EU Security Dynamics: The New National Interests

Abstract

What can we assume about the EU’s future role in security and defence policy? Not much. The scenarios seem wide open and undetermined. One predicts that the EU will become the key actor in European security because the modern use of military power is one of integrated peace-building and democratisation. Hence the military tool is simply becoming integrated with the EU’s other tools. The optimist is often a European who favours soft power on principle, and who admits to military power only as a benign addition to other, nicer tools of statecraft. He or she will often have a rather teleological view of the EU as an alternative to the crass realism of US foreign policy, and will, as William Wallace remarks, be convinced of the moral superiority of the EU (Wallace, 2005).