EU's Strategic Compass for Security and Defence: Books

At the end of the second decade of the 21th century the European Union has made important steps towards the strengthening of its global actorness and presence. Nevertheless, besides the development of the EU Global Strategy in 2016 and the inauguration of various coordination and cooperation endeavours (PESCO, CARD, EDF), the ambitious vision of the European (Security and) Defence Union is moving rather slowly. Within the new global multipolar system and the unstable international environment, the EU should make more effort to enhance its strategic autonomy and become a strong security actor in a rapidly changing world

The European Union’s (EU) common security and defence policy (CSDP) is just a little over 20 years old. During this time, the Union has deployed several military and civilian missions and operations in its neighbourhood with a view to enhancing the EU’s security in an autonomous manner. While CSDP emerged as a policy mechanism to deal with crisis in the Western Balkans, the policy has evolved into a multifaceted capacity engaged in Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Over the last decade European Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has been one of the weakest links of European integration. While the member states proceeded with uncoordinated cuts in their defence budgets, Europe's political energy was almost totally absorbed by the euro crisis. It has taken a radically changing global and regional environment, characterized by hybrid threats and a blurring divide between internal and external security, to make the CSDP a political priority for the European Union again. With the new Global Strategy (2016) and its implementation package, the EU institutions have - remarkably effectively - opened the door to a European Defence Union and eventually - in the long run - a European Army. It is now up to the member states to decide how they want to achieve strategic autonomy, but at the same time ensure that the European Union retains its identity as a soft power. This book offers insights into the political, academic and public debates on European defence and a more robust CSDP.

The Treaty of Lisbon was in fact a milestone in the process of expanding the EU's role on the level of international security. It stipulated in the Treaty on the European Union that the principal aspect of EU security is a mutual defense clause designed to protect all member states. The book aims to show the changes that are taking place in the EU as a result of the ongoing globalization and of the emergence of non-traditional threats in the securitization process. Therefore, this book was written with the aim of analyzing the current nature of the EU as a regional security complex (RSC), following the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon, as well as with the aim of revising all elements of this integrated security area contemporarily using the methodology of Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver.

This book explores the multilayer nexus among inter-related international and regional security parameters that critically define the EU's rapidly changing security environment. In terms of intensity, complexity and urgency these changes constitute challenges that threaten the very core of European security - both internal and external. In a fluid and transitional international environment of diversified needs and polymorphic threats the space dimension acquires a novel unified meaning. The book closely examines the EU's current strategic, organisational and defence capabilities regarding global, regional and domestic challenges such as terrorism, systemic instability, global order and a number of crucial hindrances to transatlantic cooperation.

This volume addresses how and in what capacity the European Union and its member states are able to respond to fundamental shifts occurring in global politics and remain relevant for the future. The changing nature of the international system is subject to considerable contestation among scholars, with many claiming that the fundamentals of the post-war international system are being rewritten. This volume brings together prominent scholars in the field of European security to address a range of pertinent issues related to Europe's role in the context of evolving global challenges.

The Handbook of European Security Law and Policy offers a holistic discussion of the contemporary challenges to the security of the European Union and emphasizes the complexity of dealing with these through legislation and policy. Considering security from a human perspective, the book opens with a general introduction to the key issues in European Security Law and Policy before delving into three main areas. Institutions, policies and mechanisms used by Security, Defence Policy and Internal Affairs form the conceptual framework of the book; at the same time, an extensive analysis of the risks and challenges facing the EU, including threats to human rights and sustainability, as well as the European Union's legal and political response to these challenges, is provided.

This book provides an empirical understanding of how EU-level defence industrial cooperation functions in practice. Using the Liberal Intergovernmental theoretical model, the book argues that while national economic preferences are an essential factor of government interests they only explain part of the dynamic that leads to the development of defence industrial policy at EU level. Moving beyond a simple adumbration of economic preferences, it shows how the EU’s institutional framework and corpus of law are used by governments to reaffirm their position as the ultimate arbiter and promoter of national economic preferences in the defence industrial sector. --publisher.

Highlighting the challenges and prospects of European security cooperation, this volume examines the impact of Brexit on strategic aspects of security, peace, defence and foreign policy for both the European Union and the UK. It applies theoretical and methodological approaches from international relations and security studies to analyse the causal mechanisms of security cooperation, and covers topics including innovative security technologies, defence procurement, EU-NATO relations, new capabilities frameworks (such as PESCO, EDF and EII), the role of French-German military cooperation, and the implications of Brexit for European deterrence or the Northern Ireland peace process. The findings contribute to a better understanding and management of anticipated challenges and sources of instability in post-Brexit Europe.

