According to a widely known phrase pronounced by then Luxemburg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos at the beginning of the 1990’s, the EU is “an economic giant, a political dwarf and a military worm”. Whereas far from being incorrect, this definition needs some updating and, most of all, serious clarification.

Basic features

Within the EU’s three-pillar structure, EFSDP constitutes the second, strictly intergovernmental pillar. As opposed to the first one (that of community method and policies, mainly in the economic field) foreign, security and defence policy has much more restrictive rules with regard to the role of supranational EU institutions. There is no exclusive right of initiative for the Commission, no co-decision for the Parliament, and Member States can not be held accountable before the Court for not abiding with decisions taken in the realm of EFSDP. Furthermore, within this second pillar, defence issues, obviously among the most sensitive ones, reflect what one might call hyper-intergovernmentalism: decisions “with military implications” are subject to even more constraining mechanisms. And rightly so.

As long as there is no political entity at a European level able and willing to express and defend European sovereignty, competence in these crucial areas must remain where sovereignty lies, namely with the Member States. Significantly, contrary to the “single” currency, we talk about “common” foreign, security and defence policy: in fact, this EU policy is restricted to the intersection field between Twenty-Five national foreign, security and defence policies. EFSDP has no mandate and no vocation to replace them, rather there is a sort of “cohabitation”, whereby common European policy only emerges in the overlapping areas.

According to the functional integration model, economic integration – through continuous spillover – would lead, in time, to the politicization of the European “construction”. As foreign, security and defence policy moves to the forefront of attention, it reveals that something else is needed in order to cross the Rubicon: the clarification of political endgoals or finalités. Over the past half decade, this all-important issue has been kept in a so-called “constructive ambiguity”. But as we approach the very heart of sovereignty, the fundamental question of – in the words of former Commission president Jacques Delors – “what do we want to do together?” can no longer be avoided.

With regard to this crucial choice, EU Member States find themselves on one or the other side of a three-level dividing line. Interestingly, on all of the three (distinct but interrelated) issues, they start from commonly shared convictions, only to arrive to two sets of conclusions diametrically opposed to each other. As far as relations with the United States are concerned, there is unanimity in EuropeThe European Union’s foreign, security and defence policy – in a nutshell, Presentation at the Central European Conference organized by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies, Hungary, 8 April 2006, 18,463 characters)