European Union grand strategy and defense: strategy, sovereignty, and political union

Abstract

In its purest essence, the European Union (EU) is a political project with a commitment to reaching a finalité politique of a federal Europe. The paper focuses on EU grand strategy with special reference to defense cooperation in Europe in a transatlantic context. The paper analyzes the prospects for an EU strategy in the defense field and also looks at ways to explain this using suitable theoretical lenses as frameworks for analysis, including concepts drawn from the fields of comparative strategy and international relations. The EU is a political project and the paper will also ask how far the defense field is a necessary and contingent part of the drive toward political union in Europe and what this tells us about the prospects for an EU grand strategy in a transatlantic context. The paper will, in particular, focus on a series of case studies to analyze the prospects for a coherent EU politico-military culture, how such a culture operates, and what it means for EU grand strategy in a transatlantic context. What does this tell us about the defense area in terms of strategy, and also about the state of the European integration project itself?

Keywords:

• European Union
• NATO
• Common Security and Defence Policy

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Winn

Dr. Neil Winn is Senior Lecturer in European Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds. His work lies at the intersection of international relations and European politics and his research has focused on the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union and the international relations of Europe in general. He has cowritten EU Foreign Policy Beyond the Nation State: Joint Actions and Institutional Analysis of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (Palgrave) and was editor for Neo-Medievalism and Civil Wars (Frank Cass). He is also published in numerous journals.