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 over the last decade, the record of European crisis management remains mixed at best. Often, 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 preferred to act through different institutional frameworks, the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ad-hoc coalitions of states or single-state led operations to get involved in crises situations. Sometimes they employed multiple frameworks to contribute to the resolution of conflicts; at other moments, they decided not to intervene at all. The examples of this are numerous: France and the African Union intervened in the Central African Republic (CAR) 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 the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008 and let the UN do the job. Finally, during the Libya crisis in 2011, the EU had set up the military operation EUFOR Libya, but individual member states preferred to cooperate through a multi-state coalition, the command of which was later handed over to NATO. When and why do EU states act through one of these institutional frameworks rather than others to restore peace and stability? When do they fail to act at all?
Although these questions are essential for rapid reaction and the effective and smooth conduct of crisis management operations, they have not yet received a comprehensive answer. In this paper, I argue that two factors – domestic consensus on foreign policy goals and their compatibility with international factors (i.e. UNSC authorization) – can explain whether and when EU states get engaged in crisis management. An additional third factor – congruence of EU states’ foreign policy goals – conditions the institutional framework in which intervention is ultimately carried out. To illustrate and underpin my argument I use evidence from positive and negative cases of EU states’ engagement in crisis management in the CAR, Côte d’Ivoire and Libya.
