Speaking EU defence at home: Contentious discourses and constructive ambiguity

Introduction

In this excerpt from an article entitled ‘Constructive Ambiguity and the Shock of Reality’, published in France’s journal of strategic studies, Revue défense nationale, a high-ranking military officer describes what Henry Kissinger defined as ‘the deliberate use of ambiguous language in a sensitive issue in order to advance some political purpose’ (Berridge and James, 2003). The European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) ² is one such sensitive issue where constructive ambiguity plays an important role. In 2008–2009, constructive ambiguity helped two countries, France and Ireland, which share opposing views about security policy, join forces to conduct a European Union (EU) military operation in the heart of the Chadian desert (operation EUFOR Chad/CAR). With a strong military and imperial tradition, France has historically been a driver of CSDP, while Ireland, which sees itself as a pacifist and neutral country, is a reluctant follower. Also, French public opinion is pro-CSDP, while Ireland’s is more likely to evoke the spectre of a militarised Europe. According to a 2012 Eurobarometer survey, 80% of the French people support CSDP, while only 50% of the Irish do so. ³

France and Ireland offer an interesting comparison to assess the power of ideas and discourse in two different institutional contexts. This article asks how French and Irish actors coordinate and communicate a CSDP discourse that both fits their national preferences and allows for the implementation of a common European policy. I argue that constructive ambiguity is a useful notion to address this puzzle, as it allows EU member states to pursue their national policies while incrementally giving them a European flavour.

The article addresses constructive ambiguity through Vivien Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism (DI) (2008). DI is a method of discourse analysis that sheds lights on both the substantive content of discourse, i.e. ideas, and the process of coordinating and communicating these ideas within the policy and the political spheres. It stresses the role of specific institutional configurations to understand how and why discourses are a powerful element of change or continuity in national interest and national policies. The first section of this article shows why DI is a relevant approach to study constructive ambiguity and the evolution of national discourses with regard to CSDP. The second section addresses methodological challenges and presents the empirical material that will be studied. Sections three and four analyse the substantive and interactive discourses of France and Ireland on CSDP. The fifth and final section compares and discusses the results. The empirical analysis demonstrates that France and Ireland view CSDP differently regarding its level of autonomy, capabilities and international partnerships. These concerns correspond to radically different national preferences – the preservation of France’s exceptionalism and Ireland’s neutrality. With the development of CSDP, however, both exceptionalism and neutrality have adapted to a changing, ‘Europeanised’ context.

Constructive ambiguity and DI

Constructive ambiguity is a common-sense notion, but an analytically unexplored one. In an article originally published in 1966, Stanley Hoffmann claims that:

There has always been most progress when the Europeans were able to preserve a penumbra of ambiguity around their enterprise, so as to keep each one hoping that the final shape would be closest to its own ideal, and to permit broad coalitions to support the next moves. And yet there always comes a moment when a terrible clarifier [e.g. a statesman, an event] calls for a lifting of ambiguities, at which point deadlock is more likely than resolution (1995: 131).

Constructive ambiguity is mostly called upon in situations where national preferences are heterogeneous and the EU’s legal basis is weak, e.g. defence or energy policies (Jegen and Mérand, 2013). Hoffmann himself did not originally apply the concept to European defence, but he later argued that France and the UK gave different meanings to ‘autonomy’ during the 1998 bilateral Saint-Malo summit which gave birth to the EU’s security and defence policy (Hoffmann, 2000: 197). Howorth explicitly refers to constructive ambiguity when elaborating Hoffmann’s point that the Franco-British agreement rested on the misunderstanding that for the UK, CSDP ‘was an Alliance project involving European instruments. For France, it was a European project embracing Alliance capabilities’ (2004b: 175).

François Heisbourg (2000) stressed the role of constructive ambiguity as an unavoidable strategy to allow for limited but genuine progress in CSDP, as exemplified by the lack of a clear strategic purpose in the so-called ‘Headline Goal’, (the creation of an EU rapid reaction force) or diverging national interpretations of the ‘Petersberg tasks’ attributed to CSDP, from humanitarian interventions to more robust peace enforcement missions. The 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) has also been taken as an illustration of constructive ambiguity (Toje, 2008: 125). Key ESS concepts such as ‘preventive engagement’ or ‘effective multilateralism’, i.e. the strengthening of multilateral partnerships for the conduct of EU foreign policies, are poorly defined regarding objectives, means and instruments, which leaves room for interpretation. As the empirical part of this article will later demonstrate, France and Ireland have ascribed a very different meaning to three core concepts of the EU strategy: ‘autonomy’, ‘Petersberg tasks’, and ‘effective multilateralism’.

