Neofunctionalism and EU external policy integration: the case of capacity building in support of security and development (CBSD)

ABSTRACT

Under the umbrella of Capacity Building in Support of Security and Development (CBSD), the EU provides equipment and infrastructure to the armed forces of partner countries. The 2017 reform of the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) to implement CBSD represents a remarkable integrative step at the interface of EU security and development policy. This article explains the IcSP reform through a neofunctionalist lens. It argues that the extension of the Commission’s competences in EU security affairs can be explained by the interaction of functional and cultivated spillover pressures. Functional discrepancies between the CSDP framework and EU development policy created strong pressures for further integrative steps. Moreover, the Commission exerted strong pressures for adopting its proposal for implementing CBSD through the IcSP by drawing on a combination of strategic coalition-building, bargaining tactics and community framing. The case illustrates neofunctionalism’s potential to explain external policy integration.

KEYWORDS:

• CBSD
• EU external policy
• IcSP
• neofunctionalism
• security-development nexus
• spillover

Introduction

The 2016 EU Global Strategy (EUGS) has called for a joined-up approach to the EU’s external policies in order to strengthen the alignment of different sectoral policies and thus increase EU external policy coherence (European Union 2016a: 26, 49–50). Policy-making at the cross-sectoral level – i.e., formulation and implementation of policy initiatives that cross the legal and institutional boundaries of individual policy areas – has thus become a main challenge for the EU in its quest to forge a more comprehensive and coherent external policy approach.

Capacity Building in Support of Security and Development (CBSD) is a recent initiative to foster EU external policy coherence at the security-development interface. Under the umbrella of CBSD, the EU has started to fund the provision of equipment and infrastructure to armed forces of partner countries. The content of CBSD would suggest its implementation in the realm of the Common Foreign and Security Policy/ Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP). However, in December 2017 EU institutions (Council, Commission, European Parliament) agreed upon a reform of the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) – a financing instrument in the realm of development policy – to put CBSD into practice. Consequently, decisions on where and to what extent the EU will provide training, equipment and infrastructure to armed forces in partner countries are taken by the Service for Foreign Policy Instruments (FPI), a body under the auspices of the European Commission. In a nutshell, the 2017 IcSP reform led to supranational empowerment in terms of the Commission’s role in EU security affairs and paved the way for funding support to foreign armed forces through the EU’s budget.

How can we explain this extension of the European Commission’s influence in EU security affairs? In this article I argue that neofunctionalist spillover logics – functional pressures and supranational entrepreneurship – provide a plausible explanation of the 2017 IcSP reform.

Initially, neofunctionalist integration theory may seem as a counter-intuitive choice in this regard, partly because neofunctionalists themselves have focused rather little on integration in foreign and security policy; partly because scholars from other theoretical traditions, most prominently intergovernmentalists, have raised strong doubts concerning the application of neofunctionalist logics in an area of ‘high politics’ (Hoffmann 1966: 882; cf. Niemann and Speyer 2018: 24).

Nevertheless, I argue that drawing on neofunctionalist insights to explain the IcSP reform is a worthwhile endeavour that contributes to existing scholarship. First, the relative absence of neofunctionalist accounts in the study of EU external policy may be due to the literature’s predominant focus on issues of power, legitimacy and effectiveness (Damro 2012; Manners 2001; Sjursen 2006). Nevertheless, the question of integration and its drivers is as relevant as in the context of EU internal policies (Thomas 2011). Through its particular focus on explaining policy-making dynamics and outcomes, neofunctionalism should be apt to account for policy changes in the external realm, in particular if it is applied to instances of incremental decision-making and policy reforms such as the case at hand (Haas 2004: xvi).

Second, there is an ongoing debate on the creeping influence of supranational actors in EU foreign and security policy. Despite member states’ strong reluctance to transfer decision-making competences in foreign and security affairs to the European level, recent studies show that supranational actors such as the European Commission, the European Parliament or the European Court of Justice have played an increasingly important role in CFSP/CSDP policy-making, taking it beyond intergovernmental cooperation (Blauberger and Weiss 2013; Riddervold 2016; Rosén and Raube 2018).

