Per M. Norheim-Martinsen

Beyond Intergovernmentalism: European Security and Defence Policy and the Governance Approach

Over the last decade, the EU has developed into a regional institution whose military ambitions extend well beyond Europe. This development counteracts the assumptions of realist and intergovernmental theories, raising the question of what concepts are appropriate for understanding security and defence policy in the EU. It has been argued that governance approaches are particularly well-suited to describe the functioning of the EU. Yet analyses of the EUs common security and defence policy (CSDP) have to date not been granted the benefits of this insight. This article seeks to remedy this by venturing down the yet unfulfilled EU trail of a burgeoning literature on security governance. Exploring five features of security governance, the article identifies the most promising questions and approaches of the so-called governance turn in IR theory, ending up with a putative EU security governance research agenda that will lead to a deeper understanding of the kind of security actor that the EU has evolved into.

Towards Intelligence-Driven Peace Operations? The Evolution of UN and EU Intelligence Structures

Comprehensive intelligence support has become a key requirement in contemporary peace operations. To deal with complex security challenges, international organizations are required not only to develop relevant intelligence structures but also to integrate civilian and military information and actors within them. There is an inherent risk, however, that too much integration will water down intelligence as a concept, in so far as it becomes more difficult to protect sensitive information, sources and methods. Both the UN and the EU have sought to establish integrated intelligence structures, but with mixed results. In tracing the evolution of UN and EU intelligence, this article sheds light on the trend in international peacekeeping towards intelligence-driven operations. In bringing together new empirical knowledge about the two organizations, the article also identifies key determining factors behind the development of intelligence structures within international organizations – a capacity normally seen as belonging to the national domain.

EU Strategic Culture: When the Means Becomes the End

After being debated in academic circles for years, the idea of a common European Union strategic culture was elevated to a policy objective in the 2003 European Security Strategy. However, whether the European Union has a strategic culture or not is still up for debate. By drawing on developments in strategic culture theory, this article demonstrates that the idea of strategic culture is not only compatible with the European Union, but may be a particularly useful conceptual tool for studying actors for which cultural factors can make up for the lack of more material ones, such as borders, language, political structure, national history, and so on. Offering a fresh perspective on the European Security Strategy, it shows that a specific strategic culture has evolved in the EU, in which consensus on a comprehensive approach to security as a unique European asset has become a focal point for the fledgling European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). However, the article concludes that this does not provide for a robust strategic culture. The repeated emphasis on the EUs unique potentials as a comprehensive security actor will also invite criticism if the EU fails to mount operations that reflect its own success formula.

Making sense of EU comprehensive security towards conceptual and analytical clarity

Abstract European leaders frequently vaunt the European Unions distinctiveness in adopting and pursuing a comprehensive approach to security. The EUs profile as an international actor is designed to span across all dimensions of security. As a result, its security policy portfolio involves a large number of institutional actors and policies that need to be coordinated. The ambition of the EU to provide security in a comprehensive manner raises challenges at the politico–strategic level, at the level of operational and policy planning and in day-to-day implementation. So far, the field is lacking an inclusive analytical framework for the analysis of providing security through a distinctively comprehensive civil–military, economic and political organisation. This article seeks to close this gap by providing suggestions for how the wide range of issues related to comprehensive security could be structured, and by framing the matter theoretically and with reference to existing conceptual work and empirical research.

New sources of military change – armed forces as normal organizations

Abstract The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-cold war security environment ffocuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defense sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a “normalization” of Europe’s defense sectors. This has important implications for how we approach and understand change in contemporary defense organizations.

Our work here is done: European Union peacekeeping in Africa

Abstract Since the European Unions Organisation Operation Artemis in support of the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) in 2003, Africa has become a key area of operations for the EU, an important source of lessons learned, and a test case for a constructive UN-EU partnership. The questions posed in this paper are whether the lessons learned have been the ‘right’ ones, and whether the hopes that the EU would become a vehicle for a revival of European peacekeeping in Africa have been met. The paper shows that despite initial hopes that it would become an active and responsible peacekeeper, the EUs African venture soon showed signs of strain. Routine claims to success, and a need to prove itself as a potent military actor, have made it hard for the EU to learn the right lessons from these operations and develop relations with the UN. A further problem is that the EU, through its short-term ‘bridging operations’, subsequently often increases the strain on the UN. Finally, the potential for drawing synergies between both organisations’ unique potentials as civil-military actors has not been tapped.