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Established in 1999, the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) originally sought to contribute to democracy-support objectives in the framework of wider peacebuilding efforts. However, governance-related elements of CSDP missions and operations, including those to do with democracy, have diminished over time in favor of more narrowly defined, pragmatic security cooperation. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has in some ways revivified the democracy-conflict nexus back, notably in Eastern Europe but not in an even way across all the places where the CSDP operates. Retrospectively, the policy’s democracy dimension is thinner today than it was fifteen years ago. EU leaders, civil society, and analysts need to reflect critically on how the policy relates to the union’s principle of democratic security.
An Early Emphasis on Democracy Issues
In its early days, the CSDP included democracy-related elements. The 2000 Feira principles for civilian CSDP prioritized police capabilities, the rule of law, civilian administration, and civil protection. Coinciding with the first CSDP deployments, the 2003 European Security Strategy linked crisis management to the goal of “well-governed democratic states” and the restoration of civilian government. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty not only committed the CSDP to “peace-keeping, conflict prevention and strengthening international security” but also defined the policy as “an integral part of the [EU’s] common foreign and security policy [CFSP],” thus requiring the CSDP to align with the union’s values and principles.
For example, in 2006, a small military operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo backed up a UN mission in support of the country’s general election in that year. Meanwhile, the Aceh Monitoring Mission oversaw a political accord between Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement, including on human rights issues.
The EU also launched several civilian rule-of-law missions, such as EUJUST Themis in Georgia. The EU Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support, established in 2006, developed a rule-of-law section in 2008. Unsurprisingly, given the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this mission has struggled to meet its aims.
In Afghanistan, the EU Police Mission (EUPOL) aimed at reforming the Ministry of Interior Affairs, professionalizing the police, and furthering the rule of law. EUPOL’s approach was markedly civilian oriented and contributed to two agreements to protect citizens from police and human rights abuses. In a 2015 assessment of the mission, the European Court of Auditors proclaimed “mixed results,” and EUPOL was gradually repurposed toward counterterrorism.
The EU’s most prominent rule-of-law mission is EULEX Kosovo. Launched in 2008 and ongoing, the mission operates in the fields of the judiciary, the police, and customs. This is not only the largest-ever CSDP deployment but also the only civilian mission with (limited) executive functions. EULEX introduced a Human Rights Review Panel to provide the mission with accountability on human rights, which is generally missing from the CSDP elsewhere. However, some EU member states’ refusal to recognize Kosovo as an independent state and a lack of competent personnel resulted in the mission focusing on technical aspects of intervention rather than supporting political reform. The case of Kosovo also exemplified the CSDP’s overall difficulty with allowing for local ownership. EULEX gradually shifted toward security matters, such as organized crime and border management.
The Evolution of CSDP Missions
Progressively, CSDP mandates and actions have deviated from this political dimension and narrowed to a more pragmatic approach. EU member states have instrumentalized the CSDP to pursue their foreign policy concerns, from migration to counterterrorism, as these have become more salient. The 2016 EU Global Strategy emphasized “principled pragmatism,” and in that year, the EU Council proposed reviewing civilian CSDP missions “in light of evolving political priorities.”
The 2018 Civilian CSDP Compact privileged matters typically addressed by security services, the police, border and coast guards, or the military, often guided by a tightly operational and results-oriented mindset, rather than broader considerations of political reform. Meanwhile, the EU’s 2022 Strategic Compass stressed cooperation between justice, home affairs, and the CSDP, and the 2023 Civilian CSDP Compact promised to “strengthen the internal-external security nexus.”
Narrowing Ambition
EU member states have generally hesitated to provide personnel such as rule-of-law experts and judges to CSDP missions. Many EU countries drew the lesson that the policy’s governance-related elements had struggled to meet their stated aims. CSDP ambition narrowed as democracy support became harder and came up against geopolitical tensions. Civilian CSDP came to focus mostly on smaller, scalable, and flexible missions and tilted toward security-sector reform (SSR) and monitoring, mentoring, and advising (MMA) missions, usually supported by only modest resources. MMA missions denoted a slimmed-down notion of security intervention in support of locally owned peace arrangements and a more detached EU approach, while the nonexecutive nature of their mandates diluted responsibility and risk.
