Description
The EU Battlegroups have been at full operational capacity since 2007. Despite this they have never been used. Repeated statements by EU officials that the Battlegroups need to be made more useable have been uttered in 2013, 2014, 2015 and more recently in the EU Global Strategy, and permanent structured cooperation in defence (PESCO). However previous talk on reforming the EU Battlegroups attest to the difficulty in reconfiguring them. In this context, the article sets out to answer the following question: what factors shape the continued existence of the EU Battlegroup Concept? To do so a social constructivist framework, including the concepts of norms, path dependency and the mechanism of socialisation, is utilised to understand EU and Member State officials’ thinking regarding the Battlegroups. The research has important implications not just for the likely success in deploying the Battlegroups but also for discussions surrounding a potential 5,000 strong First Entry Force and for PESCO, which has a political underpinning. After all, if the political willingness is not there to engage fully in the process of developing and deploying capabilities, then this will lead to a sub-optimal CSDP which fails to have ‘strategic autonomy’ (EEAS 2016) to provide for Europe’s security.
