The hard sell

Anand Menon

In meeting global security challenges, the EU must complement its

soft power skills with the development of new military capabilities

The European Union has come to play an active role in international security affairs
since the launch of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in 1999.
However, this role is necessarily constrained by the very nature of the Union itself.
Consequently, there are limits to what we should expect from the EU. A corollary of
this is that it is both inappropriate and potentially dangerous to focus solely on the
potential and role of the EU when it comes to assessing Europe’s international roles
and responsibilities.

In the decade since the launch of ESDP, the EU has surprised many observers by its
activism in the security sphere. In the space of less than a decade, the Union has
carried out 26 missions across three continents. Even the most cursory perusal of the
results obtained underlines that the Union has made a positive contribution to
international security in places as far-flung as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC).

In attempting to assess the ESDP, recognition of the nature of the EU enables us to

better understand both the scale of its achievement and its inherent limitations. As an
international organisation bringing together 27 disparate member states, the Union is
reliant upon securing agreement between all national capitals in order to act.
Paradoxically, the need for consensus is at once a weakness in terms of the potential of
ESDP and a powerful symbol of the success of European integration in taming
international relations within Europe and creating a post-modern polity incorporating
its member states.
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The limitations of the Union are thus partly a function of its success. And given these
limitations, the fact that so many missions have been carried out at all represents
something of a triumph. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise, particularly
given the wide spectrum of opinion amongst the member states about the legitimacy
of the use of force, that only five of these 26 missions have been military. And these
have been marked by their modest size and ambition, involving either interventions
into fairly benign strategic environments, or missions that have occurred once other
institutions have prepared the ground in advance (NATO in the Balkans, the UN in the
DRC).

The limited nature of ESDP military interventions is often legitimised in terms of the
Union’s role as a “normative power”. Yet such claims are both hard to sustain and
potentially counter-productive. It is hard to avoid the impression that ESDP
interventions are sometimes designed more with a view to making Europeans feel
better about themselves than with the goal of solving real security problems. And it
seems paradoxical at best to see inaction in cases of blatant abuse of human rights
(such as in Darfur) as a result of a choice of “normative power”. This is all the more so
given that other aspects of EU external activity - notably trade policy – illustrate all too
clearly the willingness of the member states to deploy traditional levers of
international power with sometimes devastating effects on poorer and less powerful
societies.

The Russian invasion and subsequent partition of Georgia underlined that the
effectiveness of soft power depends on a permissive hard power environment. Given
the limitations of ESDP, European states cannot satisfy themselves with acting through
the EU in military affairs, but must take on their full responsibilities when it comes to
high intensity military conflicts. The key here is the development of military
capabilities to facilitate such interventions, either through increased defence spending
(highly unlikely in the current climate), enhanced cooperation in terms of
manufacturing or possibly even pooling resources, or reform of increasingly ill-
adapted national defence establishments. 1

Perhaps the most insidious impact of the notion of “normative power Europe” is its
potential to be used as a legitimiser of inactivity. By defining itself in “normative”
terms, the Union provides an alibi for states unwilling to invest in capabilities so as to
meet their international responsibilities. Certainly, the label proved particularly potent
with the Bush administration in power. In retrospect it is clear to what degree the
European Union defined its international role in contradistinction to that adopted by
the Bush White House. Yet just because the American administration misused force
does not imply that hard power has lost its utility. The most pressing security issue

1 See Nick Witney, ‘Re‐energising Europe’s Security and Defence Policy,’ European Council on 
Foreign relations, Policy paper, July 2008. 
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confronting Europeans today is the conflict in Afghanistan. More than anything the
European Union is or will be doing in the near future, it is events in Afghanistan that
will bear directly upon European security interests.

Without denying the important progress made, therefore, in constructing an EU

capacity for intervention in international security affairs, Europeans must be careful
not to look upon these as an end in themselves or as Europe’s only contribution to
security. It is all too easy to hide behind high-minded rhetoric whilst ignoring the
genuine security challenges that confront contemporary Europe. And whilst ESDP has,
though a contribution of “soft” and low-end military interventions, certainly
contributed to confronting these challenges, it is vital that Europeans do not fall into
the trap of seeing these as their only such contribution.

Anand Menon is professor of west European politics and director of the European
Research Institute at the University of Birmingham