The Rise of European Security Cooperation

Abstract

One of the most striking developments in international politics today is the significant increase in security cooperation among European Union states. Seth Jones argues that this increase in cooperation, in areas such as economic sanctions, weapons production and collaboration among military forces, has occurred because of the changing structure of the international and regional systems. Since the end of the Cold War, the international system has shifted from a bipolar to a unipolar structure characterized by US dominance. This has caused EU states to cooperate in the security realm to increase their ability to project power abroad and decrease reliance on the United States. Furthermore, European leaders in the early 1990s adopted a 'binding' strategy to ensure long-term peace on the continent, suggesting that security cooperation is caused by a desire to preserve peace in Europe whilst building power abroad.

France's return to NATO: the death knell for ESDP?

“…The list of exogenous factors includes declining US interest in Europe, the return of war to the old continent during the Balkan crisis, a growing demand for international crisis management capabilities and the changing balance of power in Europe and beyond. Endogenous drivers include a permissive public opinion, concerns on the part of the British Government to avoid marginalization in the EU, strong pressures to rationalize the European defense industry and reduce military expenditures and habits of cooperation developed between Europeans within NATO and the WEU (Ojanen 2006, Howorth 2007, Jones 2007, Krotz 2009). The emergence of ESDP is only one part of a bigger story, namely the development of international security cooperation and post-national defense policies in Europe (Mérand 2008, Maatlary 2009, Bickerton 2010.…”

Upside down: Reframing European Defence Studies

“…Firstly, a large body of works seeks to explain the drivers of the rise and evolution of the CSDP by applying theoretical approaches from political science and international relations. They put forward competing explanatory factors derived from realism (Art, 2004;Hyde-Price, 2012;Jones, 2007;Rynning, 2011;Posen, 2006), constructivism (Howorth, 2004;Kurowska and Kratochwil, 2012;Meyer, 2001;Meyer and Strickman, 2010), or neo-institutionalism (Hofmann, 2011;Menon, 2011;Smith, 2004;Weiss, 2011), among others. 4 A second strand in the literature analyses the decision-making processes and the institutional arrangements of the CSDP.…”

International organization: institutions and order in world politics

“…Of these regional arrangements, the European Union is by far the most institutionalized, with rules and formal organizations governing economic relations (Armstrong and Bulmer, 1998;Eichengreen and Frieden, 1994;Kenen, 1995), human rights (Voeten, 2008;Moravcsik, 2000), legal dispute resolution (Alter, 2001;Burley and Mattli, 1993;Garrett, 1995), and, increasingly, security cooperation (Jones, 2007;Kupchan, 1997). To a greater degree than any other IGO, the EU represents a "pooling of sovereignty" (Moravcsik, 1998) and some argue that it is an example of true supranational governance (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet, 1998).…”