Threat perceptions and the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy since 9/11

This book aims at offering a deeper understanding of the complexity of policymakers’ action, especially in time of crisis, as was after 9/11 even in Europe insofar as elaborating a strategic culture was concerned. Each chapter examines an aspect of this overarching question: how do policymakers evaluate problems to tackle, what cognitive factors enter into play, how do they frame security, within which intellectual boundaries do they make sense of the changed security landscape, how have they formulated these new understandings in security documents the EU had been lacking until then and finally, how coherent is the external action of the EU in an area, the Middle East, deemed vital for EU security interests, albeit not in its immediate neighbourhood? Through a new analytical framework, security documents were distinguished according to four factors: cognitive uncertainty, threat perceptions, issue salience, and the lack of existing national approaches to the issue at stake. Ideally, the EU produces consensus when the four elements are present. In these cases, the action of the Union vis-à-vis its member states enjoys greater ‘autonomy’ and can create new policies. An example is the European Security Strategy, which is currently considered as embodying the emerging European strategic culture and which was elaborated enjoying limited national contributions but whose implications are several, both on the discursive as well as on the policy level. On the policy level, the EU policy towards the Middle East was taken as case study given the coterminous presence there of the main threats identified by the Union: new (terrorism and weapons of mass destruction) and old ones (failing states and regional conflicts). With regard to its external output, two criteria were adopted to evaluate European foreign policy: its degree of coherence (between discourses and policies, but also between its internal dimensions, especially between member states and EU institutions) and its ability to produce consensus on contested policy areas. Despite the EU’s active multi-layered involvement in several crisis- situations in the Middle East (from the nuclear standoff with Iran to the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, to Unifil II in Lebanon), Brussels, given the highly politicized nature of some of these conflicts and especially the existence of long-standing national approaches to these situations, acted more often amplifying rather than producing consensus. Supra-national solutions were easier to impose in the absence of existing national preferred policy courses and in presence of high uncertainty and high threat perception: the nuclear crisis with Iran and the role the EU3 plays there are an example of this kind. This book's contribution to the understanding of the underlying logics in the EU’s security understanding and policy elaboration is limited by not taking into account other global powers, such as the US, Russia, China and their policy prefe[...]