The EU Strategic Compass: A Blueprint for a European Defensive and Securitisation Policy

JOINT Brief 16 (May 2022)

On 21 March 2022, the Council of the European Union released the Strategic Compass for Security and Defence. The document provides a thorough assessment of international affairs and is meant to guide the development of the EU security and defence agenda for the next decade. The Strategic Compass has been hailed as a framework for coherence and convergence of the Union’s foreign policy but has also been criticised for its lack of concrete goals, for being a “wind chime” rather than a “compass”. Here the focus is on the apparent change of direction in EU foreign policy – at least when compared to the direction taken in the Global Strategy (2016) and the Integrated Approach to Conflicts and Crises (2018). While these documents have their own specific logic and focus, comparing them is useful to understand where the Compass is guiding Europeans to.