The publication of the French White Paper on defence, the priority given to security and defence by the incoming French presidency of the European Union and France’s return to NATO present a significant opportunity to adapt the capacity of both France and the EU to the uncertain threats of the twenty-first century. The three main decisions announced in the White Paper will all contribute to the strengthening of that capacity. The shift in the balance of budgetary resources—away from support systems and administration and towards equipment, training and intelligence—brings France into line with the other major military powers of the Western Alliance—the United States and the United Kingdom. The emphasis on situating these reforms within a European framework is both the logical continuation of the 1994 White Paper and the direct application of every strategic lesson learned, both in Europe and in the wider world, since the end of the Cold War: alone, European nation states can achieve very little; together, they offer crucial critical mass. The return to NATO’s integrated military structure is both the obvious (and long-delayed) harmonisation between the political and the practical side of France’s relationship with the Alliance, and a necessary step towards ending the destructive intra-EU quarrels between ‘Atlanticists’ and ‘Europeanists’. Of course, the publication of a document and the expression of a political ambition do not, by themselves, change reality. All three of these major innovations must be taken to their logical conclusions.

From Reaction to Strategic Thinking

One of the most important contributions of these innovations is their new focus on strategic thinking. France honed this skill during its 30-year experimentation with Gaullism which forced it to ask tough questions about the state of the world and to provide answers which flew in the face of accepted strategic wisdom. In 1994, none other than Henry Kissinger concluded that ‘the most consistent, the most creative, the most systematic thinking on strategy in Europe today takes place in France’.⁽¹⁾ But, soon after the end of the Cold War, France lost that habit. Throughout the 1990s, France attempted to draw the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War by modernising and professionalizing its forces. In so doing, it was essentially reacting to the painful discovery that its conventional forces, in part because of its traditional emphasis on nuclear deterrence, had become ill-adapted to the challenges of the post-Cold War world, challenges requiring mobility, force projection and logistics. Similarly, the EU, through the launch of ESDP at St-Malo in 1998, was essentially reacting to the shift in the tectonic plates of history which took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Soviet threat, the relative disengagement of the United States from the European theatre, and the reappearance of instability inside the European space (the wars in the Balkans) obliged the EU member states to organize their own autonomous capacity.

ESDP was not the invention of inspired politicians or statesmen. It was the necessary reaction of the Europeans to the tectonic shifts of 1989—to be followed by a serious aftershock on 11 September 2001. The early developments in ESDP were reactions to developments in and around Europe: the urgent need to develop new institutions, to generate military capacity, to train civilian agents; to prepare for intervention where crises demanded it. They did not amount to a strategic vision of the challenges facing the EU or of the most effective means of facing up to those challenges. The ‘European Security Strategy’ document of 2003 constituted a first attempt to think through some of the strategic issues arising from the tectonic shocks of 9 November 1989, 11 September 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it was essentially a description of the strategic environment and a statement of the way in which EU member states thought about that environment—rather than a strategy as such.