Explaining the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy

Abstract

This study explores the meaning and operation of the European Union Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) from the Saint Malo Declaration in December 1998 up to the European Council of December 2013. Applying a comprehensive strategic culture framework, the study affirms that CSDP began as an intergovernmental initiative but its institutional structure and implementation reflects a non-traditional type of intergovernmentalism, lacking the usual interests-based interstate bargaining. The study affirms that there is an emergent European strategic culture that co-exists with member state strategic cultures. It further identifies a credibility gap between the Union’s stated security and defence ambitions and its current level of capability and actorness. The explanation for these shortcomings lies in a form of bureaucratic politics suffused throughout CSDP processes. The bureaucratic politics explanation of CSDP stands in sharp contrast to suggestions that the policy area exhibits Europeanisation, finding this concept too vague to be analytically useful in understanding what CSDP represents. The original contribution of the study is that the often suggested need for CSDP to be driven by Grand Strategy in the academic literature is inappropriate and unfeasible because member states consistently fail to define their common interests, and the form of bureaucratic politics of CSDP conflicts with the development and implementation of Grand Strategy. While Grand Strategy cannot work, bureaucratic politics may in the long-term incrementally deliver an EU strategic culture, strategic actorness and enhanced capability. The study therefore concludes that despite shortfalls, the bureaucratic politics approach is the most effective way to analyse CSDP in a scholarly sense and also as a means to achieve the declared ambitions of CSDP.