The ESDP-building process and conflict prevention: intergovernmental policy-making and institutional expertise

Abstract

Most of the proposals that emerged in the process of building the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) of the European Union (EU) in the 1999–2001 period did not contain any ideas with regard to conflict prevention. At the same time, only weak commitments to conflict prevention were initially made in this process. However, the EU ultimately made substantial conflict prevention commitments in the ESDP-building process and decided to carry out the reform of conflict prevention as one of its policy fields. This article seeks to identify those factors that determined the final outcome of the negotiations on conflict prevention in the ESDP-building process. To this end, it puts forward and evaluates two competing explanations of the analyzed case based on theoretical approaches to European integration, namely liberal intergovernmentalism and rationalist institutionalism. The article argues that the outcome is best explained by a synthesis of the liberal intergovernmentalist null explanation claiming that state interests constitute the most decisive variable and the institutionalist explanation underlining the agenda-setting power of the European Commission and the Secretary General/High Representative (SG/HR).