The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has come a long way since its inception as the European Security and Defence Identity under NATO. Yet more than a decade after emerging as an autonomous entity, with its own capacity for civilian crisis management and military action, the European Union's CSDP is still very much a work in progress. This fully revised and updated new edition provides the most comprehensive account available of the CSDP and the debates surrounding it.

Over the past decade, numerous states have declared cyberspace as a new domain of warfare, sought to develop a military cyber strategy and establish a cyber command. These developments have led to much policy talk and concern about the future of warfare as well as the digital vulnerability of society. No Shortcuts provides a level-headed view of where we are in the militarization of cyberspace. In this book, Max Smeets bridges the divide between technology and policy to assess the necessary building blocks for states to develop a military cyber capacity.

Hybrid War, Grey Zone Warfare, Unrestricted War: today, traditional conflict-fought with guns, bombs, and drones-has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending Transnational crime expert Mark Galeotti provides a comprehensive and ground-breaking survey of the new way of war. Ranging across the globe, Galeotti shows how today's conflicts are fought with everything from disinformation and espionage to crime and subversion, leading to instability within countries and a legitimacy crisis across the globe.

The pandemic and recent cyberattacks have ruthlessly exposed the EU's vulnerability and lack of resilience. The Union's delicate position in a multipolar world, where it advocates multilateralism and at the same time risks being crushed between the US, Russia and China, needs to be responded to with a comprehensive strategy. This book is a contribution to the debate on the EU's future priorities in foreign, security and defence matters.

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, Future War and the Defence of Europe considers in the round how peace can be maintained on a continent that has suffered two cataclysmic conflicts since 1914. COVID-19 and the trend-accelerating impact of such pandemics is first considered. The book then weaves history, strategy, policy, and technology into a compelling analytical narrative that sets the scale of the challenge Europeans and their allies will face if Europe’s peace is to be upheld in a transformative century.

Hybrid warfare is becoming a long-term strategic challenge for NATO and the EU. This book examines its conceptual foundations, actors and technologies from a holistic, systemic perspective. In particular, new, disruptive technologies have a catalytic effect on hybrid methods and tools. 19 Technologies prove to be particularly relevant. They improve the initial conditions for hybrid action, expand the arsenal of hybrid actors and improve the scope and prospects for success of their activities.

This volume addresses developments in European space policy and its significance for European integration, using discourse theory as a framework. It seeks to address the developments in European space policy by examining several sensitive security questions linked in general with space activities, on the one hand, and the interplay between space policy and security policy in the European Union (EU) on the other. The book argues that defence and security matters should be studied for a better understanding of space projects in their historical, political, economic, legal and social context.

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading.

This book covers the security and safety of CBRNE assets and management, and illustrates which risks may emerge and how to counter them through an enhanced risk management approach. It also tackles the CBRNE-Cyber threats, their risk mitigation measures and the relevance of raising awareness and education enforcing a CBRNE-Cy security culture. The authors present international instruments and legislation to deal with these threats, for instance the UNSCR1540. The authors address a multitude of stakeholders, and have a multidisciplinary nature dealing with cross-cutting areas like the convergence of biological and chemical, the development of edging technologies, and in the cyber domain, the impelling risks due to the use of malwares against critical subsystems of CBRN facilities.

From the establishment of NATO in 1949, Western Europe has been under Anglo-American tutelage in military and security matters. Several countries, most notably France and (since reunification) Germany, have experienced this as a hindrance to the pursuit of their particular interests. Since 2008, the European Commission has actively joined the quest for “strategic autonomy” within NATO. The elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron in 2016-17 further widened the Atlantic rift, while the COVID-19 crisis with its colossal economic costs has, in turn, exacerbated the already worsening geopolitical tensions with states like Russia and China.

In The European Union and the Use of Force Julia Schmidt examines the development and activities of the EU as an emerging international military actor. The author offers a comprehensive analysis of the legal framework for the EU's military crisis management operations.

This book analyses the European Union's (EU) approach to peacebuilding in its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions, and explores how this approach impacts the EU's role in international conflict management. Peacebuilding carried out through CSDP instruments has become central to the self-conception of the EU as an actor in international conflict management. EU missions and operations have, for the most part, been deployed to promote peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict situations, in particular through capacity-building, reforms and rebuilding of state structures.