Although the importance of supranational agency is recognised in this literature, explicit links to neofunctionalist thought are scarce. However, linking empirical observations more closely with the neofunctionalist logic of cultivated spillover bears the potential to further theorise the dynamics and conditions of supranational agency. The 2017 IcSP reform represents, indeed, a crucial case for neofunctionalism’s explanatory power because the provision of training and equipment to military actors in fragile states is close to the heart of security and defence policy, a policy realm that has been traditionally perceived as the last ‘domaine reservée’ of European nation states.

Third, the 2017 IcSP reform is a recent example of policy-making on the ‘security-development nexus’ in EU external policy. Scholars working on this nexus have predominantly focused on the implications of the interlinkages between these two policy fields in terms of securitisation and coordination issues (Furness and Gänzle 2017; Keukeleire and Raube 2013; Merket 2016). This literature is relatively light in theorising, an observation that also holds for EU development policy studies more broadly (Delputte and Orbie 2018: 292–93). However, neofunctionalism should be ideally suited to explain cross-sectoral policy-making at the security-development interface because exploring (functional) linkages between policy fields and their implications for actors’ behaviour is one of neofunctionalism’s core competences.

The article proceeds as follows: the first section specifies neofunctionalist logics to explain EU external policy integration. Section 2 briefly outlines the CBSD initiative and the IcSP reform. The subsequent sections investigate the extent that neofunctionalist logics – functional and cultivated spillover pressures – help us to explain the outcome. While I cannot systematically test if neofunctionalism provides the only or best explanation of the case, the final section discusses the strengths and limitations of neofunctionalism in light of potential alternative explanations. The main finding of the article is that functional discrepancies between CFSP/CSDP and EU development policy created strong pressures for further integrative steps that were then exploited by supranational actors, in particular the European Commission. Drawing on a combination of strategic coalition-building, bargaining tactics and community framing, supranational actors pushed the member states towards agreeing to the IcSP reform instead of implementing CBSD within the CFSP/CSDP framework.

Neofunctionalism and EU external policy integration

Neofunctionalists understand regional integration as a process that evolves over time and can unfold its own dynamics. Integration is driven by diverse and multiple actors who may also build transnational coalitions (Haas 1964: 68). Neofunctionalists differentiate between the level/depth and scope/breadth of integration. The level of integration captures the degree to which an issue or policy is governed by supranational institutions and rules, while the scope of integration refers to the breadth of issues dealt with at the European level (Niemann 2006: 55).

Actors are understood as rational agents who seek to maximise their utility, but they also have the capacity to learn and change their preferences (Haas 1958: 291). Neofunctionalism builds on what Haas termed a ‘soft rational choice ontology’, implying that actors’ preferences are not taken as fixed and exogenously given. Rather, actors have the ability to redefine their values and thus to re-consider their preferences (Haas 2001: 23; Niemann 2006: 26). Interaction is characterised by positive-sum games and incremental decision-making, often driven by unintended consequences of previous decisions that were taken on the basis of imperfect knowledge and under time pressure (Niemann and Schmitter 2009).

This article adopts a neofunctionalist framework to explain EU external policy integration, which is understood here as ‘the (gradual) increase in terms of level and scope of EU competences and action in the external policy domain’ (Bergmann and Niemann 2018: 426–27). Two neofunctionalist ‘spillover’ logics are further specified below: functional and cultivated spillover.¹

Functional spillover

The concept of functional spillover captures the pressures that arise when an original objective can only be achieved by further integrative actions (Lindberg 1963: 10). The basis of functional discrepancies is the interdependence of policy sectors or issue areas (Haas 1958: 297). Integrative steps in one sector may create tensions and contradictions with the other sector. The strength of functional pressures depends on the salience of the original goal and the availability of alternative solutions to further integrative steps. However, functional discrepancies do not translate automatically into integrative action. The extent to which functional pressures influence actors’ behaviour depends on their perception of the relative importance and urgency of those pressures (Niemann 2006: 31). Neofunctionalists have suggested that the political discourse serves as an indicator for decision-makers perceiving functional logics at play (Niemann and Ioannou 2015: 198).

