The emergence and evolution of CSDP: a Liberal approach

Abstract

Introduction For over fifty years, Europe mainly focussed on the establishment of a common market and, hence, the integration of low politics. While the EU thus emerged as a civilian power (Duchene, 1972, 1973), common military ambitions have virtually been absent during this time. This was mainly due to the fact that security and defence have been considered to be the ‘ultimate guardian of state sovereignty’ (Sjursen, 2011, p. 1092) for quite a long time, which, in turn, made it difficult for Member States to reach agreement on the level and the scope of security and defence cooperation. Most EU integration and IR theories, therefore, came to the conclusion that integrative pressures were rather unlikely, if not even impossible, to occur in high politics. While integration theorists thus assumed that the EU would remain a civilian power, the post-Cold War period showed a significant increase in security and defence cooperation, with security going beyond traditional territorial defence. This broadening and deepening of security and defence (Buzan, 1991) suggested that Europe was not merely a civilian power, but had the ambition to project power abroad, thereby contributing to the resolution of reappearing ethnic conflicts and border disputes in its periphery and beyond. Empirical evidence shows that EU Member States strongly increased their cooperation on security and defence in the 1990s, with the CFSP and the ESDP emerging as the key policies of the EU’s external action in 1992 and 1998 respectively (Fraser, 1999; Howorth, 2000; Gnesotto, 2004; Smith, 2004). This militarisation of the EU contributed to the creation of several institutions, agencies and services, including, for example, the PSC, the EDA and the European External Action Service (EEAS), all of which have gained considerable autonomy from the governments of the Member States (Tonra, 2003; Meyer, 2006; Vanhoonacker et al., 2010). This development is not only remarkable for the process of European integration itself (Forsberg, 2010), but also represents an anomaly for most integration theories (Howorth, 2007). For this very reason, it is particularly interesting to analyse why and under which conditions governments decided to launch the ESDP, renamed the CSDP with the coming into effect of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. This chapter now explains the emergenceand evolution of the CSDP through a Liberal lens, contrasting the explanatory power of Liberal IR theory with Realist and Constructivist perspectives on security and defence cooperation at the EU level. Liberal IR theory has frequently been used to grasp the exceptional features of EU integration in low politics, but was often left out of the debate on the CSDP. Nevertheless, Liberalism may be a powerful tool for explaining both the institutional innovations and the dynamics in security and defence cooperation since the Franco-British summit in St. Malo in 1998. This chapter, therefore, analyses the CSDP through a Liberal lens, and places Liberal IR theory in the debate on EU security and defence cooperation. The aim is not only to comprehend the reasons behind the emergence of the CSDP, but also to understand the twists and turns in its evolution. The first section of this chapter provides a theoretical overview of Liberalism, focussing in particular on Neoliberal Institutionalism (NI), and LI. Although NI and LI work with the same premises, the first stresses the role of institutions while the latter marries NI and Bargaining theory, thus concentrating to a greater extent on domestic politics. Together, they promise to elucidate particularly well why the EU embarked on a project of closer security and defence cooperation. Based on this theoretical framework, section two subsequently explains the reasons behind the emergence of the CSDP, and explicates why cooperation has been ebbing and flowing over time. Finally, the last section of this chapter outlines the limits of Liberal IR theory in accounting for CSDP, contrasting its explanatory power with Realist and Constructivist studies of European security and defence cooperation.