Europe's strategic ambitions: the limits of ambiguity

By any measure, the European Union's efforts to forge a new European security and defence policy (ESDP) have made remarkable progress. The essentially intergovernmental nature of the project, which thereby is not a frontal challenge to state sovereignty, is one of the reasons for this progress. However, a certain studied imprecision about the eventual destination has also been essential. This is not an unusual feature of the European integration process, in which progress has often depended on defining practical objectives first, and deferring to a later stage the consideration of issues of principle and of implementation. However, the virtues of ambiguity are now reaching their limit: the force planners charged with fulfilling the 'headline goal' will need some guidance as to what the force is supposed to do; and the corresponding budget input will have to be defined.