One Piece of the Puzzle: Individual Leadership and EU Foreign Policy Development

Abstract

The Search for a Common European Foreign and Security Policy: Leaders, Cognitions, and Questions of Institutional Viability. Edited by Akan Malici. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 219 pp, $79.95 hardcover (ISBN: 978-0230604469). The slow evolution of a Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP) is often attributed to diverging national interests and identities, the transatlantic divide or the EU's emphasis on civil power. For all those who are in search of alternative explanations for the gradual evolution of the EU's CFSP beyond statist or institutionalist approaches, Akan Malici's book delivers a complementary theory stressing the cognitive strategic propensities of individual leaders. It seeks to overcome some of the perceived shortcomings of traditional comparative European Foreign Policy Analysis by incorporating insights from political psychology, which could explain the “black box” of individual decision-making, and challenges conventional invariant models of state behavior (p. 20). In the introduction, the author introduces the reader to the idea of political leadership in the context of European security integration, provides an intergovernmental account of the evolution of CFSP, and lays out the structure of his book. Chapter 2 presents his “cognitive theory of institutional viability,” which is based on the fundamental understanding that “institutions are human constructions” (p. 17) and that intergovernmental institutions, as in the case of the CFSP, are subject to governmental leadership-agency rather than the established institutional structure, thus reflecting a larger trend in institutional research. Malici then proposes his concept of decision-making bodies as “shared mental models” (p. 18), predicated upon previous work by political psychologists who advocate the existence …