It is perhaps fitting that the European Security and Defence Policy should mark its 10th anniversary chasing pirates off the coast of East Africa. ESDP was after all conceived in the French corsairs’ lair of St Malo.

Operation Atalanta against Somali pirates is the EU’s highest profile security mission and is touted by defence officials in Brussels as one of the most successful in a decade of ESDP operations.It tackles a direct threat to European citizens and commerce, has been well-run and well-supported by member nations. European navy vessels moved quickly to the region and have produced direct and visible results by reducing pirate attacks on civilian shipping.

In many ways Atalanta illustrates a remarkable evolution of the EU’s security role since that meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac on the Breton coast in 1998 led to the launch of ESDP the following year. The idea was to leave the core task of Europe’s territorial defence to NATO, while progressively giving the EU the ability to take on a range of missions, from civilian training of local law enforcement to full-scale peace enforcement. Since then, the EU has carried out 23 military and civilian missions that have sent almost 70,000 men and women to Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East under the EU flag.

The Union can claim success for the ESDP in preventing fresh outbreaks of Balkan violence; saving thousands of lives in Central Africa; solidifying fragile peace deals in Aceh and Georgia; and providing Iraq, Bosnia and the Palestinian Territories with well-trained police officers, magistrates and prison guards.

Effective civilian and military institutions have been developed to run the ESDP. The European Defence Agency was set up to boost cross-border efficiency in military procurement and open up markets. European battle groups were created to give the EU, on paper at least, the ability to respond quickly to global emergencies.

Those successes have been tempered with persistent weaknesses: the constant shortfalls of vital equipment and personnel, which long delayed the Chad operation and have left the vital police training mission in Afghanistan teetering on the brink of failure; the inability to build effective cooperation with NATO, which remains hostage to the Turkey-Cyprus dispute; wrangling over how and when EU battle groups should be used; or the perennial failure to invest in sufficient deployable forces.

The US’ position on the ESDP changed significantly in recent years. The atmosphere was positively confrontational in 2003, when French and German efforts to build up a new European headquarters at the height of transatlantic tensions over the Iraq invasion were met with hostility and distrust from Washington. Towards the end of the Bush administration, US attitudes softened in parallel to France’s rapprochement with NATO under President Nicolas Sarkozy. The Obama administration has taken up the theme, stressing the need for a cooperative approach linking the EU with the Atlantic Alliance.

“The ideological debate over whether NATO and the European Union are complementary or competitive has ended,” Sandy Vershbow, the US assistant secretary of defence for international security, said last month.

DISTINCT CAPACITIES

“As we’ve seen in the Balkans and are seeing today in Afghanistan, each institution has distinct capacities that it brings to crisis management, stabilisation operations and responses to threats to our economic and security interests. We support steps that strengthen the EU’s capacity to contribute,” Vershbow told a defence conference in Bratislava.

NATO’s new secretary-general is also keen to get the two organisations working together. Although Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s recent assertion that the aim was to “coordinate the military power and transatlantic engagement of NATO with the civilian and financial resources of the EU” did not go down well with defence officials on the other side of Brussels, they welcomed his commitment to finding a speedy solution to the Turkish-Cypriot blockage, which has hamstrung cooperation.

The impetus behind the launch of the ESDP was the EU’s failure to prevent or halt the bloodshed on its doorstep during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Blair’s arrival in Downing Street with a less hostile approach to Europe than his Conservative predecessors cleared the way for the deal with Chirac, which saw the EU’s two predominant military powers draw up the blueprint for Europe developing an effective security arm.

The expected return next year of a Tory government will provide another challenge for the ESDP. Despite America’s conversion to the ESDP cause, many British Conservatives continue to harbour a deep mistrust of the very concept of an EU defence identity independent of NATO.

ESDP structures were put in place in 2001. The Political and Security Committee, made up of ambassadors from the 27 member states, acts as the main policy setting body, similar to NATO’s North Atlantic Council. Major decisions are made by consensus among EU foreign or defence ministers.

Reporting to the PSC is the EU’s Military Committee, comprising senior officers from each member state, which issues recommendations and opinions to its civilian masters on operations and other military matters. It is served by the third major component of the EU’s defence structure, the EU Military Staff, made up of officers who provide early warning, situation assessment and strategic planning for ESDP operations as well as reviewing the EU’s military capability goals.

Individual missions are either run from the EU’s Brussels-based operations centre created in 2007, by liaison with NATO’s military headquarters in Southern Belgium, or from one of five national HQs in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Greece.

Atalanta illustrates a remarkable evolution of the EU’s security role