Until 2011, relations between Syria and the EU were focused on improving political dialogue between both entities to establish mutually beneficial trade and investment as well as cooperation on social and democratic reform. After 2004, most EU projects in Syria were carried out under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and financed through the European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI).[31] It was through its membership of the Union for the Mediterranean that Syria benefited from EU market integration initiatives.

The EU’s initial institutional response to the conflict (2011–2013)

The EU’s initial institutional policy response to the conflict was a mix of containing the Syrian regime (sanctions), exploring diplomatic conflict resolution routes (Friends of the Syrian People, Geneva process) and providing temporary support for those hard-hit by regime repression (humanitarian).

At the very beginning, the Council of the European Union established restrictive measures (i.e. sanctions) against the Syrian regime in May 2011 in response to the repression of protestors by the Assad regime in March–April 2011. Targeted restrictions initially aimed to block travel and freeze assets of individuals associated with the violent repression of protests. They were later broadened to include sectoral restrictions on trade in oil, the export of military and dual use technology, and investment. Restrictions in the oil trade mattered especially since Syria exported the vast majority of its production to the EU. But while the regime incurred appreciable short-term losses, it nevertheless managed to find other sources of demand and, later, supply.[32] A wide range of EU restrictive measures remain in place today barring, for example, EU-based actors from engaging 273 individuals and 70 entities linked with the Syrian regime.[33] Later in May 2011, the initial sanctions were followed by the suspension of EU-Syrian cooperation programmes along with a prohibition on grants and loans via the European Investment Bank.[34]

In addition, the EU as an entity developed close ties with the Syrian opposition via the ‘Friends of the Syrian People’ conferences, which started in February 2012 as a French initiative, after it became clear that the UN Security Council was paralysed by Chinese and Russian unwillingness to condemn the suppression of protests. When the UN established the Geneva process in June 2012 under the leadership of Special Envoy Kofi Annan, the EU made this the main building block of its own policies as both a forum and a set of conditions for resolving the conflict. The ‘Geneva Communiqué’, which was based on the Geneva I conference, effectively became EU institutional policy on Syria. Ever since, the EU as entity has stuck faithfully to the guiding principles it sets forth, such as its call for a transitional government body with full executive power made up of representatives from the Syrian opposition as well as Assad’s regime, and refused to engage with the regime prior to the fulfillment of these conditions (for example, in reconstruction work).[35] The political transition the Geneva Communique demands also permeated EU institutional policy in the form of the belief that there was no military solution to the conflict, only a political one. For a long time, this view was accompanied by the belief that Assad would fall and that this was only a matter of time.[36] A final element of the EU’s initial institutional response to the Syrian civil war was the provision of humanitarian and non-humanitarian assistance to the Syrian population from 2012 onwards in both the national and regional context (i.e. host communities of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon).[37]

At the end of this period, the belief in the need for a political solution, the inevitability of the fall of Assad and the feasibility of a political transition set the EU institutions on a patient wait-and-see course without initiating efforts that might have brought the violence to an end sometime sooner (like a dedicated mediation endeavor or greater diplomatic engagement with Iran and Russia).[38]

Turning to the fight against Islamic State (2013-2017)

From 2012/2013, the Syrian opposition fighting Assad radicalised. In response, the EU associated itself with the ‘Global Coalition Against Da’esh’ in 2014 as a non-military party.[39] The main consequence was that the EU increased its humanitarian and non-humanitarian aid to Syria’s population in relation to IS, both within and outside of Syria, by several billion euro (including via a Regional Trust Fund in Response to the Syrian Crisis – the ‘Madad Fund’),[40] covering Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. Such support reached its apex in March 2016 when the European Council – under German leadership – and Turkey concluded an agreement to halt the irregular migration flow from Syria via Turkey to Europe.[41] In exchange for resettling some refugees in Europe and funding the Facility for Refugees in Turkey, among a few other things, Ankara closed its borders with the rest of Europe to Syrian refugees. Another consequence was that the EU enacted a set of restrictive measures against IS in 2016, targeting mostly individuals and entities through travel bans and asset freezes.[42]

It was only in 2015, four years into the conflict, that the EU adopted a regional strategy for the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, including the fight against IS. This was reviewed in 2016 and replaced with a strategy specific to Syria in 2017.[43] As regards Syria, the regional strategy centred on the need for a political transition via the work of the UN Special Envoy, which enabled EU support for intra-Syrian negotiations, civil society and women’s participation, as well as the work of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC). It also underlined the EU’s pursuit of accountability for human rights abuses, enhanced the EU’s humanitarian efforts, and stepped up preparation for early recovery and rehabilitation efforts (once a political transition had been initiated). Practically speaking, this enabled initiatives such as the Syria Peace Process Support Initiative (SPPI) in support of the UN-led Geneva talks (together with Germany and funded from the Instrument Contributing to Stability and Peace); EU support for the consolidation of Syrian civil society diaspora actors, such as the ‘Aswat Faeela’ (Active Voices) programme;[44] and EU support for the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), aimed at preserving evidence of war crimes.