Theoretically, Vivien Schmidt’s DI (2008) is a useful framework to address constructive ambiguity and the way that national actors speak about CSDP. DI offers a middle-ground perspective that emphasises several elements: 1) the substantive content of discourse (ideas, i.e. what is said), but also the interactive process of coordinating and communicating these ideas; 2) the contextual dimension of discourse (where, when, how and why it is said), not just the textual one; and 3) the role played by individual agents within discursive processes and practices (who said what). DI shares with other discourse analytical perspectives a constructivist ontology whereby norms and interests are intersubjective and dynamic constructs in which discourse plays a central part (see Carta and Morin, 2013). DI’s added value, however, ‘resides in the endeavour to connect the role of discourse to specific institutional settings’ (Crespy, 2013). On this aspect, DI is not very different from the critical discourse analysis’ focus on the ‘history’ of texts, that is, the contingent background of social and political events in which discourses take place (see Aydin-Düzgit, 2013).

DI offers two useful analytical distinctions. The first one concerns ‘background ideational abilities’ vs. ‘foreground discursive abilities’ (Schmidt, 2008: 313–317). An agent’s background ideational abilities allow him to make sense of a given institutional context. It refers to the set of ideational rules that are specific to this context, which contribute to create and maintain institutions. Institutions, broadly defined as a set of rules, norms, expectations and traditions (March and Olsen, 1989: 5), have a constraining effect on discourses. But Schmidt claims that they are also dynamic and contingent. Through their foreground discursive abilities, agents have the ability to either change or maintain their institutions, as they can deliberately or strategically communicate, think, speak and act outside them. Thus, institutions have a constitutive role, but not a deterministic one (see also Lynggaard, 2012).

In terms of security and defence policies, background ideational abilities can be traced back to national security cultures, a set of normative and cognitive standards collectively attributed to a state’s identity and which shape national security interests and policies (Katzenstein, 1996; see also Schmidt, 2008: 307). For European states, this national ‘we-ness’ is increasingly enmeshed with a ‘European’ dimension (or layer) that contributes to redefining national discourses of foreign and security policies (Gariup, 2009; Milzow, 2012; Rogers, 2009; Waever, 2005; and Larsen, 2013). While post-structuralist discourse analysts focus on these layered structures of discourse, the DI framework begs for an empirical focus on national agents and how their discourse evolves within this changing context. Although DI is not much concerned with the normative and critical dimensions of discourse analytical theory (see Aydin-Düzgit, 2013; Carta, 2013), methodologically, it is congruent with the latter’s acknowledgement that we need to look beyond structures (see also Diez’s (2013) notion of ‘discursive struggles’ in this volume).

The second useful analytical distinction offered by DI has to do with coordinative vs. communicative aspects of discourse (Schmidt, 2008: 309–313). Both refer to the interactive process of conveying ideas, respectively within the policy and the political sphere. The coordinative discourse concerns the policy actors – e.g. civil servants, elected officials, experts – who elaborate a discourse on policy priorities. They often join together in coalitions, networks and epistemic communities that help to circulate and coordinate ideas. For its part, the communicative discourse deals with the political sphere and the process of informing and persuading the public with regard to these policy ideas. It concerns those same policy actors, but also the media, activists or public opinion in general. An early attempt at applying these notions to European security and defence policies is Jolyon Howorth’s work (2004a) on the role played by British, French and German epistemic communities in the construction and communication of a new CSDP discourse and paradigm in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to him, discourse had a mixed effect on policy change, since the connection between coordinative and communicative discourses on CSDP succeeded in the French and German case, but failed in the British one, where discourse lacked a communicative dimension congruent with the public opinion. Howorth’s analysis shows that communication is an important feature to be taken into consideration in order to assess how nation-states speak about CSDP.

