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Amongst commentators, it is fashionable to highlight the persistent military weakness of the European Union by comparison with the United States or NATO, ignoring the progress achieved since 1999. This paper will attempt to examine the development of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), a difficult, often slow and undoubtedly incomplete process, before examining possible ways forward to strengthen CSDP credibility as the EU prepares for the December 2013 Defence Council.

 

The European Union’s limited capacity and the fairly diversified interests of its Member States have proven to be the most significant contributors to its constrained capacity to tackle economic and financial problems at the international level. This problem has become only more acute and transparent with the outbreak of the recent global financial crisis. The crisis elevated some “less popular” items on the EMU-related agenda to the level of “bread-and-butter” ones; it has also expanded that agenda into areas that, so far, have not been considered the core, such as supervisory issues.

 

With the Lisbon Treaty, therefore, new rules and procedures could have paved the way towards a more credible and effective defence policy, at least in theory. In reality no real steps ahead have been done.This article tries both to investigate the obstacles that are blocking efforts towards PESCO and to advance some proposals on how to regain dynamism in the common defence field

 

Caught between high expectations and an unwilling commitment from the other parts of the EU foreign policy-making machinery (read: the Member States and the Commission), the EEAS has been struggling to find its role: is it a clearing-house or secretariat for reaching consensus among national positions, a ministry implementing foreign policy, a manager of a network of delegations abroad, or a policy entrepreneur?

The European Union prides itself on having launched five new missions between summer 2012 and 2013 within the framework of its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). It is preparing for the 2013 December EU Council summit, which is to be devoted to defence and the strengthening of CSDP. However, what sounds like a sign of success is rather one of despair. While the EU has been trying for more than a decade to develop capacities and institutions for crisis management, underpin it with a strategy, and implement all this with military and civilian missions, its record remains mixed at best

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