The logic of functional spillover can also be applied to the external policy realm given that EU internal policies have become strongly interlinked with external policy areas (Pierson 1998). Moreover, we observe the increasing emergence of an external dimension of internal policies such as immigration, higher education and science policy that diversifies the EU’s external engagement (Damro et al. 2018). Functional discrepancies can also evolve between different external policy areas, such as CFSP and enlargement policy (Bergmann and Niemann 2018).

Taken together, to trace functional spillover dynamics the following elements need to be identified: (i) the existence of functional interdependencies leading to dysfunctionalities; (ii) path-dependencies and the lack of alternative solutions to further integration; (iii) policy-makers regarding these functional logics as plausible or even compelling.

Cultivated spillover

Cultivated spillover refers to pressures for further integration created by supranational institutions (Tranholm-Mikkelsen 1991: 6). The underlying assumption is that supranational actors, once created, take a life of their own and are primarily concerned with increasing their own powers, thereby providing further impetus to the integration process. Supranational entrepreneurship may take the form of promotional brokerage, lifting agreements beyond the lowest common denominator, or be based on taking positions of centrality and authority within the EU’s political system (Haas 1964; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970).

Recent studies suggest supranational institutions have also provided significant impetus for integration in EU security policy (Riddervold 2016; Riddervold and Rosén 2016). Based on this literature, I propose three types of supranational entrepreneurship that appear particularly relevant to the security-development interface and are compatible with the forms of supranational entrepreneurship proposed by neofunctionalists. The underlying assumption is that if/when policy initiatives go beyond CFSP/CSDP and need to draw on instruments within the development policy realm, supranational actors will seek to exploit their expertise and competences (Chou and Riddervold 2015).

The first type of supranational entrepreneurship, strategic coalition building, suggests that supranational actors build alliances with EU member states that share their preferences to push for further integration and thus increase their own competences (Chou and Riddervold 2015: 64). The second type, bargaining influence, suggests that supranational actors draw on their institutional bargaining power to make sure that policy initiatives at the security-development interface increase their own competences. While the Commission may offer or threaten to withhold important implementing capacities for CFSP/CSDP initiatives (such as the external financing instruments legally rooted in development policy), both the Commission and the EP could potentially block or delay EU policies, for example, by conferring matters to the EU Court of Justice (Blauberger and Weiss 2013; Riddervold and Rosén 2016).

The third type of supranational entrepreneurship, community framing, suggests that supranational actors try to frame policy issues as genuinely cross-sectoral (Riddervold and Rosén 2016: 690). In this logic, they put forward the argument that if a policy initiative has strong linkages to development policy, further integrative steps in the field of development policy are a logical consequence, which would imply an increase of their competences. In other words, we would expect supranational actors to make a strong case for the development policy aspect of a policy initiative at the security-development nexus in an attempt to push for an increase of their competences within the field of development policy.

Taken together, to trace cultivated spillover dynamics the following elements need to be identified: (i) supranational actors’ preference for action towards further integration; (ii) supranational entrepreneurship that takes the form of strategic coalition building, bargaining influence, community framing, or some combination thereof.

The CBSD initiative and the reform of the IcSP

The discussions on how best to combine CSDP operations and the EU’s efforts to build the security capacities of third states/organisations emerged primarily in the context of the EU military training missions in Somalia and Mali launched in 2010 and 2013 (European Council 2013). In implementing these missions, it became apparent that the EU lacked adequate funding mechanisms to provide equipment such as communication tools, protective gear and adequate training facilities to partner countries’ armed forces (Tardy 2015). Identifying these two countries as pilot cases, in November 2014 the Council tasked the High Representative (HR) and the Commission to develop a joint proposal for an initiative to support capacity building of the EU’s partners (Council of the EU 2014: para. 6). At that time, the existing set of instruments to assist partner countries’ security sectors did not allow the EU to use budgetary resources to provide equipment to military actors in partner countries (see section below).

