The Post-Cold War Evolution of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy

• In Event: Military and Economic Interdependence

Abstract

This paper analyzes the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Berlin Wall fall and the subsequent decline of the threat from the Warsaw Pact encouraged the EU members to reap the “peace dividend” and materialize Fukuyama’s conception of the end of history. The idea that war on European soil is inconceivable permeated the European elite and public alike. The Yugoslav wars (the 1990s) and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (early 2000s) spurred the evolution of the CFSP, the establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS), and strategies for developing common military procurement programs, such as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), among others.
This paper employs ontological security and neoclassical realism approaches to explain how threat perceptions evolved over time and how domestic political constraints at the national and supranational levels delayed the transformation of the CFSP to face threats at Europe’s borders. The 2004 enlargement shifted the EU from a primarily Western European-centric developed bloc to an encompassing, democratizing union that needed to reinvent its identity to itself and others. The 2008 global financial crisis highlighted the vulnerability of some of its member states’ economies and the union’s place in the world. The democratic backsliding that has become more pronounced since 2008, Russian aggressive behavior toward the Baltic states and Poland did not change tenets of the CFSP until the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of domestic reactions against any policy that would imperil the economic interests of member states engaging with Russia and China. The widespread diffusion of liberal values, as envisioned by Fukuyama, was but a shortlived Western triumph.
The paper aspires to contribute in a theoretical/analytical sense to the literature within ontological security and neoclassical realism to understand the constraints imposed by the security of being to foreign policy choices in view of survival. It also aims to draw lessons that have policy implications regarding European security for EU institutions and their member states.

Author

• Dimitrios Kokoromytis, University of Utah