Conference Agenda

The EU increasingly invests in its crisis preparedness, driven by its ambition to become faster, more capable and more effective in its ability to decide and act. Security crises such as the evacuation from Kabul and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine have led to an awareness that this requires considerable institutional innovation at the EU level, which has resulted in institutional reform of existing structures and the creation of several new crisis preparedness structures. One recent example in the field of security is the EEAS Crisis Response Centre (CRC), which was inaugurated in December 2023. Examples like these suggest that the EU acknowledges a growing need for speed in contemporary crisis governance and that it seeks to tailor its institutional design to that end. However, we do not know by which institutional design paradigms these initiatives are guided. This paper seeks to find out if there exist a common paradigm in the EU about how to become a faster crisis responder and what that looks like. It does so by comparing institutional initiatives in the field of security with recent institutional innovation in the domain of health. More in particular, it compares the design of the EEAS CRC and the Military Planning and Conduct Capability with the Health Emergency Response Authority, which was created in 2021 to improve the EU's response capacity to health crises. It applies insights from the literatures on the design and authority of international organisations. Empirically, this paper relies on insights from a set of non-papers and interviews with staff involved in the creation and day-to-day management of these institutions. Tentative findings point at noteworthy similarities (and potential shortcomings) in the authority and level of centralization. For instance, there seems to be a tendency to rely on (voluntary) staff reinforcements for emergency situations, which casts doubts about the effectiveness of these initiatives in terms of guaranteeing rapid response. This paper contributes to wider debates about the EU’s capacity to learn from crises and its role as a global crisis manager in the fields of security and health.

The European Union (EU) today is much more than a peace- and free trade project, having increasingly made efforts to carve out a place for itself as a security actor. With the new Strategic Compass for Security and Defence, the EU aims to enhance its influence as a regional and global crisis manager. Even though the EU has enacted structures to enable military activities outside the union over the years, the new Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) stands out in the Strategic Compass. Based on the existing EU Battlegroup format, which has suffered from a number of structural issues and never been deployed, the RDC is meant to provide the union with the ability to respond rapidly to crises. Given the lack of interest in realising previous rapid reaction tools, how can further investments in such measures be motivated? This paper presents novel interview material from several EU institutions together with a text analysis of key documents. By employing the concept of “meaning-making” from the crisis management leadership literature, this paper explores how the EU legitimizes its enhanced ambitions as a military crisis manager in general and in relation to the RDC in particular.

Its surrounding ‘arc of instability’ has put high expectations on the European Union to be an effective peace broker. The EU is indeed seen as particularly suited for the task as mediation is built into its DNA as a peace project and a ‘negotiated order’ itself. Yet, the EU’s approach to conflict resolution is different to that (and often considered less legitimate than) other international actors, as its capacity to mediate is affected by structural factors regarding its internal foreign policy-making process. Why, then, and in what circumstances does the EU engage in peace mediation? Is it faute de mieux or in pursuit of broader foreign policy objectives?

This paper explores the role of the EU in three conflict resolution processes located on the African continent (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2007-2013; Libya, 2014-2020; and Zimbabwe, 2007-2014). It does so by moving away from a primary conception of mediation as a technical and neutral tool to broker peace to adopt a framework based on Foreign Policy Analysis, which links the international politics of conflict resolution to those of the integrating political order of the EU. The argument is that peace mediation is an instrument of foreign policy in its own right and is mobilised by the EU to extend its internal integration process in the field of conflict resolution, development cooperation, migration, and, more broadly, a common foreign and security policy. The application of an FPA approach to mediation thus unveils the interlinkages between the development of the EU’s global actorness and conflict. The paper indeed provides an understanding of how isomorphic practices of mediation allow the EU to respond to external conflicts by opening dynamic spaces of political power at the operational level, which would not otherwise be available to it politically. By analysing how internal political purposes of the EU generate mediation, the paper also analyses how mediation blurs into diplomacy and statecraft, taking the form of ‘mediative diplomacy’, as a way in which Europe and other international actors can offer to solve conflicts and a new analytical lens.