In Iraq, for example, the EU’s Integrated Rule of Law Mission was followed by an SSR advisory mission from 2017 onward. The latter mission had multiple priorities, from countering organized crime and violent extremism to managing borders, displaying a security-driven ethos.
The EU Capacity Building Mission (EUCAP) Sahel Niger and EUCAP Sahel Mali promised to streamline the rule of law through a more modest advisory role focused mainly on each country’s security forces. In 2015, the military EU Training Mission (EUTM) Mali—the biggest of its kind—and the two EUCAPs were “adapted to the political priorities of the EU, notably following the EU mobilization against irregular migration and related trafficking.”
Following the premise that “stability in the Sahel region is also key for European security,” the EU in 2019 established the Regional Advisory and Coordination Cell for the Sahel to foster cross-border cooperation on security and defense. The 2021 Integrated Sahel Strategy linked the CSDP to the need for a “civilian and political leap forwards” but clearly prioritized efforts against migration, terrorism and armed groups, cross-border trafficking, and organized crime. In 2022, EUCAP Sahel Niger updated its mandate to work more closely with the EU’s justice and home affairs agencies and signed a working arrangement with the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as Frontex. Meanwhile, the EU Military Partnership in Niger tackled terrorism.
Also in 2022, the EU and representatives of junta-led countries issued a joint declaration on cross-border cooperation in Libya and the Sahel, focused on counterterrorism, cross-border crime, and organized crime. The EU Border Assistance Mission in Libya extended its mandate in 2023 with a clearer emphasis on border management and migration but dropped its support for institutional reform. The mission also signed a memorandum of understanding with Libya on fighting terrorism and cross-border crime.
In and around Somalia, the CSDP committed more explicitly to rule-of-law promotion through EUCAP NESTOR and its follow-up mission, EUCAP Somalia, which made a clearer link between protecting EU interests and promoting the rule of law. Still, in practice, this EUCAP engaged mostly on antipiracy and maritime operations alongside EU investments in the wider Western Indian Ocean on port security and safety of navigation. EU interventions in this region have also become more securitized, eclipsing political reform work. EUCAP’s updated 2022 mandate allowed the mission to share confidential information with EU justice and home affairs agencies, again highlighting the union’s own security concerns.
Embracing Military Support
The CSDP has also acquired a military focus, reflecting the EU’s general drift toward hard, geopolitical power. The policy has furthered what researchers Trineke Palm and Ben Crum called “utility-based justifications” over “value-based considerations.” After the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the CSDP embraced security cooperation and security force assistance. Although most deployments since the policy’s inception have been civilian, the EU has since 2010 launched more military than civilian missions along with two that fall into neither category, including a hybrid civilian-military initiative (see figure 1).
The European Peace Facility (EPF), launched in 2021 under the CFSP, reflected and reinforced the EU’s move toward military capacity building. Over time, EPF funding signaled a diminishing appetite on the part of the EU for the inclusion of democracy elements. Designed as an off-budget financial instrument, the facility bypasses EU treaty provisions on military and defense expenditure and is subject to little scrutiny, for instance by the European Parliament. In 2024 alone, the EU announced its first-ever support to armed forces in places as diverse as Albania, Armenia, and Kenya, all funded by the EPF. The facility swiftly advanced from a conflict-prevention tool to an instrument that funds the provision of lethal weaponry, including to nondemocratic regimes.
In Somalia, violent extremism and insecurity motivated the EU in 2023 to approve lethal force funds under the EPF “solely for training Somali National Army personnel in conjunction with [the] EU Training Mission.” In 2024, further (nonlethal) EPF funds were greenlit for the country’s forces and the military component of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, in line with the EU’s intention to empower local and regional actors. The same year, the EU extended its training and capacity-building missions to provide “strategic advice, mentoring and training,” accompanied by EPF-funded equipment.
Of all CSDP missions set up since 2003, the vast majority have been in sub-Saharan Africa (see figure 2), where the EU experience reveals a more militarized—and depoliticized—approach. In 2023, the EU launched a hybrid civilian-military initiative to tackle regional security threats in the Gulf of Guinea. This initiative includes a commitment to “promote the rule of law and good governance in security sectors and trust-building between civil society and security and defence forces.” Yet, the EU’s then foreign policy high representative, Josep Borrell, stressed that the operation would prioritize “tailor-made support, in line with the needs expressed by our partners” and have “a strong preventive focus”—tenets that suggest a limited likelihood of any significant democracy elements in practice.
