The Use of Force as Coercive Intervention: the Conflicting Values of the European union’s External Action

The chapter deals with the troublesome area of the EU’s use of force. The chapter starts by acknowledging that the prevailing security discourse in the EU regarding coercion and force are only rarely conceivable. Indeed, the ‘structural’ nature of the EU’s external action confronts a serious challenge when facing the dilemmas of coercion. One of the cases in which the EU has conceived the use of force is when human rights are at risk, namely in the case of humanitarian intervention. Menotti and I claim that a distinctive political dynamic – manifested during the 1990s and not yet fully crystallised – has led the EU to read all cases of crisis management in the 1990 as cases of humanitarian intervention. This has turned into a specific approach to the use of force that is now pushing the EU toward gradually accepting a wider notion of intervention (as the 2003 EU intervention in the Congo demonstrated), for which, however, it is not ready nor in terms of capabilities nor in terms of conception of its overall international role.