Astrategic Europe

Abstract

This article argues that the existing literature on EU foreign, security and defence strategy has paid insufficient attention to two basic prior questions: what is strategy? And what constitutes good strategy? Judged against a baseline definition of good strategy, the EU lacks an agreed assessment of its external environment, struggles to prioritize competing foreign policy objectives, avoids difficult foreign policy choices, and often lacks the ways and means necessary to achieve its goals, yet is reluctant to modify its objectives. These problems reflect the EU's character as a polity: differences amongst member states and the primarily intergovernmental nature of EU foreign, security and defence decision‐making fundamentally constrain the Union's ability to develop and implement external strategy. The EU is better understood as an astrategic actor: an actor without a strategy in the proper meaning of the word and one that will continue to find it difficult to develop such a strategy.

Preference Constellations in EU–Russian Crisis Bargaining over Syria and Ukraine

“…Our framework thereby builds on various insights on the complex sources of EU (non-)actorness. Amongst other findings, this research has established how interactions of various actors' preferences are aggregated within and outside of EU institutional setups to, at times, produce 'astrategic' and 'inadvertent' EU policies (e.g., Cottey, 2020;Gehring et al, 2017;Krotz, 2009;Krotz and Maher, 2011;Müller et al, 2021). We consider preference variations stemming from varying economic and energy ties between EU member states with Russia (e.g., Kustova, 2021), divergent historical trajectories (Krotz, 2015), and different threat perceptions stemming from varying geographical exposure (e.g., van Hooft, 2020).…”

European Identity in Defense Policy

“…1 Admittedly, there were many institutional dysfunctions in the EU's defense policy, including competence and budgetary dysfunctions. 2 Nevertheless, the starting point for political mobilization for deepening integration in the field of defense seemed to be the emergence of EU identification in the area of security and a similar perception of strategic threats by European nations.…”

European Integration and the New Global Disorder*

“…This emerging global scenario carries important implications for the literature on EU foreign policy. First, the evolution of EU–USA relations within a multipolar context relates to ongoing discussions over EU grand strategy and its relation to US power (Cottey, 2019). An account of US disengagement from Europe and growing tensions in NATO is crucial here to explain and assess the acceleration of defence coordination initiatives such as permanent structured cooperation as well as the growing invocation of the need for strategic autonomy by European officials (Aggestam and Hyde‐Price, 2019).…”

“…Historically, Europe's alignment to US geopolitical power secured a space of relative autonomy for European institutions and member states. It gave European elites the ability to sidestep fraught questions on defence and foreign policy integration (Cottey, 2019), made it possible for member states to minimize military expenditure and to divert those resources elsewhere (Aggestam and Hyde-Price, 2019) and allowed Europe to imagine itself as a normative global actor defined by its orientation towards free trade, cooperation and the promotion of democracy (Manners, 2002).…”