EU Policy on the Iraq War and its Aftermath: The Breakdown and Revival of Consensus-based Decision-making

At first glance, the deep divisions in Europe over the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq hardly represent a successfully chapter in the evolution of Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP) and the EU’s long-term effort at becoming a coherent, influential international actor. The run up to the Iraq war split open fissures amongst EU member states rarely displayed in such naked clarity: ‘new’ versus ‘old’, ‘Atlanticist’ versus ‘Europeanist’, and within the big state ‘triumvirate’ of Britain, France, and Germany. And when a majority of member states publicly broke ranks with a tenuously reached common position, sceptics argued that the EU’s consultative and consensus-based process of foreign policy-making was either fictitious or irrevocably broken. According to David Calleo, ‘internal divergences over Iraq mocked the geopolitical vision of European unity’ (2004: 32). But what is striking about this case is not the failure of EU members to reach a common policy on Iraq. Indeed, as John Peterson noted soon after the war began, ‘Iraq had been a bitterly divisive issue in both transatlantic and inter-European relations for at least ten years’ (2004a: 11).2