Since the December 1998 Saint-Malo summit between French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, we have been learning to live with a new acronym and a new reality: the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). This is not the same thing as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) of the mid-1990s, which was a technical, juridical, and short-term mechanism designed to facilitate the emergence from within NATO of a “separable but not separate” European military capacity, under the political direction of the Western European Union. ESDI’s key feature was that it would use borrowed US assets to engage in crisis management missions in Europe’s backyard—missions with which the United States did not wish to engage. By contrast, ESDP, as stated in the Saint-Malo Declaration, involves the European Union deciding on “the progressive framing of a common defence policy [for which] the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so in order to react to international crises.”

US citizens have had difficulty adjusting to this new reality for three main reasons. First, the European Union is not a nation-state and, according to all the rules of international relations since at least 1648, only states “do” security. Second, while the United Sates has been nagging the Europeans for 40 years to get their military act together, it requires some cognitive adjustment when the Europeans actually begin to do so—especially when the buzzword is autonomy. Third, generations of US theorists have been weaned on neo-realism and tend to see all power relations in terms of balancing, bandwagoning, and buckpassing. These may not be the most helpful concepts to capture what is actually going on.

The confused debate within the United States over what the ESDP actually is has produced four different schools of thought. The “yes, please” group embraces a variety of analysts who believe, for one reason or another, that ESDP will strengthen the transatlantic partnership. The “yes, but” camp includes official spokespersons from both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations who officially support the ESDP but only on certain conditions. The “oh yeah?” cohort features skeptics who refuse to believe that Europe is capable of emerging as a military actor. The “no way!” brigade sees the ESDP as a threat to US national interests. The proliferation of these different schools reflects several basic misunderstandings about the nature of the ESDP project.

What the ESDP is Not

Before outlining what the ESDP is, it is important to stress what the ESDP is not, because much of the US confusion proceeds from such misperceptions. First, the ESDP is neither a mistake nor an irrelevance, as hostile critics have suggested. It emerges from powerful forces arising from the end of the Cold War. In that sense, the ESDP was arguably inevitable. Second, it is not a “European army” in the sense that national assets would be detached from national command and permanently reassigned to a European command. There is no talk of joint European ownership of troops or weapons systems, nor (yet) any thought of developing a European defense budget. It is not designed for the territorial defense of the European space, which remains the task of NATO. Third, it is not comparable to the US armed forces and could in no way represent a challenge to US military preponderance. Fourth, it never has been intended, even by its strongest French advocates, to undermine or replace NATO. Since the early 1990s, France, which is heavily involved in alliance-coordinated peacekeeping activities, has been moving progressively back into NATO.

Fifth, and most important, the ESDP is not designed to “balance” US power in the structural realist sense, even if that term is stretched to include “soft balancing” as discussed in the Summer 2005 International Security. The European Union has set its face squarely against the sorts of considerations of power politics that are inherent in structural realist logic and lie at the heart of “balancing.” The guiding principles behind the ESDP are pragmatic, institutional, international, multilateral, multi-level, diplomatic, rules-based, and transformative rather than strategic, coercive, self-interested, and military. The ESDP has been overwhelmingly a process of reacting to historical events. Considerations of how to respond to US power have not been totally absent, but they have not been the driving force behind the policy. Across the European Union, the underlying assumption is that the United States will remain a close ally and that whatever Europe eventually does autonomously will be broadly consistent with a harmonious transatlantic relationship.

Where the ESDP is Coming From

The ESDP emerged for four reasons. First, it is the logical offspring of the end of the Cold War—most notably the lessening strategic importance of Europe for the United States. Sooner or later, Europe had to start managing its own backyard. The second underlying factor was the reappearance of military conflict on the European continent. The crises in the Balkans, which dominated the 1990s, created a powerful stimulus because the former Yugoslavia is situated inside today’s European Union. Third, the European Union, as an integral part of the “international community,” needed well-trained armed forces in order to manage crises not only on its own periphery but also, potentially, in regions further afield. This consideration meshed with the multilateral internationalism typifying most EU activities. Fourth, these three developments synchronized neatly with the endogenous dynamics of the European Union itself as it ceased to be “just” a market and aspired to emerge as a political actor on the world stage. But to what end?

The Nature of the Beast

The embryonic strategic thinking behind the ESDP was set out for the first time in the European Security Strategy document of December 2003. The key concept is that of “comprehensive security,” which dates back to the Helsinki Final Act and reflects the intense discussions over a new definition of security that characterized the 1990s. Security is indivisible; it addresses basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, economic and environmental cooperation, as well as peace and stability. It is closely linked to the concept of global public goods, which emerged out of UN debates. It is deeply rooted in current concepts of human security.