Methods and case selection

Following Katzenstein, many scholars (e.g. Mérand, 2008; Meyer, 2006) have stressed the importance of domestic socio-historical and institutional contexts in explaining national approaches to security and defence policy in Europe. In the present analysis, France’s traditional image as a foreign policy and security actor is based on several well-known features: a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, the possession of nuclear weapons, a love-hate relationship with NATO, significant involvements in UN diplomacy and peace operations since the 1990s, and the endurance of a large network of alliances with former colonies. These features contribute to a French sense of grandeur and its will to remain an important and autonomous world power (Irondelle and Besancenot, 2010). Ireland, for its part, is a small power located at the periphery of Europe, bereft of strong resources and important economic or political interests to be defended. Its main security issue has long been an ‘internal’ one, i.e. Northern Ireland. Externally, Ireland’s defence policy is structured around the concepts of idealist and active neutrality, which translate into an active engagement within UN peacekeeping operations since the 1960s, the promotion of disarmament, non-proliferation and anti-colonialism, and a significant contribution to overseas development aid (Doherty, 2002).

Both countries’ attitudes towards European integration also stand on opposite sides of the spectrum. The French strategy for Europe is based on three elements: make the EU a powerful world actor, led by a strong political leadership (favouring intergovernmentalism), and endowed with a distinct socio-economic identity (Drake, 2010). This strong ambition is a translation at the EU level from the French politics of grandeur (see also Schmidt, 2007). Historically, Ireland also has a positive attitude towards the EU, but one that is deeply practical and reactive, even ‘mercenary’ to some extent (Holmes, 2005). Ireland mainly sees the EU as a practical benefit, most notably in terms of economic development (regarding agriculture or structural funds). In a nutshell, France has a principled and proactive approach to Europe; Ireland has a pragmatic and reactive one.

Table 1 lists the primary documents analysed to address the CSDP discourses in France and Ireland. Contributions from political authorities, members of parliament, military officers and experts in epistemic communities are scrutinised. This large choice of actors is meant to provide an encompassing view of actors and their discourses (‘who speaks?’). For example, Milzow (2012) focuses only on national political leaders (Blair, Chirac and Schröder from 1998 to 2003). Larsen (2013) has a broader view, which includes public discourses, parliamentary minutes and official publications, but he does not look at the military. Other scholars (e.g. Davis Cross, 2011; Howorth, 2012) have studied national actors within European epistemic communities, but their focus is on socialisation in Brussels rather than on what happens at home.

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Table 1.

Discourses under study.

	France	Ireland
Substantive discourse	– Livre blanc sur la défense (1994)	– White Paper on Defence (2000)
	– The French White Paper on Defence and Security (2008)	– Strategy Statement 2008–2010 (2008)
	– French Presidency of the Council of the EU – Work Programme (2008)	– Strategy Statement 2011–2014 (2011)
		– Programme of the Irish Presidency of the EU (2004)
Interactive discourse	– Parliamentary committees’ debates (defence and armed forces, foreign affairs, European affairs) (2000–2011)	– Parliamentary committees’ debates (foreign affairs, European affairs) (2000–2011)
	– Military’s contributions in Revue défense nationale (formerly Défense nationale et sécurité collective) (2007–2011)	– Military’s contributions in Defence Forces Review and Signal (2007–2011)
	– Contributions from security and defence think tanks	– Contributions from security and defence think tanks

The substantive discourse of French and Irish ideas on CSDP is examined through official releases such as white papers, strategy statements or EU work programmes. In terms of coordinative discourse, looking at different kinds of actors at the same time (elected officials, military officers, experts) allows for the analysis of whether and how these actors assign meaning and interpret actions in a similar way despite their own personal or professional backgrounds and priorities. Also, the research is focused on discourses that have a communicative dimension directed towards wider audiences. Minutes of parliamentary debates are usually seen as a way to fuel public discussions. Think tanks mostly proceed through the publication of working papers online, as well as the organisation of conferences; and contributions of military officers in the specialised press have by nature a communicative dimension as well. This communicative dimension is what makes this paper’s methodological approach different from that of scholars such as Davis Cross or Howorth, who mainly proceed through qualitative interviews.