Despite the civilian and humanitarian aspects of migration, the EU Naval Force Mediterranean, known as Operation Sophia, reinforced border control and provided training and capacity building to Libya’s coast guard. The follow-up Operation Irini focused on enforcing the UN’s arms embargo on Libya, gathering information on petroleum-related exports, disrupting smuggling and trafficking networks, and training the country’s coast guard and navy. Frontex cooperated with Operations Sophia and Irini, both of which had executive mandates that enabled the use of force.
Meanwhile, the EU Naval Force Somalia, known as Operation Atalanta, evolved into defending the EU’s economic interests. In 2024, its mandate was extended to foster synergies with Operation Aspides, which had been launched that year to counter attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi movement. These attacks targeted ships belonging to Israel, whose democracy is sliding, and its allies, and greatly affected EU trade and maritime routes. Neither military operation had much focus on improving the political situation in Yemen or elsewhere.
Failing to Strengthen Democracy
Certainly, EU deployments are guided by international law and standards, such as the EU’s 2024 Guidelines on Children and Armed Conflict or its 2024 Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Due Diligence Policy on security-sector support to third parties. Most EU missions have human rights officers or advisers and come with commitments to mainstream human rights, such as gender equality, and consult with civil society. However, in 2023, a European Parliament report on civilian CSDP called for further cooperation with host countries to deliver on institutional reform and human rights commitments. The EU has been wary about including explicit references to human rights aims in CSDP mandates, particularly those of military operations, which tend to lack experts in these areas. The CSDP’s implementation of its commitments to human rights and democratic oversight is weak.
The military EU Training Mission in the Central African Republic (EUTM RCA), rather atypically, committed to “support the build-up of a modernised, effective, ethnically balanced and democratically accountable FACA (Central African armed forces).” Yet, the FACA are far from having all of these attributes. The EU suspended training in 2021 because of the role of the Russia-funded Wagner Group of mercenaries among the FACA and later imposed sanctions on the group on human rights grounds. This episode, combined with the spread of disinformation, led EUTM RCA in 2022 to incorporate “strategic communication efforts to foster Union values, promote Union action and expose violations and abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law by foreign forces.”
Despite these challenges, the EU remains in the Central African Republic, while France restarted its budget support for the country after freezing it in 2021 because of Wagner’s influence in Bangui. Although EUTM RCA ruled out engagement with private military companies in light of Wagner’s grave rights violations, the EU’s decision to stay was based on security rather than democracy considerations. To put it another way, human rights and governance do not seem to count for much in the union’s evaluation of future missions. The CSDP’s lack of reporting and tracking systems for non-EU-trained forces aggravates this situation further.
EUTM Mali, meanwhile, was concerned mainly with counterterrorism. It did not clearly promote human rights or protect civilians. The mission’s fifth mandate, from 2020 to 2024, included overseeing local armed forces on matters of human rights and international humanitarian law, but abuses and violations were reported, and again, Wagner’s interference in the country was a grave concern for the EU. In 2022, the union reviewed both its training mission and its capacity-building mission in Mali and identified a need for further investment in training on human rights and international humanitarian law. Nonetheless, the review was conducted mostly through the lens of geopolitical competition with Russia rather than as a critical self-assessment of CSDP missions.
In the Sahel more broadly, Borrell acknowledged the EU’s failure to strengthen democracy and the union’s overly security-focused approach. The CSDP reflected these shortcomings and highlighted the EU’s uneven response to coups in recent years. For instance, whereas the bloc acted swiftly in Niger by suspending its security activities and EPF funds, EU action in Mali turned more assertive as the situation there deteriorated. On the Sahelian juntas, Borrell claimed the EU was pursuing an approach of “strategic patience”—in essence, wait and see—but the initial promises of those behind the ousters did not hold. The EU prioritized domestic and regional stability and was unable to build on governance-related elements in the CSDP and beyond, withdrawing its missions when the overall political situation deteriorated sharply.
Local civil society was often excluded from EU funding in the peace and security sphere, and EU strategies to counter violent extremism lacked an understanding of local dynamics, undermining governance-related efforts. Local forces’ poor track records on human rights seem to have weighed less in EU decisionmaking than did considerations of geopolitical competition and other factors that affect the EU’s work, such as the presence of the Wagner Group, the host countries’ repudiation of the international community, growing violence, and the particular interests of EU member states.
