Studies of the relationship between the EU and NATO often focus on the limitations of cooperation, be it at the political or operational levels. However, little is known about the functioning of the political institutional linkages between the EU and NATO. This article therefore studies the main decision-making bodies of the two organisations at the political, ambassadorial level, namely the Political Security Committee (PSC) of the EU and the North Atlantic Council (NAC) in NATO, as well as their joint meetings. The article employs an inductive Grounded Theory approach, drawing on open-ended interviews with PSC and NAC ambassadors, which reveal direct insights from the objects of analysis. The findings emphasise the impact of both structural and more agency-related categories on decision-making in these three fora. The article thus addresses both the paucity of study on these bodies more broadly and the complete lacuna on joint PSC-NAC meetings specifically, warranting the inductive approach this article endorses.
The EU has developed its role in global affairs through several treaty revisions, institutional developments, political statements and official strategic documents. The strategic documents and political statements embody both the EU's more particular short-term interests and concerns, as well as its more universal and long-term normative aspirations or 'milieu goals'. How the EU has sought to balance these and to project them globally through its formal strategy statements in the realm of security is the core research question of this paper. Furthermore, this paper assesses these attempts as part of a greater endeavour of the GLOBUS project to conceptualise global justice and the Union's role therein. The EU is a (self-)proclaimed normative power that is seen in some quarters as promoting universal values and global justice. However, what is 'just', as this article will discuss, is contested even when it is (rarely) defined. The article will therefore review three related but distinct concepts of global justice and highlight the outlying indicators of these ideal types of justice. Based on these, the article develops hypotheses on the EU's role in the pursuit of global justice and tests these against the EU's discourses embodied in the three main strategic documents: '
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.