EU Power Examined- An Analysis of the Instigation of ESDP Military Operations

Within the community of scholars that accepted the existence of a Europeanforeign policy the lack of military means was long seen as central to theargument about the civilian nature of EC/EU power. With 1) the signature ofthe Maastricht Treaty in 1992 that rendered possible the eventual framing ofa common defence policy by establishing the Common Foreign and Securitypolicy and more importantly 2) the Joint Declaration on European Defence atthe Anglo-French Summit at Saint Malo in 1998 this argument crumbled.Consequently debates on more than just the nature of European foreignpolicy came back to the fore. Additionally emotional discussions on thenecessity of and the reasons for European militarisation broke out andgradually intensified with the launch of Althea Artemis and Concordia - theEU's first ever military operations. Combining both debates this book analysesthe reasons for the EU to launch its first military operations and thustheir instigation as an intrinsic/instrumental case study in order to drawtheoretical conclusions about the nature of European foreign policy. Giventhat the EU's unique character interdicts an investigation of this topic withina traditional foreign policy analysis framework and the insufficiency ofexistent concepts to answer the two main research questions this bookintroduces an adequate analytical conceptual and theoretical framework.Furthermore it provides a contextual analysis of EC/EU semi-detachmenttowards Bosnia-Herzegovina the Democratic Republic of Congo and Macedoniabefore the deployment of the respective military operations to demonstratethat the launch of these missions requires critical examination.Subsequently it identifies the EU's rather non-cosmopolitan reasons toinitiate Althea Artemis and Concordia. Building upon this analysis and thetheoretical conclusions that are drawn from it this book finally argues thatEuropean foreign policy is normative by nature but determined by Neorealistimpulses in a Neoliberal Institutionalist framework.