AA European External Action Service that is a foreign, development, and defense ministry all in one. A much stronger position for the High Representative, foreign minister in all but name, chairing the Foreign Affairs Council. Permanent Structured Cooperation to accelerate military capability development. These are just some of the instruments introduced by the Lisbon Treaty which hold great promise for a dynamic European Union foreign policy.

But they are just that: instruments, tools, means. Means only acquire meaning if they serve an end. That, unfortunately, is less clear. An External Action Service—to achieve what exactly? If asked what EU foreign policy is about these days, no answer readily comes to mind.The EU lacks clear foreign policy priorities.

That doesn’t mean that the EU is not active. Quite the contrary. Europe invests a huge diplomatic, economic, military, and civilian effort in many important issues. But in spite of that, few see the EU as the game-changer on the key issues of the day. Its efforts are not focused enough and it lacks a clear strategic narrative.

The EU does have a strategic concept, a foreign policy idea. The European Security Strategy starts from the philosophy that durable stability can only be guaranteed where security, prosperity, democracy, and equality are guaranteed to all citizens. Promoting those four core values in the rest of the world, therefore, is the best way to safeguard them for ourselves. To that end, the Union pursues a holistic, preventive, and multilateral foreign policy: putting to use in an integrated way the full range of instruments of external action, to address the root causes of instability and conflict, in partnership with others.

This tells us how to do things—but Europe is much less clear on what to do. The method appears sound, but the EU needs to identify the key foreign policy issues on which to apply it as a matter of priority.

The starting point of any such reflection is the Union’s vital interests:

• Defense against any military threat to our territory.
   
• Open lines of communication and trade (in physical as well as in cyberspace).
   
• A secure supply of energy and other vital natural resources.
   
• A sustainable environment.
   
• Manageable migration flows.
   
• The maintenance of international law and of universally agreed rights.
   
• Preserving the autonomy of our decisionmaking.

Three issues stand out as being both the most strategic in regards to our vital interests and the most in need of deepening our strategic thinking.

First, the European Neighbourhood Policy. Long before the Arab Spring it was clear that the EU was pursuing a false stability in its southern neighborhood, negating its own strategic concept. Rather than promoting core values, Europe worked with any regime, regardless of its human rights record, as long as there was cooperation on terrorism, migration, and energy. In reality, our authoritarian neighbors are inherently unstable because of the huge internal gap between the haves and the have-nots. That would in any case have led to an eruption at some point. Now revolution is upon us, in spite of, rather than thanks to, our policies. The good thing is this proves that the core values we should have promoted are indeed universal: where they are not respected, revolt will ensue.

Those southern neighbors that already were or that now emerge as democracies deserve our real support, notably in terms of investment. Large-scale public infrastructure works can generate durable economic development, are guaranteed to benefit the local population, and are in the interest of Europe. The United Nations, the international financial institutions, and the Arab League must be our partners in this. For those countries that remain autocratic, conditionality must be effectively applied. Elections that earned the Belarusan regime sanctions previously earned the Tunisian regime congratulations—that must change.

Second, relations with the other big powers. The EU has ten so-called strategic partnerships with other global players. But without a strategy, those do not make much sense. Only when the Union knows which strategic objectives it aims to pursue can it identify which issues are vital to take up with which other power. If the EU has grand ambitions in managing climate change, for example, then China is a vital player; but if Europe were to abandon that ambition, then we don’t need a dialogue with China. In other words, the strategic partnerships should not be used exclusively as instruments of bilateral relations. Their real added value lies in their usefulness to promote our overall vital interests.

Finally, global crisis management. Europeans like to think of themselves as security providers, but the Libyan crisis demonstrated that actually we lack any collective idea of what our ambition as a security actor is. Why does Europe undertake the military and civilian operations that it does? And why in other cases does it refrain from action? The answers to these questions would amount to a civilian-military strategy for the Common Security and Defence Policy. Without strategy, we can never be sure that the operations we do take are indeed the most relevant and important. And we cannot direct the operations we do undertake to achieve the desired strategic effect. We should make clear the priority regions and issues for which we must plan and prepare. To stay in tune with today’s higher level of crisis management activity, the existing military Headline Goal has to be interpreted broadly. The aim to deploy a corps (of 50,000 to 60,000 troops) should be understood as a deployment that EU member states must be able to undertake at any one time over and above ongoing operations. Then the EU would be able to deal with every eventuality.

The EU needs to decide for itself where it wants to make its mark. Only then can it generate the necessary drive and sense of purpose that will give meaning to the External Action Service.

Sven Biscop is director of the Europe in the World Program at Egmont-Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels and visiting professor at Ghent University and at the College of Europe in Bruges.

To reinvigorate debate over European foreign policy and Europe’s role in the world, Carnegie Europe is publishing a series of essays from leading policymakers, diplomats, experts, and journalists on Strategic Europe over the coming weeks. A new essay will appear every day.