Common Security and Defence Policy

Based on Wikipedia: Common Security and Defence Policy

Europe's Military Awakening

For decades, Europe outsourced its security. The United States provided the muscle, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided the structure, and European nations provided modest contributions while focusing their budgets elsewhere. It was a comfortable arrangement—until it wasn't.

Now Europe finds itself scrambling to remember how to defend itself.

The Common Security and Defence Policy, known by its acronym CSDP, represents the European Union's attempt to develop its own military and crisis management capabilities. It's a sprawling, bureaucratic, sometimes contradictory enterprise that reflects both Europe's ambitions and its deep-seated hesitations about military power. Understanding this system means understanding why twenty-seven nations that fought devastating wars against each other are now trying to figure out how to fight together.

A Policy Born from Failure

The roots of European defense cooperation stretch back to the rubble of World War Two, but the CSDP as we know it emerged from a more recent humiliation: the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

As Yugoslavia tore itself apart, European leaders discovered an uncomfortable truth. Despite having the world's largest economy and hundreds of millions of citizens, the European Community couldn't stop a genocide happening in its own backyard. The massacres at Srebrenica in 1995, where Bosnian Serb forces murdered over eight thousand Muslim men and boys, occurred while Dutch peacekeepers under United Nations command stood by, unable to intervene effectively.

This wasn't just a military failure. It was a psychological one. Europeans had convinced themselves that their post-war project had transcended the need for hard power. History, they believed, had ended. The Yugoslav Wars proved it hadn't.

The path to the CSDP wound through several earlier attempts at European defense integration, most of which failed spectacularly. In the 1950s, the proposed European Defence Community would have created a unified European army. The French Parliament killed it in 1954, worried about German rearmament and loss of national sovereignty. The Western European Union lingered on for decades as a largely dormant talking shop, occasionally reactivated when European leaders needed to appear to be doing something about defense.

The real breakthrough came in 1998 at Saint-Malo, a French port city better known for its medieval walls than its diplomatic significance. There, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac agreed that the European Union needed autonomous defense capabilities. This was remarkable because Britain had traditionally been the loudest voice against European military integration, preferring to keep security matters firmly within NATO, where American leadership guaranteed British influence.

Blair's conversion—motivated partly by the Kosovo crisis unfolding at the time—opened the door to what became the European Security and Defence Policy in 1999, renamed the Common Security and Defence Policy in 2009.

How It Actually Works

The CSDP operates through a byzantine structure that would give organizational consultants nightmares. At the top sits the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, currently Kaja Kallas of Estonia. This position combines the roles of chief diplomat and defense coordinator for the entire European Union, a job so demanding that it requires someone to be in multiple places simultaneously.

Below the High Representative sprawls an alphabet soup of agencies, directorates, and committees. The European External Action Service functions as the EU's diplomatic corps and houses the military planning staff. The European Defence Agency coordinates weapons development and procurement. The Military Committee brings together the defense chiefs of all member states. The Political and Security Committee meets almost daily to manage crises and oversee operations.

If this sounds confusing, that's because it is. Deliberately so, in some ways.

European defense cooperation operates under a fundamental tension. Member states want to pool their capabilities and speak with one voice on security matters, but they absolutely do not want to surrender control over when and where their soldiers might be sent to fight. This means the CSDP requires unanimous decisions for almost everything important. Any single country can veto a proposed military operation, and many have.

The result is a system optimized for the lowest common denominator. CSDP missions tend to be small, carefully limited in scope, and focused on tasks unlikely to result in casualties. Training missions, police advisory teams, border monitoring operations—these are the CSDP's bread and butter. Full-scale combat operations remain rare and controversial.

The NATO Question

Any discussion of European defense must grapple with the elephant in the room: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO predates the CSDP by half a century. It has permanent military headquarters, integrated command structures, and Article Five—the commitment that an attack on one member is an attack on all. It has been tested in combat, from Afghanistan to Libya. Most importantly, it has the United States, which provides roughly seventy percent of the alliance's military capability.

So why does Europe need the CSDP at all?

The official answer is that the two are complementary. NATO handles territorial defense—protecting member states from direct attack. The CSDP handles crisis management—peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention, stabilization missions in places NATO doesn't want to go or can't agree to go. The EU has signed agreements allowing it to use NATO planning and logistical capabilities for its own operations.

