Europe in Crisis Management: Alliance Choices for Intervention

Why do European states sometimes respond collectively to violent humanitarian crises while at other moments they fail to do so? Despite significant developments in the European Union’s (EU) security and defence policy from a legal and practical perspective, the record of European crisis management remains mixed at best. Although a number of official EU documents explicitly provide for robust crisis management operations and despite the development of capabilities to conduct them, EU member states have proved reluctant to launch CSDP military operations. Of the thirty-five crisis management missions which have been carried out until today, only eleven had military mandates. EU states pondered, hesitated, disagreed and let others interfere when civil war, atrocity crimes and human suffering were looming: instead of using the EU’s crisis management capacities, member states then preferred to act through different institutional frameworks, the United Nations (UN), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ad-hoc coalitions of states or single-state operations to get involved in crises situations where more robust action was required. At times, they decided not to intervene at all. The examples of this are numerous: France and the African Union intervened in the Central African Republic and Mali, before EU states dispatched military training and military advisory missions to the conflict-stricken countries. Moreover, despite an explicit request by the UN and a previous history of crisis management in the country, the EU failed to get its act together in face of a deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008 and instead let the UN do the job of restoring stability and peace. Finally, during the Libya crisis in 2011, individual EU states preferred to cooperate through a multi-state coalition, the command of which was later handed over to NATO. Which factors can explain when and under which institutional framework EU states cooperate to restore peace and stability with robust means? Although this question is essential for rapid reaction in violent humanitarian crises and the effective and smooth conduct of military operations, it has not yet received a comprehensive answer. This paper takes a first step to fill this gap by constructing a theoretical framework which draws upon a two-stage decision making model. Intervention, I argue here, is a highly political choice, made by national governments based on a careful assessment of the interests – material and ideational – at stake. In a first step, national role conceptions regarding the use of force provide the principal confines against which the (material) interests involved in intervention are assessed. While ideational reference points and material interests reflect a propensity towards intervention, they do not determine whether or not force is used. Only at a second stage, a bargaining process defined by power politics amongst the EU’s big players shapes whether and – depending on states’ particular alliance preferences – under which institutional command intervention is carried out. Ultimately, a plausibility probe provides evidence that (alliance) choices for and against intervention are informed by states' strategic-ideational preferences within a context of power and interdependence.