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.
Reasons for this state of affairs include: the absence of a strategic culture supported by mechanisms that can generate coherent and long-term interventions, including force deployment; EU Member State reluctance to endow EU institutions with a full-spectrum foreign policy toolkit; and bureaucratic interoperability problems. Underlying such reasons is the fact that the foreign policy interests of EU Member States are diverse and sometimes competitive, which limits the demand for EU foreign policy as a public good that is produced by the EU’s institutions.
In conflicts like the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars, with their high levels of violence and existential elements, this state of affairs makes EU institutions ‘event takers’. That, in turn, is problematic because it is conflicts such as these that can produce negative effects for the EU, such as damaging the international legal order, generating human flight, developmental regress, causing regional conflict spill-over, radicalization and transnational organised crime. Instead of mobilising to address such conflicts as a collective action problem, EU Member States have largely preferred to remain in the social trap of prioritising their individual foreign policies – attractive in the short term, but less effective in the long term. Despite promising recent policy developments in Brussel, this situation is likely to persist in the near future.
With this problem in mind, the core recommendation of the paper is to increase the effectiveness of EU institutional 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, and to act in part 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 high-intensity preferences.
To operationalise such modalities, EU Member States need to install two critical system upgrades regarding the existing toolkit for EU institutional engagement in the conflict cycle:
The EU’s institutions need to be enabled to mobilise dedicated conflict task forces, with broad authorisation to create, align and implement political conflict strategies across the EU bureaucracy that leverage short- and long-term capabilities and interventions coherently (including sanctions, funds and missions). Such task forces can build on the existing practice of inter-services consultations.
The EU as a whole needs the capability to deploy armed force on the battlefield. This can be done indirectly by providing training, (lethal) material and mentoring support for partner armed forces – including non-state groups – via the European Peace Facility. It can also be done more directly by creating limited high-end EU expeditionary military forces (off-budget) that can be deployed in support of such partner armed forces. Reviving the EU Battlegroups could be an element of such an upgrade. The purpose of force deployment is to support partner armed forces in a bid to halt atrocities or to create conditions amenable to negotiating a solution to the conflict - not to engage in sustained conventional warfare.
Both upgrades require significant prior improvement of the quality of the EU’s conflict analyses, as well as the processes by which such analyses are connected to political 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 creating harmful effects cannot be avoided in the fog of war, there is ample scope to improve the current conflict analysis practices of the EU institutions first.
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 – which helps to mitigate its awful consequences. But if the EU wishes its institutions 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 (auxiliary) force on the battlefield.