Before we move on to the empirical analysis, several caveats are in order. First, Ireland published its last White Paper on defence in 2000, while France published one in 2008. But Ireland has also published strategic statements for the periods 2008–2010 and 2011–2014, which updated that White Paper. ⁴ Second, the French Assemblée nationale has a committee specifically dedicated to defence and armed forces, which is not the case with the Irish Dáil Éireann, where defence is handled by the committee on foreign affairs. Third, the analysis of specialised defence journals is limited to the years 2007–2011, since the online archives of the Irish Defence Forces Review are not available prior to 2007. Also, the journal, Signal, has been added in the Irish case, since the Defence Forces Review is an official publication of the Department of Defence, which could be seen as having a less independent view. Finally, it should be noted that the empirical research was concluded in 2012, and does not include the latest Irish presidency of the EU in early 2013, as well as the release of a new White paper in France in 2013.

Substantive discourse

This first empirical section looks at the main substantive elements of French and Irish discourse towards CSDP. Two observations stand out. On the one side, French and Irish ideas are totally congruent with their respective view on both security policy and European integration. France has strong political ambitions for CSDP, while Ireland has a more pragmatic and reactive approach towards it. On the other side, constructive ambiguity works, insofar as each country succeeds in presenting CSDP as a natural continuation of its traditional priorities.

Interactive discourse

The substantive discourse surveyed in the last section forms the set of ideas that national actors aim to promote. This section now looks at the coordinative and communicative discursive practices of these actors. In each case, these practices are shaped by specific institutional contexts that can be summed up by two notions: exceptionalism in the French case, neutrality in the Irish one.

Discussion and comparative analysis

Table 2 summarises the main findings of the French and Irish discourses:

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Table 2.

Constructive ambiguity and the national discourse.

Aspects of constructive ambiguity in CSDP	France		Ireland
	Importance in national discourse	Meaning	Importance in national discourse	Meaning
‘Autonomy’	strong	Autonomous EU policy (including a common defence clause)	weak	Autonomous EU instruments (no common defence clause)
‘Petersberg tasks’	strong	Higher end tasks (peace enforcement, military capabilities, Headline Goal)	strong	Lower end tasks (peacekeeping, humanitarian and civilian capabilities, Battle Groups)
‘Effective multilateralism’	weak	Effectiveness (partnership with UN, NATO, etc.)	strong	Multilateralism (under UN authority)

France and Ireland offer a very different interpretation of the three elements of CSDP selected for analysis: autonomy, Petersberg tasks and effective multilateralism. For French actors, autonomy refers to the political ambition for an autonomous security and defence policy – what the French often refer to as ‘Europe de la défense’ – meaning that Europe should take care of its own defence, including a common defence clause similar to that of NATO. For Irish actors, autonomy refers to the development of EU capabilities and common command structures (to a limited degree) for the conduct of peacekeeping operations. Ireland opposes the concept of a common defence clause. In terms of crisis management operations, Irish actors tend to stress the lower end of Petersberg tasks, which refer to peacekeeping in a humanitarian perspective, although with more robust capabilities than under a UN framework. French actors, conversely, aim at developing the whole range of crisis management capabilities, including ambitious military goals. Finally, both countries share the strategy of effective multilateralism, as it stands at the top of the EU security strategy. However, the French rather look at it in terms of equal partnership with other organisations, whereas the Irish frequently reassert the primacy of the UN.

Seen from that perspective, there is little doubt that constructive ambiguity succeeds in the way that both France and Ireland are able to frame and interpret elements of CSDP that best fit their preferences, to use them to promote their defence agenda in a legitimate and ‘European’ way, and to present CSDP as a natural continuation of their preferences. The findings echo those of Larsen (2013), who demonstrates how the national ‘we’ is strategically articulated with an EU dimension to build ‘actorness’ and state identity in foreign policy. How does DI help us to grasp this comparison between France and Ireland? Two observations can be made here.

The first concerns the agents’ background ideational and foreground discursive abilities. The analysis demonstrates that each national discourse is consistent, endowed with clearly observable core features, despite the professional or organizational preferences of the actors involved (see Table 2). This is congruent with Schmidt’s idea that agents’ practical and taken-for-granted social dispositions and meanings remain central. These deeply rooted features still revolve around neutrality for Irish actors and exceptionalism for French ones. The interesting added value of DI rests within the notion of agents’ foreground discursive abilities. It is only through this second notion that one may understand how constructive ambiguity works; that is, how national actors are able to pursue their national policies while incrementally and strategically giving them a European flavour. France and Ireland provide a robust confirmation of this analytical distinction, as they both include ‘Europe’ in their discourses, but in a different way.