This argument is empirically tested through a process-tracing approach in the study of the three cases mentioned above, which are realised by triangulating primary documentation, third-party commentary, and semi-structured interviews.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine prompted a strong, concerted and immediate response by the EU that few may have anticipated in terms of unity and resolve among EU institutions and member states. In October 2022, the EU took its support for Ukraine to a new level by deciding to establish a military assistance mission (EUMAM) to Ukrainian armed forces to train as much as 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In many respects, this is a groundbreaking decision by the EU and its member states, similar to the commitment to provide Ukraine with lethal military aid through the European Peace Facility. For the first time in the history of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) the EU launches a military mission aimed at a country in its Eastern neighbourhood that is fraught with active and protracted military conflicts orchestrated by Russia. Second, unlike the EU’s previous efforts to build capacity of partner countries against irregular non-state forces, the EU now committed to provide training against conventional battle-hardened army of nuclear armed opponent. Third, the EUMAM is the first military CSDP mission for a third country taking place on the EU’s soil, with operational headquarters in Poland and Germany.

The decision to launch the mission, as well as its design, presents a puzzle, considering member states’ previously highly diverging preferences vis-à-vis Russia and on security and defence. Unlike many Central and Eastern European members, the EU’s main military powers – France and Germany – have overall been hesitant in pushing back against Russian aggression by providing Ukraine with meaningful military aid. In addition, the United Kingdom has already been successfully implementing a training mission for Ukrainian military that is similar in its scale and objectives and to which many EU and NATO member states contributed their personnel.

Probing neofunctionalist and intergovernmentalist propositions for explaining the launch and design of CSDP operations and missions, we find that a particular combination of functionalist pressures, supranational entrepreneurship, changing government preferences and interstate bargaining dynamics can explain the creation and set-up of EUMAM.

Like other Western powers that had contributed to the reconstruction of Afghanistan over the previous two decades, the EU was blindsided by the speed with which Kabul fell in the summer of 2021. The chaotic evacuation laid bare the EU’s deficiencies to both anticipate the turn of events and coordinate an effective response. When addressing the European Parliament at the height of the crisis on 19 August, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called the Taliban takeover ‘a catastrophe’ and ‘nightmare’, and blamed intelligence providers for the state of unpreparedness the EU found itself in. At the same time, Borrell referred to warnings he personally had received weeks earlier by then Afghan president Ashraf Ghani at a meeting in Tashkent. Subsequent policy analyses concluded that Afghanistan had not been a foreign policy priority for the EU prior to mid-July 2021. By that time, most US and NATO forces had rapidly pulled out amidst an intensified Taliban offensive and US President Biden had brought the deadline for the full US withdrawal forward. Overall, the reasons behind the EU’s lack of preparedness are still underexplored and little attention has focused on the mechanisms behind its response.

This paper investigates the EU’s crisis structures it had at its disposal when responding to the fall of Kabul. It argues that the core issue was not the lack of capacity to plan an appropriate mission. Indeed, the EU has historically expanded its policy toolbox in response to crises. But in this particular case, established mechanisms such as the Integrated Political Crisis Response (IPCR) were under-utilised, despite having been activated during the COVID-19 pandemic and the migration crisis. Additionally, the EU’s Political and Security Committee, which usually convenes half a dozen times a month, assembled only on 16 August. And an extraordinary meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council only happened on 17 August. This raises the critical questions of why existing structures were not effectively leveraged prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul and in the immediate aftermath and whether this was due to a lack of warnings. This paper examines this, among others, by drawing on interviews with EU officials involved in the evacuation and its anticipation. The findings feed into the wider debate of the EU’s inability to utilise its foreign policy toolbox in times of necessity and the relationship between intelligence and EU crisis responses.