In April 2015 the European Commission and the HR issued a Joint Communication on ‘Capacity building in support of security and development (CBSD) – enabling partners to prevent and manage crises’ (European Union 2015). Based on findings derived from the pilot cases, the Communication on CBSD identified the need to adopt a more coherent EU approach towards security capacity building, including an improvement of the EU’s financial capabilities to provide material support to its partners (European Union 2015: 8–12). To put CBSD into practice, the European Commission in June 2016 proposed a Regulation on reforming the IcSP, adding an €100 million envelope for the provision of non-lethal equipment and infrastructure to third parties.² In December 2017, the Council and the European Parliament agreed on the final text of the amended IcSP Regulation based on the Commission’s proposal, paving the way for the implementation of CBSD measures within the current Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) until 2020 (European Union 2017).

The CBSD initiative and its implementation through the IcSP represent a remarkable integrative step in terms of scope/breadth and level/depth of integration. It increases the breadth of issues dealt with at the European level because the provision of equipment and infrastructure to the armed forces of partner countries had not been part of the EU’s security toolbox yet. It is the first time that EU budgetary resources are used to fund assistance to third party military actors. The IcSP reform also represents an increase in the depth of integration as it charges a supranational actor, the Commission’s Service for Foreign Policy Instruments (FPI), with this task instead of establishing an intergovernmental body to administer the envisaged funds. As financing decisions under Article 3 of the IcSP do not have to go through comitology procedure and are only presented to the Political and Security Committee (PSC) for information, EU Member States have no formal decision-making power in this process (Landell Mills et al. 2017: Annex 6). Although the amended IcSP Regulation will expire in 2020, the Commission’s recent proposal to continue to fund CBSD measures through the EU budget within the next MFF (2021–2027) indicates that this integrative step is not likely to be revoked (European Commission 2018: 31–2).

The subsequent empirical analysis of negotiation dynamics between the Commission, Council and EP in the period between 2015 and 2017 builds on triangulation across multiple data sources. First, I conducted nineteen semi-structured interviews between June and December 2017. Interviewees included officials from the European Commission (DG DEVCO, FPI) and the European External Action Service (EEAS), Members of the European Parliament from different political groups, member state representatives in Headquarters and Permanent Representations in Brussels, and a civil society expert (see Annex I). As the interviews were conducted during ongoing legislative negotiations, they were all done on the condition of anonymity. Subsequently, I attributed individual statements to the different theoretical arguments under scrutiny as well to potential alternative explanations.

Second, I reviewed official EU documents and transcribed parts of EP plenaries and committee meetings (AFET, DEVE) dealing with the IcSP reform, based on the available video documentation on the EP website. Finally, I accounted for relevant secondary literature, primarily policy papers and statements produced by think tanks and NGOs.

The analysis of these data sources followed what Beach and Pedersen (2013: 18–21) termed ‘theory-testing process tracing’, i.e., to probe whether the hypothesised mechanisms derived from neofunctionalism can account for the outcome. In doing so, I investigated to what extent the individual elements of the functional/supranational spillover dynamics identified above were present and played out as theorised. The next sections present the results of the process-tracing analysis.

Functional spillover

The CBSD initiative and the ensuing reform of the IcSP can be explained as steps taken to alleviate pressures arising from an incomplete institutional architecture for EU security sector reform (SSR) activities and CSDP military training missions.

