Friday, March 14, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
Since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 EU foreign/security policy cooperation has expanded primarily through the use of pragmatic and informal working methods. The driving force behind this kind of integration was an internal process of norm development promoted by EU foreign policy actors. This informal approach to cooperation faced a series of major challenges after 2003, when the EU began to undertake foreign security assistance operations under the rubric of a new institutional framework: the Common Security and Defence Policy (CDSP). Within the space of just a few years, the EU found itself organising a range of complex CSDP operations involving police forces, rule of law tasks, border monitoring, peace monitoring, and, in some cases, the projection of air, land, and naval forces into conflict zones. As the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy framework was not specifically equipped to deal with this degree of rapid task expansion, officials involved in the CSDP had to devise a completely new set of institutional rules and bodies to cope with these challenges. This paper examines the emergence of several innovative methods of EU cooperation and institution-building in the context of the CSDP, including transgovernmental integration, mimetic learning (from UN and NATO experiences in particular), and institutional learning-by-doing. However, the paper also notes that this innovative informal approach based on the accumulation of practical experience in the CSDP has run into serious difficulties since the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty reforms.
