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The Security Policy of the European Union, by Victor Mauer

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Outlook and perspectives

If the size of the gap between expectations and capabilities in terms of institutions, instruments and resources is to serve as a measure for the development of European foreign and security policy, [1]we can conclude that in light of the 50-year European integration process and irrespective of the trauma of the EU's apparent general disability during the War in Iraq, that the EU has become a power sui generis in the field of foreign and security policy despite the constant fragmentation and cooperation, institutional incoherence, limited instruments and hard-fought for resources.

In the last few years, the EU has been assuming responsibility for regional, and to a limited extent, global security. This development is the result of the successful rounds of enlargement of the Union which build on the founding principle of security through integration and increasingly turn the EU into a hegemonic engine for peace on its home continent. The next step has been to apply a policy of providing security in its immediate neighbourhood, which has indisputably fostered the political, economic and social transformation in the adjacent countries due to the attractive prospects of becoming a member of the EU. But because of the EU's limited capacity to admit new members, this approach needs to be reconsidered. Finally, numerous civil, military and joint civil-military missions in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Asia pursue large-scale crisis management despite their still narrowly defined scope and at the same time, they provide essential experience required to optimise decision-making and resource-management.

The EU's global influence has increased in terms of its foreign and security policy. Not least because of its specific character as a norm-imposing and multilaterally supported "association of nations" to create an ever closer union of the people of Europe, the EU will not assume the role of a traditional superpower or a balancer between different powers. Its security policies will have an increasingly regional direction.[2]

The method of gaining regional sovereignty by relinquishing national sovereignty[3] – originally used in a very different context – makes sense, although it violates the sometimes historically determined desire of the powerful European nation-states to act unilaterally. This approach, which leads to a policy of readjusting the "integrative balance"[4] in an enlarged community, results in an EU Foreign and Security Policy that exists alongside the national foreign and security policies of its members states and functions as a centripetal power. The member states can use the Common Security Policy to hide as well as to promote their national interests, to increase the legitimacy of their policies by operating collectively or to lower costs and risks. The European Security Policy has no centre with an all-mighty authority but there is an umbrella under which individual member states and the institutions, instruments and resources of the EU can come together.

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