The Congo crisis tested three widely proclaimed EU priorities: its partnership with Africa, its strategic support to the UN, and its belief in the need to protect the vulnerable

In July 1898, a French military expedition reached Fashoda, an isolated fort on the Nile. The troops had marched for over a year across Africa to claim the outpost for the Empire – but the British were there too, with gunboats. For a few months, it seemed the stand-off might spark war. But Paris decided that this would be futile, and the French withdrew.

Displaced and abandoned: to many, the humanitarian crisis in Congo seemed like the sort of tragedy an EU mission might have stopped. Photograph: Reuters

This was the imperial game at its most bizarre. Yet France’s retreat signalled a strategic shift: disputes with Britain over Africa would now be decided by diplomacy, not force.

The French remained ready to use force against others in Africa, most obviously Africans. Even last year, French troops were in action to defend allies in Chad and Djibouti. But the Fashoda incident is a classic case of a major power recognising the limits to its military options – the political cost of picking a fight was simply too high.

Such moments of recognition litter history, although they often come too late. Outgoing Israeli premier Ehud Olmert recently described the 2006 Lebanon war as “the first war in which the military leadership understood that classic warfare has become obsolete.” The European Union is the product of similar, tragically belated, insights in the 1950s.

And in the autumn of 2008, the EU’s leaders collectively recognised their lack of credible military options in response to the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That crisis – with rebel forces outmanoeuvring UN peacekeepers and displacing 250,000 civilians – looked like the sort of humanitarian catastrophe the EU is supposed to stop. The Union had, after all, sent troops to ensure stability in the Congo in 2003 and 2006.

This time, calls for a European intervention came from an astonishingly broad variety of voices: from former Czech President Vaclav Havel and former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to Oxfam and the UN itself. But while EU ministers met on the crisis repeatedly, they consistently failed to offer troops.

Diplomats were quick to blame each other: France and Belgium wanted to act, but Britain and Germany were against it, and so on. The net result may have been the EU’s Fashoda.

The Congo crisis tested three widely proclaime......