Capacity building and training of partner countries’ armed forces has been an incremental element of CSDP. Since the launch of the first EU military operation ARTEMIS in 2003, there have been five EU military operations with a strong or exclusive mandate for training and advising partner countries’ armed forces: EUFOR ALTHEA Bosnia–Herzegovina, EUSEC RD Congo, EUMAM RCA Central African Republic, EUTM Somalia and EUTM Mali (Ansorg and Haastrup 2018: Appendix). While EU member states pay for the expenses for their soldiers participating in EU military operations themselves, the costs for common expenses such as infrastructure for the deployed soldiers or troop transport are funded through the ad-hoc Athena mechanism. The Athena mechanism, however, cannot be used to fund the provision of equipment and infrastructure to third parties. Outside the CSDP framework, there are two instruments that the EU can draw upon to fund capacity building of partners’ security forces: the IcSP, and the African Peace Facility (APF) funded through the off-budget European Development Fund (EDF). While the IcSP has been limited to cooperation with civilian security forces (e.g., police), the APF is a regional funding mechanism. Assistance funded by the APF can only be channelled through regional organisations such as the AU or ECOWAS, but the APF does not allow for direct assistance to partner countries’ security forces.

This gap between the CSDP framework and EU development policy led to dysfunctionalities when the EU military training missions in Mali and Somalia were confronted with shortages of adequate equipment and infrastructure on part of their partners that seriously hampered the effectiveness of these missions (European Parliament 2017a: 5; Tardy 2015). As an EU examination of EUTM Mali found,

the trained units lack communication equipment, thus hindering command and control […] Other needs and requirements include ambulances, water tanks and fuel trucks to ensure autonomy and the ability to operate independently. (European Union 2015: 6)

As the first Head of EUTM Mali, French General Francois Lecointre, put it, EU military trainers found a ‘very impoverished and disorganised’ Malian army that ran short of any basic equipment needed to maintain a functioning armed force (Fletcher 2013). According to an EU official familiar with both EUTM Mali and EUTM Somalia, these shortages have put into danger the overall success of the missions:

what is important to understand is that there are potential counter-productive effects if we train but cannot equip. Because if we do not provide the necessary equipment for the tasks we trained the soldiers for, we can damage the overall strategic goals of the missions. And there are reputational costs as well. (interview J)

These dysfunctionalities created pressures to change the existing institutional framework for supporting CSDP operations, also because there was a certain degree of path-dependency and a lack of alternative solutions. A spillback in the field of CSDP as a consequence of these dysfunctionalities, i.e., a withdrawal of joint EU military training missions was not considered an option (interviews F, S,). The bilateral provision of necessary equipment by EU member states was discussed as an alternative in a few individual cases, but it was neither perceived a consistent nor sustainable long-term solution (European Union 2015: 6).

In contrast, EU member state officials emphasised the rationale for having an EU funding mechanism for supporting the EU’s military training missions (interviews F, M, O, P, S). The empirical evidence indeed suggests that both EU and member state policy-makers regarded these functional pressures as plausible and compelling. In the first ever thematic Council debate on EU defence in December 2013, Germany introduced the idea of a new EU initiative to train and equip military actors in partner countries under the concept of ‘enable and enhance’, which was later taken up by the EEAS under the formula ‘train and equip’ (Tardy 2015: 2). Following the Communication on CBSD, ten EU member states tabled an informal ‘food for thought paper’ at the Foreign Affairs Council in April 2016 to put further pressure on the Commission to propose a plan for the quick implementation of CBSD (CONCORD 2018: 6).³ This initiative illustrates that several EU member states were aware of and acted upon the functional pressures to take further integrative steps.

Another indication of the perceived dysfunctionalities between CSDP and EU development policy is the notion of CBSD as the ‘missing piece’ or ‘missing link’ between EU security and development policy. This narrative can be found in several policy documents and speeches (Danjean 2017; European Commission 2017; European Parliament 2017c; European Union 2016b). This discourse is important to the functional spillover argument because it underlines that the functional logic was considered as plausible.

