The foreign policy of the European Union (EU) tends to be a topic for both gratuitous and justified criticism. The EU lacks a strategic culture and shared external threat perception; it lacks military bite; and its toolkit and funds remain scattered throughout the European Commission, the Council Secretariat and the European External Action Service (EEAS) – not to mention Member States’ different foreign policy priorities. Of late, criticism has even gone as far as (correctly) stating that the EU lacks strategic autonomy in the face of extraterritorial US sanctions. This has been especially pronounced in the case of the nuclear deal with Iran, but the Nordstream pipeline offers another example.
Such criticism tends to overlook that the EU was never designed to carry out a coherent foreign policy commensurate with its weight, simply because its Member States do not want it to become too relevant in this sovereign domain par excellence. Nevertheless, they have grudgingly made incremental improvements, for example through the creation of the EEAS and the High Representative, the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) and the European Peace Facility (EPF). Yet, such advances have been overshadowed by several major conflicts in Europe’s direct vicinity as well as the harsh realpolitik conducted by strongmen like Putin, Xi, Erdogan and, arguably, Trump. Stuck in a mid-way position between a well-developed sectoral foreign policy (i.e. economics and trade) and an incipient full-spectrum foreign policy, the EU struggles to deal with conflict on a classic power-capability basis.
In this paper, we examine whether EU foreign policies and interventions as conducted by its Brussels-based institutions are relevant in the conflict contexts in which they play out. We use the conflict cycles of the Syrian civil war (2011–2020) and the Iraqi civil war (2010–2020) as case studies. Since these conflicts are both high-intensity and existential in nature, they are not necessarily representative for other conflicts in which EU institutions engage.
As to our decision to focus on EU institutions, we appreciate that EU foreign policy – especially its ‘high politics’ – is formed through a complex set of interactions between EU Member States and EU institutions. Under current decision-making rules, EU Member States are the masters of the bloc’s foreign policy insofar as it pertains to engagement with conflicts elsewhere. The shortfalls and recommendations noted in this report are therefore largely theirs to address. Yet, it is the EU’s institutions that can deliver foreign policy as a European public good in their capacity as semi-autonomous service centres if and when key Member States require it. Hence, the diplomatic and military representatives of the EU Member States are the primary audience of the paper, while its analytical focus lies on the EU’s institutions as key levers for improvement.
Even though the EU as a whole has made impressive recent steps to improve the quality and effectiveness of its foreign policy making and implementation, we nevertheless use an external benchmark by taking local conflict dynamics as a starting point for assessing the relevance of EU foreign policy and interventions. This is appropriate, we feel, because EU foreign policy related to conflict seeks to effect change in the real world, which is much less forgiving than paper circulating in Brussels.
Finally, we have taken Syria and Iraq as case studies precisely because they epitomise the EU’s foreign policy conundrum. It is the most violent conflicts in Europe’s neighborhood that produce the greatest negative effects for the EU and yet these are the most difficult cases for EU institutions to engage in effectively. In other words, we examine an extreme in order to cast the dilemma as to how much collective foreign policy EU Member States actually (should) want into starker relief.
Section 1 briefly takes stock of how the EU foreign policy universe has developed over the last decade in relation to the conflict cycle. This provides context and identifies initial strengths and weaknesses. Section 2 traces the evolution of the Syrian civil war, with Section 3 examining the development of EU foreign policy in relation to local conflict dynamics. Sections 4 and 5 accomplish the same tasks for the Iraqi civil war (the fight against Islamic State). Finally, Section 6 offers a set of reflections that intend to provide an agenda for discussion in Brussels between EU institutions and Member States on how EU foreign policy can be made more relevant to the conflict cycle.