The unofficial answer is more complicated. Some European leaders, particularly in France, have long dreamed of strategic autonomy—the ability to act independently of Washington. They point to situations where American and European interests diverge: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which many Europeans opposed; trade disputes that spill over into security relationships; and the fundamental question of whether Americans will always be willing to die for Europe.

Donald Trump's election in 2016, with his open questioning of NATO's value and demands that Europeans pay more for their own defense, turbocharged these concerns. His return to the presidency has only intensified them. Even supporters of the transatlantic alliance now acknowledge that Europe cannot indefinitely depend on American protection.

The result is an awkward dance. European officials insist the CSDP strengthens NATO by making Europe a more capable partner. Skeptics, including some in Washington, worry that European defense initiatives will duplicate NATO structures, waste resources, and potentially undermine alliance solidarity.

Missions and Operations

Despite its limitations, the CSDP has deployed forces across three continents.

The first operation came in 2003, when European troops deployed to the Republic of Macedonia—now North Macedonia—to help stabilize the country after an insurgency by ethnic Albanian militants. Operation Concordia, as it was called, used NATO assets and involved only a few hundred soldiers. It was deliberately modest, a proof of concept rather than a demonstration of power.

Later that year, the EU deployed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Operation Artemis. This mission, authorized by the United Nations Security Council, aimed to stop atrocities in the Ituri region, where ethnic militias had been massacring civilians. French troops formed the backbone of the force, establishing what became known as the "framework nation" model—a large contributor provides headquarters and logistics while smaller nations contribute niche capabilities.

Artemis lasted only a few months but established important precedents. It showed the EU could deploy forces rapidly to distant regions. It demonstrated that European states would intervene in Africa, their former colonial backyard, under European rather than NATO or UN command. And it revealed the limitations of such operations—without sustained follow-up, the underlying conflicts continued.

The longest-running CSDP military operation is EUFOR Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which took over peacekeeping duties from NATO in 2004. At its peak, it deployed over seven thousand troops. Today, the force has shrunk to a few hundred, but it maintains the legal authority to escalate rapidly if the fragile Bosnian peace breaks down.

The most innovative CSDP mission has been Operation Atalanta, launched in 2008 to combat Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden. This was the EU's first naval operation, and it created the European Union Naval Force as a permanent institutional framework. At its height, Somali pirates were hijacking dozens of ships annually and extracting millions in ransom payments. Atalanta, working alongside other naval forces, helped reduce successful pirate attacks to nearly zero.

Most CSDP missions, however, are civilian rather than military. Police training in Afghanistan, judicial reform in Iraq, border assistance in Ukraine and Moldova, security sector reform across Africa—these unglamorous tasks represent the bulk of what the CSDP actually does. They rarely make headlines, but they absorb most of the policy's attention and resources.

The Capabilities Gap

Europe has money. Europe has soldiers. What Europe lacks is the ability to deploy them effectively.

The numbers look impressive on paper. European Union member states collectively maintain over 1.4 million active military personnel. Combined defense spending exceeds two hundred billion euros annually, making the EU the world's third-largest military spender after the United States and China. European arsenals include nuclear weapons—France maintains its own independent nuclear deterrent, while Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands host American nuclear bombs as part of NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements.

But much of this force exists only on paper or can only be used for domestic purposes. European militaries evolved during the Cold War to fight Soviet tank armies on the North German Plain. They have too many heavy armored units and not enough deployable expeditionary forces. They have separate national logistics systems that don't talk to each other. They have twenty-seven different procurement systems buying twenty-seven different sets of equipment.

Consider military transport aircraft. To project power beyond their borders, European forces need to move troops and equipment by air. Yet for decades, Europeans relied heavily on renting aircraft from Ukraine and Russia—a dependency that became acutely embarrassing after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Airbus A400M transport aircraft, a joint European project meant to solve this problem, ran years behind schedule and billions over budget.

Or consider naval aviation. Among all twenty-seven EU members, only France operates a full-sized aircraft carrier capable of launching conventional fighter jets. Italy has two smaller carriers designed for helicopters and short-takeoff aircraft. That's it. For comparison, the United States operates eleven carrier strike groups.

