Conclusion. EU Maritime Foreign and Security Policies: Aims, Actors, and Mechanisms of Integration

Abstract

This book set out to provide a comprehensive understanding of EU maritime foreign and security policies, asking to what extent, how, and why the EU is a maritime power in the making. The studies confirm that the EU indeed is becoming a maritime global power. The EU amongst other things now has its own Maritime Security Strategy with a functioning and comprehensive action plan, two major ongoing military naval operations, to a large degree acts with one voice at the international scene, and it has taken important in steps in the development of an Arctic policy. In the maritime domain, the EU is no longer only a soft power but increasingly uses military means to respond to new security threats and challenges, also known as ‘soft threats’ such as piracy and migration. The high number of planned actions agreed in the EUMSS and action plan as well as the maritime focus in the EU’s new Global Strategy suggests that we can expect maritime integration and cooperation, including in the military domain, to continue to grow in the years to come. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the US’ more reluctant tone towards guaranteeing Europe’s defence will only serve to push this development further. After all, EU leaders have already agreed to deepen cooperation on security and defence in the face of these events (European Council 2017). The findings in this book are thus important also for our understanding of the EU as such. Being the only remaining intergovernmental policy area in the EU and the one most strongly linked to member states’ sovereignty, EU foreign and security policies have been referred as a sine qua non in order to achieve full European integration. And EU maritime foreign and security policy indeed takes collective European security policies a substantial step forward. In times where some commentators have questioned the EU’s very survival, the findings in this book in other words lead to the opposite prediction—of more rather than less EU integration in the face of new security threats and challenges. This chapter sums up the book’s main finding and discusses their broader empirical and analytical implications.