7 - Lessons Learned and Still to be Learned: The Case of the European Union

Summary

Joint analysis and assessment provide the critical underpinning for common strategy … The EU (…) lacks a sufficiently robust process for joint analysis, assessment, and planning that brings together the relevant civilian and military actors. Such a process must also cover more than just crisis response.

In late December 2012, diplomats and experts convened at Wilton Park, the secluded sixteenth-century home in the English countryside run by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to share insights and assessments on how the newly built European External Action Service (EEAS) had already met expectations and where there was room for improvement. Already at that early stage, Wilton Park made the point in demanding joint analysis and assessment as core prerequisite for qualified EU decision-making. In view of Nikki Ikani’s and Christoph Meyer’s findings on the Arab uprisings and Ukrainian crisis, it is of interest to discuss whether lessons have been learned or are overdue to be learned by European institutions and member states in order to achieve the kind of strategic autonomy as a global actor that has been invoked by numerous Council Conclusions and the EU Global Strategy.

Major Post-mortem based Findings and Lessons

Nikki Ikani’s insightful analysis of the situational awareness inside the emerging EEAS and the dynamics of the Arab uprisings shows that anticipation of possible disruptive events in the Middle East and North Africa had been available in principle though not subject to stringent and comprehensive analysis and without being put in structural and organisational contexts that would have enabled decision-makers to take due note in time. Ikani’s conclusion already provides a significant starting point and outline for defining lessons to be learned from the collective underperformance in situational awareness and foresight:

It has been found that foreknowledge regarding the risks of significant upheaval existed within the institutions under scrutiny, yet was scattered throughout the institutions and across levels of hierarchy, with limited follow-up. It has been identified that the performance of the European institutions has been affected by the diagnostic difficulty of the Arab Uprisings, as underlined in previous studies, yet has been particularly hampered by the limited capacities for knowledge production and transfer within the institutions, as well as by a political unwillingness within the institutions and likely beyond in accepting discordant knowledge claims.