The Europeanization of National Foreign Policy?

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, and informed in part by the experience of the conflicts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s, EU member states have created European security institutions in order to be able to act independently from NATO and the US. Two countries in particular, Britain and France, have adjusted their national positions in order to make possible the creation of the EU ESDP in the first place. While there is more than one institutional tool at EU member states’ disposal in matters of international security, this book addresses the circumstances, national preferences and crisis situations that determine the choice and the extent of the use of political and military instruments located in the EU CFSP and ESDP as opposed to other institutional venues or bilateral initiatives — and the extent to which these preferences have evolved since ESDP was declared partly operational in 2001. The chapters that follow analyse British, French and German policies with respect to the EU CFSP and the ESDP in crisis decision-making, and shows the extent to which national considerations over EU instruments have evolved since the creation of ESDP in particular. This research is motivated by the observation that, although the EU is in possession of foreign, security and defence policy instruments, the application of these instruments has been selective (Biscop, 2006).