Learning to Learn in an Era of Surprise? Intelligence Production and Use in Foreign Policy-Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union

拟议的项目解决了在三个“战略灾难”的背景下，国家和欧洲外交政策的预期，准备和反应的所谓失败的突出问题：阿拉伯之春，俄罗斯吞并克里米亚（比尔特，2013年），以及所谓的伊斯兰国/达伊沙的迅速崛起。战略文件指出了不断上升的不确定性水平，并宣称“我们生活在一个可预测的不可预测的世界。因此，我们将做好准备，更迅速、更灵活地应对未来的未知情况“（EGS，2016：46）。为了应对这些意外和所谓的失败，不同的公共机构进行了与阿拉伯之春（2012年），欧盟对俄罗斯的态度（上议院，2015年），2003年入侵伊拉克（枢密院委员会，2016年）和不同危机的汇合（德国外交部，2014年）有关的绩效评估。从这些事件中得出的教训可能会影响未来几年的外交政策，就像20世纪30年代的教训塑造了一代美国和欧洲政策制定者的思维一样，无论是好是坏（Lebow，1985）。然而，现有的少数几个公共调查在深度和范围、判断成功和失败的标准以及如何处理后见之明偏见等问题方面存在很大差异。此外，不仅从业者不同意什么是可知的，应该学习，但公共和调解辩论遵循自己的逻辑在构建失败（Oppermann & Spencer，2016）。国际关系领域现有的学术文献也没有为解决这些问题提供太多帮助：它很少定义什么是成功的学习，也没有具体说明在什么条件下这种学习发生在外交政策决策中。部分问题是缺乏与国际关系（Levy，1994）和政治学（Sanderson，2002）中基于证据的公共政策的更广泛领域中的学习和智力的竞争概念的接触。此外，从美国案例研究中收集的见解可能不适用于组织和政治更加多样化的欧洲环境。欧洲国家可能会受到这些新老威胁的影响，在不同的和更直接的方式比美国考虑到欧洲的地缘政治接近和独特的社会文化组成，在这种背景下，该项目的目的是提供一个更好的规范和证据的基础，学习正确的教训有关警告和当前的情报与这些不同类型的威胁。在第一步中，项目团队将与相关文献以及领先的从业者进行接触，以达到规范化的基础，但在外交政策外观良好的学习现实的期望。这将构成基于最可能的研究设计的实证工作的基础。我们专注于三个最有能力的演员在欧洲外交政策与英国，德国和欧盟，每一个有其独特的但相互关联的情报和外交政策社区。项目小组将研究这些参与者如何处理三起重大战略意外事件，方法是将案头研究和从业人员访谈相结合，以确定随着时间的推移，威胁出现和升级的实际动态以及知识主张，并考虑到很大的不确定性。第三，项目小组将主要利用访谈数据和行为者之间的比较，研究业绩和相对成功和失败的根本原因。在最后一步，我们将与咨询委员会的从业人员接触，并举办一系列讲习班，阐明从每一个案例中汲取的主要经验教训，以及如何提高行为体的能力，以更好地预测和应对新的威胁。

TThe proposed project addresses salient concerns about alleged failures of anticipation, preparedness and response in national and European foreign policy against a backdrop of three 'strategic surprises': the Arab Spring, the Russian annexation of the Crimea (Bildt, 2013), and the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State/D'aesh. Strategy documents identify rising levels of uncertainty and proclaim '[w]e live in a world of predictable unpredictability. We will therefore equip ourselves to respond more rapidly and flexibly to the unknown lying ahead' (EGS, 2016: 46). In response to these surprises and alleged failures, different public bodies have conducted performance reviews relating to the Arab Spring (2012), the EU's approach to Russia (House of Lords 2015), the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Committee of Privy Counsellors, 2016) and the confluence of different crises (German Foreign Office, 2014). Lessons identified from these episodes are likely to shape future foreign policy for years to come, just as lessons from the 1930s shaped the thinking of a generation of US and European policy-makers, for good or for worse (Lebow, 1985). Yet, the few existing public inquiries differ substantially in their depth and scope, the criteria for judging success and failure, and how they handle problems such as hindsight bias. Moreover, not only do practitioners disagree about what is knowable and should be learnt, but public and mediatised debates follow their own logic in constructing failures (Oppermann & Spencer, 2016). The existing academic literature in the field of International Relations does not offer much help in addressing these questions either: It rarely defines what it considers successful learning, nor does it specify under what conditions such learning takes place in foreign policy decision-making. Part of the problem is the lack of engagement with competing conceptions of learning and intelligence in the broader field of International Relations (Levy, 1994) and evidence-based public policy in political science (Sanderson, 2002). Moreover, insights gleaned from US case studies may not be applicable in an organisationally and politically more diverse European setting. European countries may be affected by these old and new threats in different and more direct ways than the United States given Europe's close geopolitical proximity and distinct socio-cultural make-up.Against this background the project aims to provide a better normative and evidential basis for learning the right lessons about warning and current intelligence in relation to these different kinds of threats. In a first step the project team will engage with the relevant literature as well as leading practitioners to arrive at a normatively grounded yet realistic expectations of good learning in foreign policy looks. This will form the basis for the empirical work which is based on a most likely research design. We focus on three of the most capable actors in European foreign policy with the UK, Germany and the EU, each with their distinct yet interconnected intelligence and foreign policy communities. The project team will look at how these actors have handled three cases of major strategic surprises by combining desk-based research and practitioner interviews to ascertain the actual dynamics of threat emergence and escalation with the knowledge claims over time and given substantial uncertainty. Thirdly, the project team will then draw mainly on interview data and comparisons between the actors to study performance and underlying causes of relative success and failure. In a final step, we will engage with practitioners on the Advisory Board and in a series of workshop to elucidate key lessons to be learnt from each of these cases and how to improve actors' capacities to better anticipate and react to new threats.