Carolyn Moser
Stories on the civil–military interface in the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) rarely have a happy ending. They tell us that bureaucratic efficiency and operational effectiveness could be enhanced if the civil and military branches of EU security and defence were better streamlined. This blogpost challenges this negative narrative and argues that a significant civil–military nexus—that is the interconnectedness of civilian and military elements in the CSDP—has already materialized.
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Anna Mrozek
The intergovernmental component based on international law principles remains quite strong in this policy field. However, the Council appears as a key decision-making body with regard to launching EU military missions, and determining the structural details (command and control). This certainly raises the question on which level of the multi-level legal system effective rule-of-protection mechanisms are in fact embedded.
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Jelena von Achenbach
While most legal scholarship and the Bundesverfassunsgericht hold that Member States remain self-governed in the field of military policy, the New Defence Policy illustrates that this is not the case. PESCO shows how the New Defence Policy is subjecting the Member States to regulatory measures which are generated and enforced through EU political processes that clearly leave behind the intergovernmental form.
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Falk Ostermann
This blog post wants to raise two objections against politico-integrative euphoria: first, I agree with the view that the current initiatives are marginal in comparison to the EU’s needs for becoming a flexible, ready, and willing autonomous security and defense actor; and second, I will expound that autonomy still matters though in a different way than it did before, posing a particular challenge to EU actorness.
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Moritz Weiss
To what extent does PESCO suggest novel ways and rules of decision-making that are neither supranational nor intergovernmental? While I share the general view that the differentiated integration of PESCO shapes a certain middle ground between the two forms of policy-making, I argue that we should preserve the distinction between supranational and intergovernmental rules since it still makes a difference in political life.
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Sebastian Graf von Kielmansegg
Grand labels like a “European Defence Union” are rather misleading. In particular, there is no “European Army” in sight. For the foreseeable future, there is no return to the European Defence Community of the 1950s. A more realistic solution is a cooperative network of national armies, systematically using the concept of pooling & sharing.
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