The problem isn't just money. European defense spending has increased significantly since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. The problem is fragmentation. Each nation buys its own equipment, maintains its own supply chains, and guards its defense industry as a matter of national sovereignty. The result is massive duplication and waste.

Permanent Structured Cooperation

The EU's answer to this fragmentation is something called Permanent Structured Cooperation, universally known by its acronym PESCO.

Established in 2017, PESCO allows groups of member states to pursue deeper defense integration without requiring every country to participate. It's an "opt-in" framework—countries that want to move faster on defense can do so without being held back by more reluctant partners. Currently, twenty-six of the twenty-seven EU members participate. Only Malta, the EU's smallest member, has stayed out.

PESCO works through specific projects. Participating countries commit to developing particular capabilities together—a European medical command, a network of logistics hubs, a cyber rapid response force, military mobility improvements that would allow troops and equipment to move quickly across borders. As of 2023, over sixty PESCO projects were underway, though many remained in early development stages.

The ambition is significant. PESCO commits participants to regularly increasing their defense budgets, to making more of their forces deployable, and to collaborating on equipment purchases. In theory, it could eventually produce something approaching a European army—not a single force replacing national militaries, but an integrated system where national forces operate seamlessly together.

In practice, PESCO has produced mixed results. Some projects have made genuine progress. Others exist mainly as PowerPoint presentations. Critics argue that PESCO has too many projects, spread too thin, with insufficient funding and unclear priorities. Supporters counter that even modest progress represents a breakthrough in European defense culture, which historically resisted any supranational integration.

The European Defence Fund

Money talks, and in 2017, the European Union started putting its money where its ambitions were.

The European Defence Fund marked the first time EU budget resources were used to finance military research and development. Previously, all European defense spending came from national budgets, with the EU itself contributing nothing directly to military capabilities. The Commission argued this was absurd—the EU spent billions on agricultural subsidies and regional development but nothing on the defense capabilities that ultimately protected those investments.

The fund supports two types of activities. Research projects develop new defense technologies—drones, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity tools, novel materials. Capability development projects take those technologies and turn them into actual military equipment that multiple countries can purchase together.

The budget is modest by defense standards—roughly eight billion euros for the period 2021 to 2027—but the symbolism matters. The EU is now in the defense business, not just the defense coordination business. This represents a significant expansion of what the European project means and does.

The fund also comes with strings attached. Projects must involve companies from at least three different EU countries, encouraging the cross-border collaboration that European defense has historically lacked. This irritates some large defense contractors, who would prefer to work alone, but it forces the kind of integration that might eventually produce a genuine European defense industrial base.

The Mutual Defense Clause

Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union contains a sentence that could transform European security: "If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power."

This is the EU's mutual defense clause, roughly equivalent to NATO's famous Article Five. It has been invoked exactly once.

On November 13, 2015, terrorists attacked Paris, killing one hundred and thirty people in coordinated assaults on a concert hall, restaurants, and the national stadium. The French government declared this an armed aggression and invoked Article 42.7, requesting assistance from other EU members.

The response revealed both the potential and the limitations of European solidarity. Other member states provided various forms of support—intelligence sharing, taking over French military commitments elsewhere, contributing to operations against the Islamic State. But there was no automatic deployment of European forces to defend France, no integrated European response comparable to what NATO might organize.

The clause remains largely untested against the scenario it was designed for: a conventional military attack on EU territory. How it would interact with NATO's Article Five, given that most EU members also belong to NATO, remains unclear. Some analysts argue it provides a useful backup for non-NATO EU members like Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden. Others suggest it's largely symbolic, a statement of intent rather than a workable military guarantee.

The Shadow of Ukraine

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 transformed European defense discussions overnight.

For years, proponents of European defense integration had warned that the post-Cold War peace could not last forever, that Europe needed autonomous capabilities, that relying entirely on America was strategically risky. They were largely ignored or dismissed as alarmist. Then Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, and suddenly everything seemed possible.

Germany announced a one-hundred-billion-euro special fund for defense modernization, ending decades of military underinvestment. Sweden and Finland abandoned their traditional neutrality and joined NATO. European countries pledged unprecedented amounts of military aid to Ukraine, drawing down their own stockpiles to help a non-member state resist aggression.

