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 EU's 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 EU's 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 EU's
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.
