Whether the European Union should intervene in the affairs of other countries is often unclear because of competing priorities among member nations, a speaker said at Harvard University.
Deputy Director General Katarina Engberg of the Swedish Ministry of Defense spoke to an audience of about 25 on Tuesday about the EU’s military operations, citing the examples of intervention in Lebanon and the Congo.
“We are living, partially at least, in an [unpredictable] world where interests aren’t as clear, conflicts are marked by the growing influence of non-state actors, often for a variety of reasons, often times in failed states, where the failing system is challenged,” she said.”In such a world, it is difficult to elaborate strategy that meets the needs.”
Engberg explained how the world dynamic changed from 2001 to 2006 due to various world crises. In this chaotic time, it was public support for military operations that saved the EU from collapsing, she said.
“2006 was an important time,” Engberg said. “For the EU this was the time of constitutional crisis…and politicians in the European Union had figured out that the Security and Defense Policy was the one area not contested by its citizens. Here one could actually forge ahead.”
But sustaining military intervention operations requires active support from a nation’s domestic population, Engberg said. Because of this, she said the EU needed to make their operations more transparent to the public.
“I sat through many meetings where EU military interventions were decided upon and at many times I was asking myself, “what is going on?’ So I am not too upset when people outside the European Union kind of scratch their head and wonder too.”
Other problems can arise, Engberg said. She used two examples of EU military intervention, explaining the negative aspects of intervention in Lebanon and the positive aspects of intervention in the Congo.
“To build a case you have to be able to assess the situation, to preplan and to make a decision both on a military and political level. And the [EU military] structures are not as mature, as I have been mentioning,” Engberg said.
She said that the interconnected nature of world politics creates problems when deciding whether or not to intervene.
“The EU is not a stand-alone phenomenon. It is part of a growing web of regional organizations, a new division of labor when it comes to crisis management in general,” Engberg said. “The EU is a global actor and a very cautious subcontractor to the UN and in collaboration with the African Union, among others.”
“[The U.S. and EU operate] in a much more messy world where strong interests and broad strategy don’t really apply,” she said. “So with some few exceptions such as armed aggression, when national interests and sovereignty are at stake or humanitarian intervention where compelling moral arguments can support intervention, we are facing a fading certainty with regard to the usefulness of the use of force and its relationship to other instruments of crisis management.”
Harvard economics professor Richard Cooper, who attended the lecture, said that a truthful comparison between the EU and the U.S. would show that they similarly respond to international dilemmas. While Americans believe they can solve the world’s problems, Cooper said, in reality their capability to do so matches the EU.
“There are many individual Americans who conceive of themselves as grand strategists, but the notion that the United States of America has a grand strategy is a shimmer of the fact that the U.S. always has a response to a particular problem,” Cooper said.
Other attendees said they learned a lot about the process of how states make decisions about intervention.
“It’s a very messy process. But apparently it’s something that from the experiences in the last couple years many good leaders are willing to continue to work on and not just put it in the trash bin,” said Tim Maurer, a public policy graduate student at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Kennedy School graduate student Manuel Muniz said he learned that the EU has a muddled policy on intervention.
“There’s no common European strategy in the pure sense of the word…[The EU] never has a unified stance on things that are important,” Muniz said.
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