The vigorous debate addressing the potential of the European Union’s security and defence policy is indicative of high hopes and severe policy problems. This article examines the likelihood that EU member-states will develop the strategic culture - reflecting common interests and views of the world - that can be said to be a precondition for a successful security and defence policy. The article first investigates the EU’s predominant values and the reigning conception of the legitimate use of military force, and it then weighs this political potential of the security and defence policy against obstacles to unity: the ‘post-modern’ complexity of multilevel governance coupled with the necessity of ‘modern’ executive authority to undertake military coercion, as illustrated by the recent fight against global terrorism. In the light of the conclusion that the EU does not have the potential to construct a strong strategic culture, the article suggests steps the EU could take to safeguard liberal achievements in its history of integration while also enabling strategic military action by groups of countries sharing a particular view of the world, an interest in a particular conflict, or both.

The European Union has ventured into the business of power politics with its common security and defence policy (CSDP). Realism can explain both why the EU is being pulled into this business and why it is failing to be powerful. Although realism has much to offer, it is not the dominant approach to the study of the EU and its foreign affairs because the EU is commonly perceived as capable of transcending power politics as we used to know it. The first purpose of this article is therefore to question the stereotyping of realism as a framework that only applies to great power confrontations. The second is to introduce the complexity of realist thought because realism is a house divided. The analysis first examines structural realism, then the classical realist tradition. The third and final purpose of the article is to evaluate the contributions these approaches can make to the study of the CSDP. The most powerful realist interpretation of the CSDP is found to be the classical one, according to which the CSDP is partly a response to international power trends but notably also the institutionalization of the weakness of European nation-states. The article defines this perspective in relation to contending realist and constructivist perspectives. It highlights classical realism as a dynamic framework of interpretation that does not provide an image of a CSDP end-state, but rather a framework for understanding an evolving reality and for speaking truth to power. * The author is grateful to the participants in the special issue workshop held at Oxford University, 26 February 2010, for constructive suggestions and comments and to the special issue editors, Christopher Bickerton, Bastien Irondelle and Anand Menon, for systematic and constructive criticism. The author is also indebted to Casper Sylvest, as well as an anonymous reviewer for thorough and thoughtful comments.

This book provides an authoritative account of how the US, British, and French armies have transformed since the end of the Cold War. All three armies have sought to respond to changes in their strategic and socio-technological environments by developing more expeditionary capable and networked forces. Drawing on extensive archival research, hundreds of interviews, and unprecedented access to official documents, the authors examine both the process and the outcomes of army transformation, and ask how organizational interests, emerging ideas, and key entrepreneurial leaders interact in shaping the direction of military change. They also explore how programs of army transformation change over time, as new technologies moved from research to development, and as lessons from operations were absorbed. In framing these issues, they draw on military innovation scholarship and, in addressing them, produce findings with general relevance for the study of how militaries innovate.

Over the past thirty years Denmark has become a capable and willing expeditionary ally, not least on account of an accelerated investment in new forces in the early to mid-2000s. With the 2005–2009 defence agreement the Danish Army scrapped its concept of conscripted mobilization and fully committed to deployable capacities; the navy became a ‘blue water’ navy given the commitment to build two combat support ships and three frigates and to scrap the submarine force; and the air force fully focused its organization on specialized and deployable ‘wings’. The literature suggests that external threats and technological innovation are key drivers of military change, which in broad strokes helps us understand Danish change—but not in full. As a small state, Denmark has been particularly attuned to the threat of abandonment by its NATO allies and the concomitant but rival desire to pay as little for defence as possible. NATO standing and money are thus the critical drivers of Danish military change and we are able to show how they have shaped three successive waves of military reform, beginning piecemeal in the 1990s and then continuing with deeper waves of reform in 2001 and 2014. Civil–military relations have throughout been quite solid and enabled change, which has to do with the political priority of securing Denmark's standing in NATO with as little money as possible, leaving it to the military services to figure out how to shape the toolkit.