.

15.

16.

17.

18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

23.
24.
25.

26.
27.
28.

455

for French Security Policy: Strategic Consistency, Tactical Adaptation, European Security, Vol. 10, No.1, 2001, pp.2244.
Simon Duke, CESDP and the EU Response to 11 September, European Foreign Affairs
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Colin McInnes, A Different Kind of War? September 11 and the United States Afghan
War, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29, 2003, pp.165184. For EU aid to
Afghanistan, see http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/afghanistan/intro/
index.htm.
The European Convention. Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. Brussels. Doc. No. CONV 850/03, Brussels, 18 July 2003; Giovanna Bono, La PESC et la
PESDC dans la Constitution europeenne : evaluation sur la base du projet de la Convention, Annuaire francais de relations internationales, Paris, June 2004.
Meeting of Heads of State and Government of Germany, France, Luxembourg and
Belgium on European Defence. European Defence Meeting: Conclusion, Brussels,
Egmont Palace, 29 April 2003, accessed at www.diplomatie.be/en/press/
homedetails.asp?TEXTID 6273.
Eleven EU countries are involved in either peacekeeping or warfighting activities in
Afghanistan. The countries not involved are Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden.
The United States Mission to the European Union, Fact Sheet: NATO coalition contributes to global war on terrorism. Brussels, 24 Oct. 2002, accessed at www.useu.be/
Terrorism/EUResponse/Oct2402NATOFactSheetTerrorism.html. Kurt Palis, Teilnahme
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accessed at: www.bundestag.de/internat/weu/amtl_unt_archiv/palis1202.pdf, pp.10
11.
European Council European Defence: NATO/EU Consultation, Planning and Operations, 15 Dec. 2003, on the European Council website at the EU Council Newsroom,
http://ue.eu.int/newsroom, accessed 16 Dec. 2003.
Ibid.
Stephen Castle, Europe Summit: At Long Last, a Deal is Struck on the EU Defence
Role, The Independent [London], 12 Dec. 2003.
Blair Accepts European Defence Deal, The Guardian [London], 29 Nov. 2003. Militareinsatze: Einigung mit NATO, Tagespiegel, online version, 13 Dec. 2003.
Robert Graham and James Blitz, Warmth Prevails as Leaders Skirt the Hot Topics,
Financial Times, 25 Nov. 2003, p.5. See: European Council, Presidency Conclusions,
Document No.10679/04, Annex EN: European Defence: NATO/EU Consultation,
Planning and Operations, 17/18 June 2004. Also: Tigner Books, EU Sets Up Independent Military Ops Center. Defensenew.com, 18 June 2004.
For the original definition of the Petersberg Tasks, see WEU Council of Ministers,
Western European Union Council of Ministers Petersberg Declaration. WEU Documents, 19 June 1992, accessed at www.weu.int/documents/920619peten.pdf.
For further details about the WEU and its operations, see www.weu.int.
For an overview of the WEUs military operations, see Arie Bloed and Ramses
A. Wessels, (eds.), The Changing Functions of the Western European Union, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997; and Matthias Jopp, The Defense Dimension of the
European Union: The Role and Performance of the WEU, in Elfriede Regelsberger,
Philippe de Schoutheete de Tervarent and Wolfgang Wessels (eds), Foreign Policy
of the European Union: From EPC to CFSP and Beyond, Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 1997.
Interviews with EU Military Staff, April 2002.
For details see Bono (see n.6 above), section titled: The rise of the military in the EU.
Centre for Defence Studies, Achieving the Helsinki Headline Goals. London: Centre for
Defence Studies, Nov. 2001. See summary of the EUNGO Contact Group Meeting,
Achieving the Helsinki Headline Goals, International Security Information Service
Europe, 10 Jan. 2002.

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29. Ian Manners and Richard G. Whitman, The Foreign Policies of the European Union
Member States, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; Douglas J. Murray
and Paul Richard Viotti (eds.), The Defence Policies of Nations: A Comparative
Study, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
30. NATO, NATO Handbook, Brussels: Office of Information and Press, 2001, pp.5053.
31. Centre for Defence Studies (see n.28 above).
32. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC: The
White House, September 2002, accessed at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf.
33. NATO. Prague Summit Declaration, Press Release (2002)127, 21 Nov. 2002, accessed
at www.nato.int/docu/pr/2002/p02-127e.htm.
34. Ewen MacAskill, UK Envoy Urges NATO to Play Big Role in Iraq, The Guardian, 13
Dec. 2003, p.16.
35. Philip H. Gordon, NATO after September 11th, Survival, Vol.43, No.4, 2001,
pp.89106. Views confirmed by authors participation in information meetings with
NATO officials at SHAPE and NATO Headquarters in January 2003.
36. His exact words: The worst thing you can do is to allow a coalition to determine
what your mission is. The mission has to be to root out the terrorists. Its
the mission that determines the coalition. Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with
Larry King, CNN, 5 Dec. 2001, accessed at www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/
t12062001_t1205sd.html.
37. Nicole Gnesotto, EU, US: Visions of the World, Visions of the Other, in Gustaf
Lindstrom (ed.), Shift or Rift: Assessing US-EU Relations after Iraq, Transatlantic
Book 2003, Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2003, pp.2142.
38. For a review of the democratic deficit of the CFSP and ESDP: Giovanna Bono, The
European Union as an International Security Actor: challenges for democratic accountability in Hans Born and Heiner Hanggi (eds). The Double Democratic Deficit: parliamentary accountability and the use of force under international auspices, Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004. See also Stelios Stavridis, The Democratic Control of the EUs Foreign
and Security Policy after Amsterdam and Nice, Current Politics and Economics of
Europe, Vol.10, No.3, 2001, pp.289311; and Matthias Koenig-Archibugi, The
Democratic Deficit of the EU Foreign and Security Policy, International Spectator,
Vol.4, 2002, pp.61 74.