Taking Flight or Crashing Down? European Common Foreign Policy and International Crises

Abstract

What was the level of commonality in European foreign policy for recent international crises? This article assesses the level of commonality by conducting a chronological comparative content analysis to bring to light the rhetoric of European powers (United Kingdom, France and Germany) and EU actors. It focuses on the crises between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and the civil war in Libya of 2011. The article argues that states often converged in their positioning on a wide range of issues, even in moments of crisis. However, it also reveals that they remain in control of the timing of their statements and that EU actors were weak. This paper puts forth a novel tool to assess European foreign policy in times of crisis, it provides empirical data on the subject and highlights the importance of different types of issues in the assessment of commonality.

Keywords:

• Foreign policy analysis
• content analysis
• common European foreign policy
• integration
• cooperation
• international crises

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Ece Ozlem Atikcan, Francesco Cavatorta, Jonathan Paquin and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments in improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The declarations were retrieved from the official websites of: Élysée, Ministère des Affaires étrangères (France), Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 10 Downing Street, Federal Foreign Office of Germany (English version), Federal Government of Germany (English version), EU Council, EEAS, and for the United States, State Department and the White House.

2. Baldwin (2008) called it ‘Sarkozy’s Georgia Peace Plan.’

3. This finding is consistent with Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (2014, 903) who wrote about Germany’s overcompensation for its abstention.

4. Koenig (2011, 10) reports that EU members were displeased for not having been consulted before the French recognition of the TNC. Also, when the strikes began in Libya, France’s immediately began the operations on the ground without warning their allies, which angered Washington and London (Clarke 2011, 4).

5. For more on US-European alignments, see Paquin and Beauregard (2015).