Notably, the regional strategy was adopted when the rebels threatened the regime in Idlib and Latakia in early 2015 when its assumption of a negotiated settlement might have reflected the belief that a ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ was imminent.[45] Yet, the 2016 revision kept its main policy foci and objectives in place, although the Russian expeditionary intervention of 2015 and the (imminent) fall of East Aleppo in 2016 had fundamentally changed conflict prospects. Both events not only demonstrated that the regime and its allies were pursuing a battlefield solution, but also that they were gaining the upper hand while stalling the Geneva process.[46] The EU’s Syria strategy of 2017 did not reflect these changing realities on the ground either. In other words, the EU’s emphasis on political process and transition failed to adjust to changing realities or, alternatively, to develop greater leverage to help bring such a transition about while negative externalities such as refugees and transnational terrorism grew.

Institutionalising a policy of relief and wishful thinking? (2017–2020)

Persistent in its belief in a political solution via an inclusive and meaningful transition, in line with UNSCR 2254 and the Geneva Communique, the EU continued to support and strengthen the Syrian political opposition as well as civil society while also pursuing accountability for war crimes and providing relief to a suffering Syrian population. It created and ran the annual Brussels conference from 2017 onwards to accomplish two objectives. First, to maintain a pipeline of humanitarian and non-humanitarian aid to both the region and Syria. Second, to institutionalise a policy of ‘wishful thinking’ as it was abundantly clear well before 2017 that there was no political transition on offer. The primary advantage of this position was that it provided a rallying point to maintain EU Member State policy unity and cohesion. It also put a lock on the release of any reconstruction funds until a political transition was firmly underway. In other words, while the EU institutions had little direct influence over developments on the Syrian battlefield, they sought to exercise such influence indirectly by the power of continued disengagement. The disadvantage was that this locked both EU institutions and Member States in an irrelevant position since none of the fighting parties showed an inclination to compromise just because the EU was withholding its reconstruction funding.[47]

A key aim of the Brussels conferences has been to reduce the risk of ‘donor fatigue’ with Syria. In that regard, they have been successful. The EU also supported the otherwise flailing UN peace process substantially by giving Syrian civil society a prominent place during the Brussels conferences, which helped keep the political opposition alive and develop its organisational and intellectual capacities.

Interim conclusions

The EU as an entity has been unable to intervene effectively in the Syrian civil war for a cascade of reasons. First, the growing intensity of the war’s violence and the uncompromising stance of its belligerents rendered the non-coercive intervention tools and instruments of the EU institutions irrelevant from a conflict resolution perspective early on. Second, the EU institutional toolkit and mechanisms necessary for deploying coercive force did not exist in 2011–2012. In other words, if one had argued that military intervention was the only effective crisis management method in 2012/2013 to help end the Syrian civil war, it would not have been operationally possible. Third, even if the EU institutions had been capable of fielding such an intervention directly or indirectly (e.g. through a European Peace Facility Fund avant la lettre), its Member States would probably not have allowed it due to a mix of policy divergences and mistaken beliefs about the state of the conflict (negotiated solution feasible, fall of Assad inevitable). Fourth, had all these factors come together positively, it still stretches the imagination to see the EU mounting an intervention commensurate with the scale of the war. Instead, the EU as an entity took recourse in the non-coercive policy instruments it could mobilise, with humanitarian aid increasingly serving as a cloak to cover a hollow policy position based on the Geneva Communiqué.

Practically, what the EU institutions might have done better was to develop a political strategy enabling large-scale support for the Syrian opposition by others early on. This could have included a diplomatic offensive in particular, with associated incentives, vis-à-vis the Gulf countries and Turkey to ensure more and better coordinated support for the opposition, including weapons and equipment. In the Gulf, playing on concerns about the regional profile of Iran and the need to halt its growth in Syria through a concerted effort, such a diplomatic offensive might well have gained traction.