The second observation concerns coordinative and communicative discourses. Here, the empirical analysis shows that France and Ireland follow different paths. The challenges of coordination are higher in France, and those of communication more central in Ireland. In France, many actors are involved – e.g. three parliamentary commissions, companies and industrial lobbies, a wide range of think tanks, etc. – a majority of whom have been Europeanised since the late 1990s (Irondelle, 2003). Also, the French military is not uniform: some officers remain nostalgic of Gaullism and French independence, while others are openly pro-EU or pro-NATO. This may partly explain why there are more criticisms voiced by French officers than Irish ones towards CSDP. As a consequence, most of the discourse centres on the coordinative dimension, where specialised policy actors (public officials, military officers, experts) speak with each other in different settings – think tanks or the Revue défense nationale. In Ireland, there are fewer issues, actors and interests at play, and coordination is easier. However, on the communicative side, the discourse faces more challenges, since the issue of neutrality remains very sensitive in the public opinion. Efforts to communicate what CSDP is about – often in an explicitly pedagogical way – feature prominently. In that sense, it is not surprising that the magazine, Signal, talks more about Europe than does the more academic Defence Forces Review. For example, a 2009 issue of Signal on the Lisbon treaty includes interviews with scholars Keohane and Tonra, and also publishes a copy of the protocol annexed to the treaty in which Ireland obtained the legal guarantee to safeguard its neutral status. ⁷ Irish actors self-consciously communicate a minimalist EU discourse with a low transformative impact on Ireland’s traditional policy, which is based on active neutrality and UN primacy.

Here, the comparison between France and Ireland confirms DI’s claim that it is necessary to take the institutional context into consideration in order to understand how the national discourse is built, coordinated and communicated. On the one hand, the formal institutional context matters: in Ireland, the fact that the constitution requires a parliamentary vote on overseas military operations, and a popular referendum on EU treaty changes, necessitates a greater communication effort on the part of foreign policy decision makers. In France, there are fewer such concerns, as the executive branch has much more latitude with regard to security and European policies. On the other hand, informal institutional structures, norms and rules also matter, as evidenced by the ongoing pre-eminence of France and Ireland’s security cultures: exceptionalism and neutrality.

Conclusion: constructive ambiguity and change

This article has relied on Vivien Schmidt’s DIs to study French and Irish discourses on the CSDP of the EU. A key element of the puzzle rests within the notion of constructive ambiguity of CSDP: the EU develops an ambiguous set of priorities and strategic objectives, which allows member states to claim at the national level that their security discourse and preferences are congruent with CSDP. A focus on institutional contexts and national actors’ coordinative and communicative efforts at speaking about CSDP demonstrates how these national discourses are successfully constructed at home.

The combination of constructive ambiguity and DI also generates insights regarding the issue of change in security discourse and policies. It offers an interesting alternative to the classical view that there is either no change at all or progressive convergence towards a common model (Gross, 2009). The case of France and Ireland’s discourse on CSDP demonstrates that there is indeed an incremental change at the national level, in the sense that both countries adapt their thinking to Europe, but that this change tends to reaffirm national specificities more than it erases them.

When CSDP ambiguities are lifted, these national contentions show up more clearly. For example, recent years have witnessed a significant lack of European enthusiasm for robust CSDP military interventions in international crises such as the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, Libya in 2011 or Mali in 2012. Also, budgetary cuts have forced most countries to be more selective in their overseas commitments. In France, these evolutions have contributed to a disenchantment experienced by many security actors towards CSDP, and some renunciation of Europe puissance, in favour of a more pragmatic and balanced approach (Irondelle, 2008). Another ambiguity that could be lifted sooner or later is the implementation of an EU common defence clause, which was introduced in the Lisbon treaty (article 42.7). Member states now have an obligation of aid and assistance if one of them is a victim of armed aggression. This obligation does not refer to the use of military force, as does the NATO equivalent (article 5), but it is a considerable move towards common defence. If further steps were to be taken in that direction, that could prove a central challenge for Ireland’s neutrality.