The EU as a security actor in Africa

Instability and conflict in Africa create a range of security problems for Europe. Rapidly increasing migration via the Mediterranean Sea, extremism and terrorism, as well as cross-border crime, all have implications for security in Europe, but are spill-over effects of instability outside Europe. The European Union has a considerable interest in a stable Africa, and also seems willing to assume a special responsibility for the continent. This Clingendael report focuses on the European Union’s role as a security actor in Africa. It considers the use of all the policy instruments at the EU’s disposal. The authors concentrate mainly on the question how the integrated approach is evolving, and what consequences this has for the Common Security and Defence Policy

A Jumbo Financial Instrument for EU External Action? Bertelsmann Stiftung Commentary 19 February 2019

By proposing to integrate 11 existing financial instruments into a unified Neighbourhood, Development, International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI), the European Commission hopes to both simplify its spending on external action under the EU’s general budget for 2021-2027 and make it more effective. Can the NDICI – by overcoming unnecessary budgetary fragmentation and overlap – also be an instrument facilitating the Union’s ‘integrated approach’ to external conflict and crisis? As the proposal now stands, there are still a number of blind spots that could undermine its effective contribution to a multidimensional, multi-level, multilateral and multi-phased approach to address fragility and instability in third countries. The current external financing instruments of the EU, as established under the 2014-2020 multiannual financial framework (MFF), have struggled to provide enough coherence and flexibility in responding to today’s quickly shifting context. In the face of mounting instability in the neighbourhood (and beyond) and a sharp increase in refugee flows and migration, the key finding of a mid-term self-assessment by the Commission was the need for “more strategic and overarching programming” and “coherent interactions at the operational level in the renewed international context”. The need for flexibility and the problem of silo approaches similarly figure in an externally evaluated Coherence report and the European Parliament’s implementation assessment. In an effort to address these recommendations, the Commission has come up with a new and bold proposal for future spending on issues relating to the neighbourhood, development and international cooperation. By merging the 11 existing instruments outlined below (cf. Table 1) into one financial instrument, the NDICI seeks to increase simplification, coherence, responsiveness and strategic direction in EU external action

From Global Strategy to Strategic Compass: Where Is the EU Heading? Egmont Security Policy Brief No, 121 December 2019

Does the EU need a “Strategic Compass” to guide the implementation of the security and defence dimension of the European Union Global Strategy (EUGS)? Does it need a military strategy perhaps? And what about a review of the EUGS itself? As Josep Borrell has assumed the post of High Representative, various proposals by Member States and EU institutional actors are being discussed in Brussels. The wish for more strategic documents may reflect the complexity of the challenges that the EU is facing. It may also result from the inability to fully implement existing strategies. Producing new documents can be a way of forging a deal between Member States on foreign policy priorities for the next five years. But it could also be window-dressing, occupying the machinery and deluding ourselves that we are active. How to take EU strategy and its implementation forward

Europe ́s Coherence Gap in External Crisis and Conflict Management The EU’s Integrated Approach between Political Rhetoric and Institutional Practice. November 2019

The European Union (EU) aspires to play a part in conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict peace- building through civil and/or military operations, through stabilisation efforts, and by building resilience at home and abroad. To bring this ambition to fruition, EU institutions have gradually expanded their ‘comprehensive approach to external conflict and crisis’ (CA) to become a full-fledged ‘integrated approach to conflict and crisis’ (IA).1 In their most basic form, CAs seek coordination and coherence in responding to external conflicts and crises by adopting a system-wide ‘whole-of-government approach’ (WGA). In their more elaborate form, IAs have incorpo- rated non-traditional security concepts, variously known as conflict transformation, (non-liberal) peacebuilding and human-security approaches. In their most expansive form, IAs may even be understood to apply to external action writ large

A coordinate ascent method for solving semidefinite relaxations of non-convex quadratic integer programs

We present a coordinate ascent method for a class of semidefinite programming problems that arise in non-convex quadratic integer optimization. These semidefinite programs are characterized by a small total number of active constraints and by low-rank constraint matrices. We exploit this special structure by solving the dual problem, using a barrier method in combination with a coordinate-wise exact line search. The main ingredient of our algorithm is the computationally cheap update at each iteration and an easy computation of the exact step size. Compared to interior point methods, our approach is much faster in obtaining strong dual bounds. Moreover, no explicit separation and reoptimization is necessary even if the set of primal constraints is large, since in our dual approach this is covered by implicitly considering all primal constraints when selecting the next coordinate

Decision-Making in Security and Defence Policy - Towards Supranational Intergovernmentalism?

For scholars and practitioners of European politics alike, the distinction between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism has always been fundamental. This distinction has underpinned the various schools of European integration theory, just as it has remained crucial for European governments keen to demonstrate that the member states remain in charge of key policy areas. Nowhere is this considered to be more central than in the area of foreign and security policy, which has consciously been set within the rigid intergovernmental framework of Pillar Two of the Maastricht Treaty and, under the Lisbon Treaty, remains subject to the unanimity rule. And yet, scholarship on the major decision-making agencies of the foreign and security policy of the EU suggests that the distinction is not only blurred but increasingly meaningless. This paper demonstrates that, in virtually every case, decisions are shaped and even taken by small groups of relatively well-socialized officials in the key committees acting in a mode which is as close to supranational as it is to intergovernmental. The political control of foreign and security policy, which is considered sacrosanct by member state governments, is only rarely exercised by politicians at the level of the European Council or Council of Ministers.supranationalism; Europeanization; Europeanization