The EU's Comprehensive Approach to Crisis Management

The new dynamic security environment of the 21st century has required a paradigm shift when it comes to dealing with international crises. Civil-military coordination and cooperation have become critical success factors in complex peace operations, where new threats call for flexible and multi-faceted responses. The EU tries to apply a “Comprehensive Approach to Crisis Management” that is supposed to ensure that the various components systematically address the whole spectrum of a crisis by profiting from synergy effects.
By offering a first in-depth analysis of the EU’s “Comprehensive Approach”, the book provides an important contribution to better understanding the EU as a distinct security actor. It identifies the characteristics of the EU’s approach according to presented EU policy, elaborates how these are historically rooted in the process of European integration and traces key conceptual and structural developments. Based on an empirical study of the EU’s civil and military Crisis Management engagement in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2003 to 2009, the author discovers a substantial gap between EU policy and practice.