While the EU has succeeded in defining a complex framework for boosting its role and that of its member states in military crisis management, its performance in this area so far has fallen well short of its ambitions.

This paper analyses what the EU wants to be able to do militarily and contrasts this with the current reality. To explain the gap between the two, the paper examines national ambitions and performance across the EU and analyses their domestic determinants. The paper concludes by suggesting that the EU might need to strike a new balance between the inclusiveness and the effectiveness of its activities in this area if it wants to increase its military crisis-management performance and live up to its declared ambitions.