The idea to review the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS), put forward notably by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, did not meet with universal enthusiasm. While not everybody was convinced that the ESS was already in need of updating, some also feared that too divisive debates would be provoked, particularly on Russia, and that the EU would end up with a worse rather than a better document. Hence the somewhat cautiously expressed – and grammatically slightly awkward – mandate given to High Representative Javier Solana by the December 2007 European Council: “to examine the implementation...

Among officials from outside the EU and among academics, in the course of 2008 the “review” of the European Security Strategy (ESS), as it was often called – although that was never the mandate given to Javier Solana by the December 2007 European Council – generated great expectations. That in itself is proof of the importance attached to the ESS.

That the European Council in December 2008, after a long debate – which not coincidentally only really gained steam after the summer’s crisis in Georgia – decided to leave the ESS untouched should in itself not be a reason for...

Sixty years after the founding of NATO, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ten years after Saint-Malo, and five years after the publication of the European Security Strategy (ESS), it is high time for the EU to focus properly on the implications of that key phrase from the Saint-Malo declaration. What is the “international stage”? What would a “full role” entail for the EU? And what would be required for it to “be in a position” to do so? To date, despite significant progress in the development and implementation of ESDP, and despite a full year’s “debate”...

Decisions to improve capabilities are made not by the EU or NATO, but by individual governments. All governments have undertaken defence reforms, but their efforts have been constrained by budget cuts, by the natural resistance of defence establishments to change, and most importantly by a lack of clarity about what constitutes the most effective shape for the nation’s armed forces in an era of multinational operations of many different types. Within the framework of ESDP, headline goals have been defined and revised, progress assessed, shortfalls identified, and programmes initiated to remedy them. Extremely detailed military planning has been conducted in...