Europe’s Strategic Dilemmas

Resumo

The slow pace of progress in military co-operation reflects a deeper problem: the lack of a shared strategic culture in Europe. At the same time, resource constraints make it even more urgent than before for them to co-operate. Meanwhile, in the last decade the environment in which Europe operates has dramatically changed – and Europe has failed to catch up. In particular, developments have undermined six of the assumptions on which the first European Security Strategy (ESS), agreed in 2003, was based. Europeans therefore urgently need a new global strategy. They will need to make tough choices about where in the world they want to have influence and how. One striking illustration of Europe’s tendency to avoid making such difficult choices is the concept of “strategic partnerships” – the EU’s key conceptual framework for its relations with the leading powers of the twenty-first century. If anything is to remain of the EU’s aspiration to be a “normative power”, it must distinguish in its foreign policy between democracies and non-democracies.