The empirical findings thus demonstrate the importance of functional spillover pressures to explain the emergence of the CBSD initiative. However, the evidence also shows that EU member states held different views on the appropriate instrument to implement CBSD. Particularly, Germany and France initially preferred to undertake the capacity building measures within the CFSP framework, which would have meant a lesser degree of integration in terms of depth compared to the choice for a development policy instrument like the IcSP managed by the Commission (interviews B, C, F, S). In fact, the Council’s own legal service had argued in an opinion on the Commission’s proposal that the proposed activities fell under the realm of CFSP, thus supporting Germany’s and France position (Hautala 2017: 2).

Two factors stand out in explaining why the Council finally approved the Commission’s proposal for the IcSP reform. First, the interview evidence suggests that the perception of time pressures and a sense of urgency to overcome the existing obstacles in the EU’s financing architecture were a key driver behind member states’ agreement to fund CBSD through the IcSP (interviews A, C, F, O, S). The importance of time pressures for decision-making within the Council corresponds with the neofunctionalist assumption that decisions in the political arena are often taken under closing deadlines and a sense of urgency (Haas 1970: 627). Second, and most importantly, supranational entrepreneurship exerted by the Commission and the European Parliament added significant pressures on the member states to agree to this compromise solution (see next section).

Cultivated spillover

The negotiations on the CBSD initiative and the Regulation amending the IcSP were significantly shaped by the European Commission and the European Parliament.

The European Commission

The empirical evidence suggests that the European Commission played a highly influential role in shaping the debate on CBSD and strongly pushed for its implementation through a reformed IcSP, thus increasing its own competences at the security-development interface.

There is clear evidence that the Commission used bargaining tactics for getting the member states’ consent to the 2016 proposal on amending the IcSP Regulation. When discussions on ‘train and equip’ first emerged within the Council in December 2013, the European Commission quickly signalled its strong concerns that the provision of equipment and infrastructure to third parties may conflict with Art. 41(2) of the Treaty on European Union (interviews B, Q, S). This Treaty article prohibits the use of budgetary resources for expenditures arising from operations having military or defence implications (Treaty on European Union 2009: Art. 41).

From the point of the Commission, these kind of activities could only be financed through the EU’s budget if there was a strong link with development policy and objectives. In turn, this meant that the Commission insisted on a rather narrow range of equipment funded by the EU. EU assistance should not be used for any purposes other than for the delivery of development services or security for development (interviews B, F, M, Q; European Commission 2016). Interviewees confirmed that the Commission signalled to the Council that it would legally oppose an initiative on military capacity-building within the CFSP/CSDP framework that would allow for a broad range of equipment to be purchased (interviews B, F, S). As one interviewee put it, ‘there is a strong perception among parts of the Commission that it has to act as a guardian of the treaty, making sure that the restrictions set by Article 41(2) do not erode’ (interview S).

In other words, the Commission used the threat of legal procedures to convince Member States that funding for CBSD had to be placed within the field of development policy if it was to be in accordance with the Treaty on European Union. In this endeavour, the Commission aligned with the position of member states such as Sweden and Ireland who were rather sceptical about the CBSD dossier and argued that it could only be financed through the EU’s budget if there was a strong link to development objectives and principles. This strategic coalition-building thus put further credibility to the Commission’s stance (interviews B, F, M).

In addition, the Commission used its right of initiative to push for an implementation of CBSD through the IcSP. While the Communication on CBSD in 2015 had identified three options for implementation – not including a reform of the IcSP – the Commission argued in the Impact Assessment accompanying the 2016 proposal that the most appropriate short-term option to support CBSD actions within the framework of the MFF 2014–2020 was to reform the IcSP (European Union 2016b; interviews A, C, K).⁴ An initial appraisal of the Commission’s Impact Assessment by the European Parliament heavily criticised the Commission’s bias towards the IcSP reform, stating that ‘none of the options presented, with the exception of the preferred one, were considered to be realistic, viable options and all were therefore discarded early on’ (European Parliament 2016: 4).