As inevitable ‘event-taker’, some argue that the EU as an entity has done reasonably well in limiting two critical negative effects of the war in the short-term – refugees and radicals – if the war is considered only from a security perspective. This counterfactual is hard to argue with, but the huge flow of refugees in 2015 and the serial terrorist incidents on European soil (e.g. at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015) illustrate the limits of this argument. The long-term negative effects of the EU’s ‘hands-off approach’ are hard to predict, but do not look promising.[48]

Turning to the practicalities of EU institutional interventions during the Syrian civil war, by far the largest amount of its diplomatic energy and financial resources has been devoted to creating and maintaining a flow of humanitarian aid to shield the most vulnerable Syrians from the worst fallout from the war. At a much lower order of magnitude are the EU’s efforts to support the Syrian political opposition to develop alternative representation, Syrian (diaspora) civil society to maintain and re-create some social texture while the country was consumed by war; and limited governance and service provision in opposition-held Syria to maintain some public functions. Yet more modest has been the EU’s support for formal negotiations under UN-auspices. Without a Syria envoy or mediation team of its own (there are individual officials engaged), its support was limited to funding and high-level participation. Finally, there are the restrictive measures that the EU put in place to prohibit EU-based actors from dealing with the Syrian regime. After the initial reduction in trade (especially oil) that these measures brought about, they mostly served a signalling function.[49] Table 3 below maps the main EU policy packages against the course of the civil war.

Based on the preceding analysis, a number of observations can be made regarding the relevance of EU institutional policy and interventions in relation to the Syrian civil war. They are summarised in Table 4 and discussed below.

A few points in Table 3 deserve a short explanation. Throughout the conflict, the EU as an entity maintained a relatively static policy with little effort at rejuvenation. It stuck to its mantra that there could only be a political solution to the conflict – even while a military alternative was implemented. Similarly, throughout the early stages of the conflict it continued to view the fall of Assad as inevitable, despite both early and growing evidence to the contrary. This may have been a stance born out of political necessity that was also comforting and helped avoid the awkward conclusion that, even if the EU had wanted to intervene militarily, it would probably not have been capable for most of the conflict given that development of its defence policy toolkit only accelerated between 2015 and 2018. This policy position also relegated the EU to irrelevance with respect to both the diplomatic course of negotiations and the military course of the conflict (Syria 1, 3, 4 and 7).

It is more surprising that the EU institutions never enacted a truly encompassing political strategy towards the conflict that included structured and sustained diplomatic outreach to Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey and the US backed by whatever leverage it was capable of mustering (mostly humanitarian and developmental aid, some sanctions and some accountability initiatives). The EU never fielded its own crisis management team, mediation team (although individual officials have played a role) or Special Representative to increase the tempo of its engagement with international or domestic parties key to the conflict. Instead, it kept supporting a dysfunctional UN-led political process (Syria 2 and 8).

On the upside, the EU as an entity performed strongly in its ability to mobilise financial resources to mitigate the humanitarian fallout of the conflict as best as possible. The European Commission (DG ECHO) successfully managed a rapid scale-up of humanitarian aid operations to provide both a cross-sectoral and multi-country response in countries where humanitarian capacities and expertise were not present or inadequate.[51] The Brussels conferences have served as a reliable institutional mechanism to make sure aid keeps flowing and the EU does not carry this burden alone. Yet, also in the area of humanitarian aid did major operational issues arise that remain largely unresolved:

Also on the upside, the EU has helped to reinforce a more autonomous and capable Syrian civil society in two ways. First, the EU promoted and sustained its creation by selecting such organisations as implementers of EU-funded initiatives in and outside Syria. Second, the EU engaged Syrian civil society actors prominently in discussions about the political transition in Syria with the aim of making such discussions as inclusive as possible. This has helped to develop an ecology of political alternatives to the Syrian regime and a group of organisations that will continue to clamour for accountability and explore the possibilities for change (Syria 5).

On balance, EU foreign policy and interventions have not been of much relevance to the Syrian civil war from the perspective of the conflict cycle. They have not mattered from either a conflict prevention or a crisis management perspective. This should be a serious cause for concern because the Syrian civil war, together with Ukraine and Libya, is taking place in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood. Its spillover effects are extensive.[53] In brief, the EU failed its geopolitical-actor-in-the-neighbourhood test rather convincingly. As a result, it was and is an event-taker, forced to respond to the consequences of civil war. The bright(er) note is that, without the EU’s reasonably effective and rapid humanitarian effort, the human consequences of the war would have been much worse.[54]

It bears observing that the EU was bound to fail given that the Syrian civil war turned out to be one of the victory/defeat variety rather than the more common negotiate-and-share-power variety to which the EU is better suited. The victory/defeat variety requires large-scale military intervention against hostile conventional forces – directly or indirectly – if the tide is to be turned. Despite recent progress, the EU does not have the culture, doctrine or capabilities to mount this type of intervention.[55]