The Underlying Causes of Strategic Surprise in EU Foreign Policy: A post-mortem investigation of the Arab Uprisings and the Ukraine-Russia crisis of 2013/14

TY - JOUR

T1 - The Underlying Causes of Strategic Surprise in EU Foreign Policy

T2 - A post-mortem investigation of the Arab Uprisings and the Ukraine-Russia crisis of 2013/14

AU - Ikani, Nikki

AU - Meyer, Christoph

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/R004331/1]. The authors would like to thank the interviewees and workshop participants, the Advisory Board members of the INTEL project, Dr Tom Casier as well as participants of a joint KCL-LSE seminar for comment on an early version of a paper, and the editors and referees of European Security. The authors alone are responsible for the content of the article. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2023/4/26

Y1 - 2023/4/26

N2 - The study of why and when governments are caught out by strategic surprise has been a major occupation of intelligence studies, international relations, public administration and crisis management studies. Still little is known, however, about the structural vulnerabilities to such surprises in international organisations such as the European Union (EU). EU institutions themselves have not undertaken rigorous investigations or public inquiries of recent strategic surprises, instead relying on internal review processes. In order to understand the most common underlying problems causing surprise in the EU context, this paper adapts and tests insights from the strategic surprise literature. It elaborates a theoretical framework with five hypotheses about why the leadership of EU institutions has been prone to being caught by surprises in foreign affairs: limitations in collection capacity, institutional fragmentation of policymaking, organisational culture, member state politicisation, and cognitive biases arising from collective ideas and norms. These hypotheses are tested using a post-mortem approach investigating two significant strategic surprises: the start and spread of the Arab uprisings of 2010/11 and Ukraine–Russia crisis of 2013/14.

AB - The study of why and when governments are caught out by strategic surprise has been a major occupation of intelligence studies, international relations, public administration and crisis management studies. Still little is known, however, about the structural vulnerabilities to such surprises in international organisations such as the European Union (EU). EU institutions themselves have not undertaken rigorous investigations or public inquiries of recent strategic surprises, instead relying on internal review processes. In order to understand the most common underlying problems causing surprise in the EU context, this paper adapts and tests insights from the strategic surprise literature. It elaborates a theoretical framework with five hypotheses about why the leadership of EU institutions has been prone to being caught by surprises in foreign affairs: limitations in collection capacity, institutional fragmentation of policymaking, organisational culture, member state politicisation, and cognitive biases arising from collective ideas and norms. These hypotheses are tested using a post-mortem approach investigating two significant strategic surprises: the start and spread of the Arab uprisings of 2010/11 and Ukraine–Russia crisis of 2013/14.

KW - Strategic surprise

KW - EU foreign policy

KW - intelligence

KW - Warning

KW - European Union

KW - crisis

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141748292&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/09662839.2022.2140009

DO - 10.1080/09662839.2022.2140009

M3 - Article

SN - 0966-2839

VL - 32

SP - 270

EP - 293

JO - European Security

JF - European Security

IS - 2

M1 - 2

ER -