EU Foreign Policy and Crisis Management Operations

This book explores the drivers of the EU's recent forays into peace- and state-building operations. In the decade since the Union's European (now Common) Security and Defence Policy (ESDP/CSDP) became operational in 2003, the EU has conducted more than 20 civilian and military operations that broadl [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

This book explores the drivers of the EU's recent forays into peace- and state-building operations. In the decade since the Union's European (now Common) Security and Defence Policy (ESDP/CSDP) became operational in 2003, the EU has conducted more than 20 civilian and military operations that broadly served to either deter aggression in host countries, and/or to build or strengthen the rule of law. This sudden burst of EU activity in the realm of external security is interesting from both a scholarly and a policy perspective: on the one hand, institutionalized cooperation in the field of foreign, security and defence policy challenges the mainstream in IR theory which holds that in such sovereignty-sensitive areas cooperation would necessarily be limited. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of operations suggests that the ESDP may represent a potentially significant feature of global governance. The present study seeks to identify the drivers behind this development: what motivated EU governments, the principals behind the ESDP, to take on such responsibilities?In seeking to explain the operational record of the ESDP, it also offers an original interpretation of the purpose of the policy at large. The book builds its analysis on an explicit and systematic comparison of the explanations that the major theories in the field of international relations have so far offered. Taking the perspective of the pivotal actors, EU governments, it structures their potential interests in crisis management operations along two dimensions: whether they pursued objectives internal or external to the Union, and whether they were driven primarily by power-political or ideational considerations. These four classes of explanation are linked to the existing theoretical explanations to derive one specific proposition for each. Throughout, this study compares the respective plausibility of each of those propositions for four carefully selected case studies of ESDP operations: in Bosnia and Chad as well as the civilian missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. On the one hand, these cases form a pattern of most and least likely cases for the respective propositions.On the other hand, they reflect the geographical and topical spread of ESDP action while retaining the most significant ESDP efforts to date in terms of operation size and political risk. In uncovering the diplomatic history behind these operations, the present book builds on in-depth interviews with 70 diplomats and military officers involved in the respective decision-shaping processes. In doing so, it systematically reconstructs the positions of the French, British and German governments because these are generally suspected to wield the greatest influence in the EU, and because they mirror the range of the most important intra-EU cleavages dividing national security policies in the Union. Yet this study also covers the positions of other EU member states wherever the latter played a significant role in the decision-making for a given operation. The book thus combines a deductive, theoretical approach with an inductive research design that reconstructs the intra-European diplomatic history behind each operation, focysing on the motives behind each one.This book will be of much interest to studens of European Security, EU policy, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and IR.