European Strategic Culture and the Prospects for European Defence

Abstract

Will the European Union ever become an organisation with a coherent strategic concept that also works in practice? This question has been posed by a number of scholars (Biscop 2002; Salmon 2005; Rynning 2003; Cornish and Edwards 2001) and was also an important motivation for this comparative study of national strategic cultures and norms. This concluding chapter will explore in more detail the implications of the findings presented earlier in terms of the evolution and effective implementation of European defence. In so doing, it will also advance recommendations on how ESDP can be framed and advanced so that areas of normative incompatibilities can be either circumvented through appropriate institutional design or operational caution, or gradually defused through measures aimed at increasing mutual understanding of the origins of contradictions. Four issues in the current debate about ESDP will be examined, each of which impinges on more than one of the normative dimensions used to structure this study: (i) goals for the use of force between humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive attack; (ii) the development of high-end combat capabilities for ESDP; (iii) the question of how the EU should relate to the US/NATO; (iv) the appropriate institutional design and co-operation arrangements for European defence.