This innovative and timely consideration of the European Union's crisis response mechanisms brings together scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to examine how and why the EU responds to crises on its borders and further afield. The work is based on extensive fieldwork in - among other places - Afghanistan, Libya, Mali and Iraq. The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others not.

Currently, some 2,500 civilian experts work across Europe, Africa, and Asia in ten ongoing civilian missions launched under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Mandates cover a broad range of multidimensional tasks, such as rule of law support, law enforcement capacity building, or security sector reform. Numerous (recent) incidents from the field underscore that there are serious institutional as well as procedural weaknesses and irregularities tied toaccountability in these EU peacebuilding missions.This title offers a comprehensive legal analysis and empirical study of accountability concerning the Union's peacebuilding endeavours, also referred to as civilian crisis management.

This book critically explores the European Union’s brand of peacebuilding in the form of its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). A contextually close reading of EU missions – using the fluid categories of telling and acting, stressing the dialogical ways of being, and taking heed of the concept of just peace as a particular guide to building peace – allows the book to tap into the specific meanings the EU has of peace, the ways in which it imagines its relationships with its varied partners, and perhaps most controversially, the way that being/becoming a global actor has been front and center of the CSDP. The analysis focuses on three core missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

Chapitre 8 du livre "Histoire de la sécurité européenne depuis 1945" (2024), pages 230 à 266.
i l’invasion du territoire ukrainien par les troupes russes le 24 février 2022 a provoqué un séisme géopolitique et rappelé aux Européens leur vulnérabilité face à une Russie désireuse de recouvrer son influence dans son « étranger proche », la guerre en Ukraine apparaît aussi comme le moment paroxysmique d’une série de remises en question ayant considérablement fragilisé le paradigme libéral de l’ère post-guerre froide. C’est au nom de ce dernier, fondé sur l’expansion de la démocratie et du marché, que les États-Unis avaient en partie justifié leurs interventions en Afghanistan et en Irak : pour cesser de ne plus menacer la sécurité de l’Occident, le Moyen-Orient devait se fondre dans le moule libéral. C’était là le cœur de la doctrine dite « néo-conservatrice », qui s’était développée au sein du parti démocrate américain dans l’entre-deux-guerres puis dans les années 1960 et 1970 et dont les partisans avaient rejoint le camp de Ronald Reagan avant d’entourer George W. Bush après 2000

This book proposes that the European Union should craft a grand strategy to navigate the new world order based on a four-pronged approach. First, European decision-makers (both in Brussels and across EU capitals) should take a broader view of their existential interests at stake and devote greater time and resources to serving them within the wider cause of the liberal order. Second, Europe needs to help reinvigorate the West by restoring a sense of solidarity through fairer distribution of benefits and burdens. Third, it should develop separate strategies for parts of the world, such as Russia and China, where liberal values are not likely to be attainable in the foreseeable future yet order is still necessary. Fourth, Europe needs to clarify its core interests elsewhere and help stabilize the Middle East and Africa.

This book sets out the key foreign policy developments that have marked 2020, a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the EU's response. In this context, key questions for Europe include how it can become a proper global actor and build up European strategic autonomy? What is the future for the transatlantic partnership under the new US administration? How to deal with the antagonism between China and the United States? How to act in the face of the "new empires" that threaten to destabilise our neighbourhood? And how should the EU strengthen its partnerships with Africa, Latin America or the Indo-Pacific? In answering these questions, HR/VP Josep Borrell Fontelles addresses some of the main issues facing the EU’s foreign and security policy.

In a world that has returned to great power rivalry, understanding the grand strategy of these powers is crucial. This book introduces ten key terms for analysing grand strategy and shows how the world's great powers - the United States, China, Russia and the European Union (EU) - shape their strategic decisions today. Outlining the steps needed for a less confrontational grand strategy and a more peaceful and stable world order, this lively and accessible introduction shows how the choices made in each of these ten areas will determine the course of world politics in the first half of the 21st century.

This book describes the evolution of French defence policy since the end of the Cold War. For the past thirty years there have been significant changes to French defence policy as a result of several contextual evolutions. Changes include shifts in the global balance of power, new understandings of the notion of international security, economic downturns, and developments in European integration. Yet despite these changes, the purpose of France's grand strategy and its main principles have remained remarkably stable over time. This book identifies the incentives, representations and objectives of French defence policy.