An Eastern Difference?
The exception to the CSDP’s general trend away from political support lies in Eastern Europe and relates to the impact of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With the war in Ukraine, the EU has strengthened the geopolitical stance of civilian CSDP and increased the policy’s presence in the Eastern Partnership, which governs EU relations with six countries in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. There, a novel bond has emerged between the CSDP and democracy, linking the EU’s enlargement goals with its security and democracy agenda. The results of this new approach are yet to be seen, however.
The EU has had an SSR advisory mission with a rule-of-law component in Ukraine since 2014. The mission includes governance commitments, for instance with regard to the police, the judiciary, and anticorruption. When war broke out in 2022, the EU adapted the mission’s mandate to enable the investigation and prosecution of international crimes. In 2024, the EU extended the mission with more budget and personnel; the extension mentioned the “re-establishment of the Ukrainian government functions and the rule of law in de-occupied areas” and linked Ukrainian law enforcement and reforms in the civilian security sector to “accession-related commitments”—a novelty for the CSDP.
In neighboring Moldova, the EU’s civilian Partnership Mission was framed partly in democracy terms. Launched in 2023, the mission promised to enhance security-sector resilience in crisis management, hybrid threats, and cybersecurity. The mission sought to connect Moldova’s security to that of the EU while “safeguarding democratic values and processes” and guaranteeing “public confidence in the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic institutions.” This approach demonstrated the union’s attempt to search for and engage with like-minded partners, although it is not yet clear what this will mean for EU democracy support.
Also in 2023, the EU launched a civilian mission in Armenia. Despite mentioning human security in its mandate, the mission focuses primarily on observing and reporting. While its presence may offer Armenian citizens a sense of security, its impact on supporting democracy appears minimal. This CSDP presence in Armenia added to the union’s EPF support for the country and to the EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia, which in 2022 had a temporary, two-month task to monitor the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Conclusion
In the last decade and a half, the CSDP has gradually turned toward security operations and missions that deprioritize democracy-related commitments. Even if the shift is not absolute and some institution-building elements remain, the trend is significant. It is strong enough to raise searching questions about CSDP commitments to democratic oversight of the security sector, including by parliaments, the media, and civil society.
UN missions have moved in a similar direction of pragmatic peacekeeping, although with more politically integrated missions than those deployed by the EU under the CSDP. The union could further its cooperation with the UN; an EU-UN strategic partnership emerged in the 2010s. Since then, the two organizations have cooperated on peace and security, but when it comes to governance and democracy, cooperation is loosely defined. Meanwhile, peace operations across the world have become more regionalized as local actors increasingly push back against multilateral initiatives. EU support for regionalized peacekeeping needs to uphold the union’s values within such frameworks while not forgetting the EU’s early principles in CSDP deployments.
It seems certain that the EU will continue toward a CSDP focused on the union’s immediate interests and security concerns. New initiatives are underway, such as the Rapid Development Capacity, which will allow the bloc to quickly deploy a modular force of up to 5,000 troops. In March 2024, a major report by former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö proposed the CSDP as a tool to “safeguard international shipping routes and critical infrastructure.” And in December 2024, the EU Council recommended that the CSDP should further its synergies with relevant EU actors to tackle terrorism and violent extremism.
Yet, the bloc can do more to revive the CSDP’s inclusion of issues related to democratic governance in a way that is consistent with realpolitik. For example, the EU could foster dialogue between democracy, peace, and security actors and reinforce the links between experts and practitioners. The union could focus more on conflict prevention and peace mediation through support for open, safe spaces and inclusive, pluralist discussions by enabling the CSDP’s work in such fields.
The EU could also reconsider the roles of some deployments and ask whether these could be performed instead by the European Commission. Doing so would help reduce the risk of a widening disconnect between initiatives led by EU member states and those led by the commission. At the same time, the union could build on governance-related matters in promising environments, thus linking ambition with pragmatic goals. The EU—and, by extension, the CSDP—could also extend its footprint by linking thematic fields and integrating its civilian and military dimensions. Geopolitical challenges mean the EU needs to find ways of recovering the CSDP as a meaningful part of its democracy-support toolbox.
The author wishes to thank Marta Martinelli, Raluca Csernatoni, Richard Youngs, and Thomas Carothers for their comments on a draft of this article.
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