The EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy: combining Gaullism with Transatlanticism?

By Sem van der Tang

In an interview with NRC on April 8, 2025, Dr. Nathalie Tocci, a Special Advisor to the EU High Representative, expressed her doubts about NATO’s current capacity for deterrence and collective defence. To paraphrase this as concerns would just put it mildly. Tocci declared that “Article 5 is waste paper”.  The contemporary tension in the Transatlantic relationship between European countries and the United States (US) is palpable. Footprints of this friction are increasingly becoming commonplace since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. For example, Trump stated that “the EU was formed to screw the United States” and Vice President J. D. Vance implicitly put the shared western values of NATO’s member-states into question with his infamous Munich Security Conference Speech. In light of this situation, French President Emmanuel Macron opened a “strategic dialogue” regarding an extension of France’s independent nuclear deterrence. Germany’s prospective Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, portrayed interest in discussing this force de dissuasion with London and Paris.

These recent developments are related to a buzzword whose echo has filled Brussels’ halls for many years: strategic autonomy – the notion that the EU must define and implement its own (foreign) policy without any dependence on external actors such as the US. Furthermore, Macron shaped this term by including the ideal of a military independent EU, both in a material and operational sense. This conceptualisation diverges from the idea of the EU as strictly a normative or civilian power, where it uses soft power to change international norms in such a way that they align with the Union’s values.

Does Brussels need hard power, i.e., a credible military force, to back this normative power up and to influence today’s complex and confusing international politics? The EU does not possess an army that acts autonomously from the member states or replaces the member states’ defence forces. However, in true Brussels fashion, there is a sui generis defence initiative that balances the desire for European integration and the (up until recently) primacy of Atlantic solidarity for security. The EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) combines the perspectives of both a military and a civilian power. How did this unique defence capacity develop and what is its contemporary relationship with regards to NATO?

The history of hard power in the EU: ambitions and hesitance.

Although the idea of a collective European defence force and subsequently a common foreign policy got off to a flying start after the end of the Second World War, it ultimately ended up tripping over its own feet in 1954. The envisaged European Defence Community (EDC) was to be created approximately along the same lines as the European Coal and Steel Community’s supranational institutions. However, the project failed to come to fruition in 1954 after the Assemblée Nationale, the French Parliament, rejected the ratification of the treaty that, nota bene, their own country had proposed since 1950. Ambition outran the political will to cede sovereignty in exchange for European security and thus common defence policies were solely found in a Transatlantic context over the course of Europe’s next 44 years.

In the meantime, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister – and at the time, president of the Council of the EU – claimed with hubris that “this is the hour of Europe,” during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. This rhetoric, however, did not translate into a successful brokering of a ceasefire and the baton was quickly passed to the United Nations (UN) and the US in late 1991. The EU’s carrot and stick approach did not work. Europe could only collectively offer closer (economic) relations, but had no stick to wield.

It was not until December 4, 1998, when the prospect of an EU defence force truly rose out of the EDC’s ashes. The Saint-Malo Declaration was the result of secret negotiations between two EU member-states that were polar opposites when it came to the subject of European defence. The UK and France, under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac respectively, ended their Mexican standoff by stating that the EU needed “to play its full role on the international stage”. It appeared that the only two permanent members of the UN Security Council in the EU had put their differences aside by recognising the need for a “capacity for autonomous action, backed by credible military forces,” and particularly a ‘‘readiness” to use it in the face of “international crises”.

The result of these negotiations became the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP, later renamed to CSDP). Although Blair softened the UK’s stance on an European defence initiative, the CSDP’s current setup still is a continuation of a compromise between France’s Gaullism – i.e., aspiring European independence – and the UK and its closest allies’ Transatlanticism – i.e., member-states seeking to safeguard NATO’s hegemony in defence matters. Furthermore, it sought to combine the capacities of the EU for civilian and military crisis management. This grand balancing act shrouded the defence project in ambiguity.

Today’s CSDP: (how) does it work?

How does this delicate balancing act translate into action? It should first be noted that CSDP missions have a tendency of being reactive rather than proactive by usually responding to a request of an extra-EU state, such as the host country, or at the behest of the United Nations. Furthermore, objectives should align with the Petersberg tasks that constitute aims such as conflict prevention, peace-keeping, stabilisation, or crisis management. These aims are achieved, as article 42 of the Lisbon Treaty elaborates, by providing “the Union with an operational capacity drawing on civilian and military assets. … The performance of these tasks shall be undertaken using capabilities provided by the Member States.” In essence, the Treaty explains how capabilities are made available on a voluntary basis and all decisions regarding CSDP rest on unanimity in the Council of the EU. The subsequent policy-making process is thus in firm intergovernmental hands – which can be contrasted to supranationality, where member states cede a part of their sovereignty and transfer decision-making power to an institution above the participating countries.