Another indication of the Commission’s resolve to push through the IcSP reform is that the Commission’s leadership was not willing to accept the opinion of its own legal service. In March 2015, the Commission’s Legal Service came to the conclusion that cooperation with military actors could not be conducted under the legal framework of development cooperation, i.e., through the IcSP. In a second opinion in February 2017, and reportedly due to political pressure from within the Commission, however, the Legal Service argued that financing CBSD through the IcSP was possible when it served development objectives (Hautala, 2017: 2; interviews Q, S).

Apart from strategic coalition-building and bargaining, I also found evidence for community framing by the Commission. When there were strong concerns within the European Parliament about development policy being the correct legal basis for CBSD activities, the Commission, including the High Representative/ Vice-President of the Commission Federica Mogherini, strongly emphasised the development aspect of CBSD, thus making the argument for placing CBSD within the field of development policy. The 2016 proposal for the amended IcSP Regulation emphasises the links between CBSD and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the sustainable development goals (SDGs) (European Commission 2016: 3). In the EP plenary debate on the legislative proposal on 14 September 2017, HR/VP Mogherini intervened right before the votes were taken and made the following statement:

(…) this is not about moving the objective from development to security. On the contrary, it is to fulfil the SDG number 16 that links development and security and asks all international players to dedicate also resources to guarantee that the security conditions are there for the development work to have effectiveness. (Mogherini 2017)

By (re)framing CBSD as an initiative with a strong footing in development policy and linking it to the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs – a key reference point for EU development policy – the Commission and the HR/VP built up a strong rationale for the proposed integrative steps.

In sum, the Commission’s strong entrepreneurship was crucial to member states’ understanding that this was the ultimate compromise that could be achieved in relation with the Commission. As a representative of an EU member state that had initially favoured a solution within the CFSP framework explained,

given these circumstances, the joint position of France and Germany then was to give a chance to the Commission to implement CBSD through the IcSP, but identify some projects in advance that could provide a clear added value to CSDP operations and make sense from a military point of view. (interview S)

The European Parliament

The European Parliament provided further integrative impetus to the negotiations on the IcSP reform, although to a lesser extent than the Commission. At the same time, there was also considerable resistance within the EP towards this integrative step as the issue was very much contested among the different parliamentary groups. One point of debate was whether CBSD further contributed to the securitisation of development policy; another if the assistance of armed forces of fragile, and often authoritarian states, undermines EU development policy objectives, in particular the goal of reducing global poverty (European Parliament 2017a; Hautala 2017).

NGOs working on development cooperation and/or civilian peacebuilding strongly lobbied the European Parliament against the IcSP reform out of a concern that CBSD would lead to a further securitisation of EU development policy. For example, the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO), a civil society platform of 35 NGOs and think tanks, criticised in an open letter to MEPs the insufficient justification of funding CBSD through the IcSP:

we do not feel that simplistic references to the “Security-Development Nexus” and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 are adequate to justify such a major change to the EU’s approach to external assistance. (EPLO 2017: 1)

To avoid that CBSD would divert funding away from development cooperation and civilian peacebuilding activities, it was argued that CBSD should not be funded through the IcSP, but rather in the context of CFSP/CSDP or by the member states themselves. This critical reasoning resonated well with some factions within the European Parliament, particularly the Greens/EFA and the leftist GUE/NGL, but also parts of the S&D group (interviews G, H, K, Q; Hautala 2017).

These tensions within the EP resulted in a hard-bargained compromise. On the one hand, the EP successfully injected several references to the 2030 Agenda and SDGs into the Regulation on amending the IcSP and thus supported the Commission’s position that military capacity building could only be funded through the EU’s budget if it served development objectives (European Union 2017: 7). On the other hand, EP negotiators in the final trilogue negotiations on the IcSP Regulation insisted on excluding funds from the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI) for financing CBSD measures (European Union 2017: 10).

