Engaging in the conflict cycle in other countries to gain outcomes favourable to one’s own interests is akin to playing in the champions league of foreign policy. Doing this effectively and responsibly requires a coherent and full-spectrum political strategy as well as the diplomatic, financial, developmental and military means to deliver it. It is clear from the scope of the security interests articulated in the European Union’s (EU) Global Strategy (2016) and its many associated foreign policy statements that the EU intends to meet these requirements. However, study of EU institutional policies and interventions in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars highlights that it falls well short of doing so. As a result, EU institutions are not well placed to intervene effectively in high intensity conflicts with existential features such as these two civil wars. This observation may extend to violent conflict more broadly.[84]

The analysis has brought to light several key reasons why EU institutions struggle to intervene effectively in conflict elsewhere. First, EU Member States have so far been reluctant to endow EU institutions with the required full-spectrum toolkit and a fully interoperable bureaucracy. The EU is especially incapable of deploying – directly or indirectly – credible military force on a battlefield. Given the mixed track record of bringing about political change by force of arms, it can be legitimately debated whether it is desirable to develop this capability. But for now, the EU has indicated its intention of doing so in recognition of the fact that there are conflict circumstances in which only the deployment of force can prevent worse (such as war crimes and atrocities) or create conditions for negotiating a new political settlement. This problem can in part be resolved by creating the required institutions, capabilities and procedures.

Second, even if EU institutions had the required toolkit and interoperable bureaucracy, it would still lack the strategic culture and mechanisms that can generate coherent and long-term interventions, including force deployment. The geopolitical interests of EU Member States are diverse – sometimes they compete – which limits the demand for EU foreign policy as a public good that can be produced by the EU’s institutions to address conflict as a collective action problem. This issue cannot be resolved without developing greater political agreement on the need to be able to intervene in conflict elsewhere in times of significant great power competition.[85] In brief, if the EU as a whole does not see a need for being able to influence the course of conflict in neighbouring countries like Libya, Syria or the Ukraine, why would any great or regional power take it seriously in respect of such conflicts?

These limitations make EU institutions ‘event takers’ in conflicts that feature high levels of violence and/or existential features. That is problematic because it is exactly such conflicts that produce negative effects that affect the EU, such as damaging the international legal order, generating human flight, causing developmental regress and regional conflict spillover, radicalisation and transnational organised crime.[86] Even though key elements of the EU’s CSDP architecture that would enable more direct intervention in such conflicts – such as the global human rights sanction regime or the European Peace Facility – were not yet in place during much of both civil wars (see Section 1), it would hardly have been possible to use them due to the aforementioned foreign policy divergence among EU Member States and lack of strategic culture / threat perception.

In turn, this suggests that a full spectrum upgrade of the EU’s foreign policy and toolkit will not suffice in the absence of a shared strategic culture. This is likely to be elusive, efforts such as the Strategic Compass notwithstanding. After all, some EU Member States have a provincial foreign policy and others a more global orientation; some have a middle-of-the-road foreign policy while yet others take a more assertive posture. Despite promising recent policy and institutional improvements, this strategic challenge is likely to persist in the near future. Wholesale replacement in EU foreign policy decision making of unanimity by qualified majority voting would leave the underlying diversity of Member State interests intact, which is bound to create problems - even though the experience in some policy areas suggests that the introduction of (the threat of) qualified majority voting can produce smoother decision-making by unanimity.

With this in mind, the core recommendation of the paper is to increase the effectiveness of EU interventions in high-intensity conflicts by institutionalising full-spectrum decision making, policy implementation and force deployment modalities for the EU as a whole, as well as for EU coalitions of the willing.

The parallel existence of such tracks will enable the EU to act jointly in conflicts where Member States have more or less compatible foreign policy preferences with matching intensity preferences. It will also enable it to act in coalitions in conflicts where Member States have more or less compatible foreign policy preferences with a mixed distribution of intensity preferences (like Iraq, or arguably Syria). EU foreign policy inaction, including institutional paralysis, will continue to occur where Member States’ foreign policy preferences are largely not compatible and have a sufficient quorum of high-intensity preferences.

A joint modality that enables conflict intervention by the EU as a whole could consist of a newly-established European Security Council, supported by the European External Action Service (including scalable conflict task forces built on existing inter-service coordination platforms – see below), an enlarged but now operational EU Military Headquarters and dedicated European or national force assets.[87] A modality for coalitions of the willing could consist of a fast-track Council Qualified Majority Vote for a new PESCO-type ‘Council’[88] supported by an EEAS-based conflict task force, a Service Level Agreement with an operationalised EU Military Headquarters and national force assets. To operationalise these modalities and give them teeth, EU Member States also need to install two critical system upgrades regarding the toolkit for EU engagement in conflict.

Notably, both upgrades require significant parallel or prior improvement in the quality of the EU’s conflict analyses, as well as the processes by which such analyses are connected to conflict strategy design, review and implementation. Examination of EU institutional interventions during the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars demonstrates that its understanding of both conflicts was partial at best and dangerously incomplete at worst. Unsurprisingly, this creates a risk of interventions doing more harm than good. While ‘doing harm’ cannot be avoided in the fog of war, there is ample scope to improve the current conflict analysis practices of the EU institutions, recent progress notwithstanding (a process driven by the EEAS directorate’s ‘Integrated Approach for Security and Peace’).

The two conflicts assessed in this report suggest that EU institutions do a decent job on the softer aspects of conflict – mostly humanitarian aid and peacebuilding – that help mitigate its awful consequences. But if the EU wishes to engage effectively across the entire conflict cycle, it needs to create institutional modalities that can better navigate alternating constellations of Member State interests, develop more coherent political intervention strategies backed by high-quality resources and be able to deploy limited force on the battlefield.