Besides missions focussing on military aspects of security, such as EUMAM Ukraine (EU Military Assistance Mission), approximately two-thirds of CSDP-mandates have a more civilian nature through a focus on judicial reform (strengthening rule of law), policing, and civil protection. These missions reinforce the idea of the EU as a normative power and allows it to promote its norms, values, and ideals, such as human rights and liberal democracy, beyond its own external borders. Moreover, the fact that the EU uses a security toolbox with these figurative multiple foldable drawers means that it can combine civilian and military policy into an “integrated approach to security” – a clear comparative advantage over NATO.

The strict voluntary bottom-up approach of CSDP reinforces the commitment of participating member states and makes missions flexible in their mandates and deployment. Operations thus come in all shapes and sizes with different constellations of participating countries, each offering an unique contribution. However, it is not all sunshine and rainbows – the same intergovernmental approach also marks CSDP’s pitfall: problems with force generation, financing, coordination, and disproportional burden-sharing. It begs the question of how clear the comparative advantage over NATO actually is, when national interests are seeping into the process of mandate-forming. This could lead and has led to more ambiguousness and inefficiency.

CSDP under the looming shadow of NATO.

How does the CSDP actually relate to and interact with the security organisation that is deemed supreme from the perspective of the EU’s member states? Even the Union itself considered NATO the “primary framework” when it came to “collective defence” for its member states, as noted in a strategic document regarding the EU’s Global Strategy in 2016. The US originally accepted the then-called ESDP on the condition of the “three D’s”: no decoupling from NATO; no discrimination of non-EU NATO-members; and no duplication of NATO’s capabilities. Out of this flowed the Berlin Plus agreement, which underscored the interlinkage between CSDP and NATO. It included some practical provisions as well, since European countries sometimes lacked independent critical enablers such as intelligence, logistics, heavy lifting and command centres – for example, Berlin Plus allows the EU to make use of NATO’s Operational Headquarters in Brussels.

However, more recent times are marked by strain in the Transatlantic alliance. Although President Trump has been ambiguous about his willingness to abide by NATO’s Article 5 (the mutual assistance clause), these doubtful sentiments concerning unequal burden-sharing are not outlandish among some previous high-ranking members of the US Department of Defense, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates under President Barack Obama’s administration. Similarly, Professor Barry Posen questioned the return on the American investment in NATO and called for a gradual withdrawal of the US. He stated: “the European Union provides as good a foundation for US disengagement as the United States will find anywhere in the world today.” Worries were already expressed by NATO’s first Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower in 1951: “if in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the [US], then this whole project will have failed.”

The future of EU-NATO relations: a CSDP-redux?

Has tension surmounted to a tipping-point? Is the Transatlantic alliance at a point where something has got to give, be that modest or radical reform? Scholars like Professor Jolyon Howorth have offered perspectives for the future to this regard in their academic contributions. One scenario entails new initiatives and reforms towards a more effective CSDP that goes beyond the status quo, with EU member states “demonstrating serious unity of purpose”. But, so Howorth questions, would this duplication of NATO-capabilities improve relations on both shores of the Atlantic? Therefore, he draws another picture: a European defence policy that transcends the current US-dependency and recasts EU-US relations as two autonomous actors with shared interests – “There is no God-given law whereby Europe should be utterly reliant in perpetuity on an ally … for its regional security.”In any case, the future of Transatlantic relations will at least partially depend on bridging the EU’s capability-expectations gap. Professor Christopher Hill described this concept in 1993 as the divergence between what international actors expect and demand of the EU and its limited capacities to actually deliver on these hopes. This gap can be shrunk through the implementation of a genuine autonomous defence and security capacity that adds hard power to soft power and backs up the rhetoric of strategic autonomy. Such reinforcement calls for either more political will and leadership through the current intergovernmentalist institutional setup of CSDP or more supranationalism in CSDP. A way to (re)gain a seat at the table and transform dependency into partnership would be to, as Tocci puts it, “think concretely” about our “grocery list”. To strengthen the EU’s credibility, deterrence, and potentially its Transatlantic relationship, it is imperative to invest in the critical capabilities that the US has traditionally supplied.

Photo: Lucas Gallone via Unsplash