The EU deployed the CSDP's mechanisms in new ways. A military assistance mission to train Ukrainian forces was established in Germany and Poland. The European Peace Facility, technically outside the EU budget but administered by EU institutions, provided billions in lethal military aid—the first time the EU had ever financed weapons for a country at war.

But the war also exposed European limitations. Stockpiles of ammunition, particularly 155mm artillery shells, ran dangerously low. European defense industries, scaled for peacetime procurement, couldn't ramp up production quickly enough. Coordination problems that seemed theoretical suddenly had life-or-death consequences.

In May 2025, EU member states agreed to launch a €150 billion loans-for-arms fund backed by the bloc's shared budget. This initiative allows EU countries to borrow from Brussels and spend on weapons systems through joint procurement—a significant step toward the kind of coordinated defense investment that advocates have long sought.

What Europe Can and Cannot Do

The honest assessment of Europe's military capabilities is humbling.

Europe can deploy peacekeeping forces to permissive environments where they're unlikely to face serious combat. It can train foreign militaries, advise police forces, and monitor borders. It can conduct counter-piracy operations and limited humanitarian interventions. It can provide logistical and financial support to allies fighting wars.

What Europe cannot currently do is fight a sustained, high-intensity war against a peer adversary without American support. It lacks the integrated command structures, the precision-guided munitions stockpiles, the aerial refueling capacity, the satellite reconnaissance capabilities, and the logistical depth that such a conflict would require.

This doesn't mean European forces are useless. In many scenarios—peacekeeping, crisis management, training missions, counter-terrorism—they're highly capable. French forces, in particular, have demonstrated the ability to conduct expeditionary operations in Africa with minimal outside support. But for the kind of territorial defense scenario that Russia's aggression has made suddenly relevant, Europe remains dependent on American power projection.

The question is whether this will change. European leaders increasingly talk about strategic autonomy, about the need to be able to act when America is unwilling or unable to help. The institutions are being built—slowly, haltingly, with endless committee meetings and bureaucratic friction. The money is starting to flow. The political will, galvanized by Ukraine, seems stronger than ever.

Whether it will be enough, and in time, remains to be seen.

The Democratic Deficit

One underappreciated aspect of European defense integration is its democratic dimension—or lack thereof.

National militaries answer to national parliaments. Elected representatives debate defense budgets, authorize deployments, and hold military leaders accountable. This democratic control is fundamental to how modern democracies wage war.

The CSDP exists in a more ambiguous space. The European Parliament has limited oversight over defense matters, which remain firmly in the hands of national governments acting through the Council. Decisions about CSDP missions are made by diplomats and defense ministers, with parliamentary involvement varying widely across member states.

This arrangement reflects practical realities—foreign policy and defense have always been executive prerogatives, and expecting twenty-seven national parliaments plus the European Parliament to approve every military decision would make the CSDP even slower than it already is. But it also means that the growing European defense infrastructure lacks the democratic legitimacy that would make it truly robust.

Some reformers argue for giving the European Parliament more power over defense matters, treating it like any other area of EU policy. Others counter that defense is different, that national sovereignty over military affairs must be preserved, that European citizens aren't ready to see their soldiers deployed by Brussels rather than by their own governments.

This debate will only intensify as European defense integration deepens.

An Unfinished Project

The Common Security and Defence Policy represents one of the European Union's most ambitious undertakings—and one of its most incomplete.

It emerged from the trauma of Europe's failure to prevent atrocities in its own neighborhood. It evolved through decades of bureaucratic maneuvering, Franco-British negotiations, and incremental institution-building. It has deployed forces on three continents and developed capabilities that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Yet it remains fundamentally limited by the same forces that have always constrained European integration: national sovereignty, divergent threat perceptions, and the comfortable assumption that America will always be there to handle the hard stuff.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine may have changed those assumptions permanently. European leaders now talk openly about scenarios that were recently unthinkable—a world where American security guarantees cannot be relied upon, where Europe must defend itself with its own resources. Whether this rhetoric will translate into the sustained investment, institutional reform, and political courage that genuine strategic autonomy would require remains the defining question of European defense.

For now, the CSDP sits somewhere between aspiration and achievement—more than a talking shop, less than a military alliance. It is a work in progress, reflecting a continent that is still learning, after centuries of conflict, how to protect itself together rather than against each other.

The next chapter is being written in real time.