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

Within the community of scholars that accepted the existence of a European foreign policy, the lack of military means was long seen as central to the argument about the civilian nature of EC/EU power. With 1) the signature of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 that rendered possible the eventual framing of a common defence policy by establishing the Common Foreign and Security policy and more importantly 2) the Joint Declaration on European Defence at the Anglo-French Summit at Saint Malo in 1998, this argument crumbled. Consequently, debates on more than just the nature of European foreign policy came back to the fore. Additionally, emotional discussions on the necessity of and the reasons for European militarisation broke out and gradually intensified with the launch of Althea, Artemis, and Concordia - the EUs first ever military operations. Combining both debates, this book analyses the reasons for the EU to launch its first military operations and thus their instigation as an intrinsic/instrumental case study in order to draw theoretical conclusions about the nature of European foreign policy. Given that the EUs unique character interdicts an investigation of this topic within a traditional foreign policy analysis framework, and the insufficiency of existent concepts to answer the two main research questions, this book introduces an adequate analytical, conceptual, and theoretical framework. Furthermore, it provides a contextual analysis of EC/EU semi-detachment towards Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Macedonia before the deployment of the respective military operations to demonstrate that the launch of these missions requires critical examination. Subsequently, it identifies the EUs rather non-cosmopolitan reasons to initiate Althea, Artemis, and Concordia. Building upon this analysis and the theoretical conclusions that are drawn from it, this book finally argues that European foreign policy is normative by nature but determined by Neorealist impulses in a Neoliberal Institutionalist framework.