The EP’s rapporteur, the French MEP Arnaud Danjean, strongly pushed for a quick adoption of the Commission’s proposal in the parliament. His first draft report on the dossier significantly broadened the scope of the proposed CBSD actions and therefore stirred considerable criticism among all parliamentary groups except from the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Liberal Alliance (ALDE) (European Parliament, 2017c: 10; interviews G, Q). Subsequently, he withdrew his draft and returned to the original formulations of the Commission in a second draft in order to gain the Social Democrats’ (S&D) support to the Regulation. Moreover, he accommodated to the demands for an exclusion of DCI funds for generating the additional €100 million for CBSD activities, a key issue raised within the Committee on Development (DEVE) and by S&D parliamentarians (Lietz 2017; interviews G, Q). Through this move, he managed to build a majority of MEPs of EPP, S&D and ALDE that endorsed the EP’s mandate for the trilogue negotiations in September 2017. In the subsequent trilogue, the EP negotiators successfully applied bargaining tactics vis-à-vis the Council and the Commission, making their consent to the IcSP reform dependent upon the exclusion of DCI funds (interviews Q, S).

EP negotiators celebrated the final compromise as a victory for the EP because no ‘development money’ would be spent for CBSD (European Parliament 2017b; Lietz 2017). Simultaneously, through their consent to the Regulation they subscribed to development policy (Art. 208 TFEU) as the correct legal basis for CBSD actions. This apparent contradiction illustrates the tensions within the EP that prevented it from engaging more strongly in supranational entrepreneurship.

In sum, the evidence suggests that both the Commission and the EP demonstrated a preference for further integrative action. While the Commission strongly pushed for the IcSP reform and engaged in all three types of supranational entrepreneurship (coalition-building, bargaining, community framing), EP negotiators primarily used bargaining tactics, also as a means to secure internal consent within the parliament to the IcSP reform.

Discussion and conclusions

This article set out to explain integration at the interface of EU security and development policy through a neofunctionalist lens. The empirical findings on the CBSD initiative and the IcSP reform match neofunctionalist expectations on functional and cultivated spillover logics well. The functional discrepancies between the CSDP framework and EU development policy resulted in an incomplete financing architecture for CSDP military training missions that created strong pressures for further integrative steps. These pressures became particularly evident when EU officials and member state representatives realised that these dysfunctionalities put into danger the success of the training missions EUTM Mali and EUTM Somalia. Drawing on a combination of strategic coalition-building, bargaining tactics and community framing, the Commission exerted strong pressures for adopting its proposal for implementing CBSD through the IcSP. The European Parliament added further integrative impetus to this endeavour, but was less supportive of the reform proposal due to strong internal divisions on the complementarity of CBSD with EU development policy. In sum, the interaction of functional pressures prompting EU member states to push for the CBSD initiative and supranational entrepreneurship exerted by the Commission and the EP provides a convincing explanation of the case.

Yet, this does not preclude potential alternative explanations. Liberal intergovernmentalism (LI) is an obvious candidate in this regard. Liberal intergovernmentalists have strongly criticised neofunctionalism’s lack of attention to member states’ preferences (Moravcsik 1993: 477). In the case at hand, one could plausibly argue that member states’ preferences are crucial to explain the variation of their responses to functional pressures. In the case of France, it is evident that there was also a strong national interest to complement its own security engagement in conflicts such as Mali with an EU-level funding mechanism, thus sharing the financial burden of security sector reform activities more equally among EU member states (Tardy 2015; interviews F, S). Similar arguments about the importance of national preferences could also be made for more CBSD-sceptic states such as Sweden that has traditionally been more sceptical towards the intermingling of development and security policies (Loevin 2016).

Yet, the empirical analysis demonstrates that member states did not stick to their initial positions due to the interaction of functional pressures and supranational entrepreneurship. While CBSD supporters such as France and Germany finally gave their consent to a reform of the IcSP instead of a solution within the CFSP/CSDP framework, the CBSD sceptics such as Sweden and Ireland gave up their hesitancy to fund military capacity building through a development policy instrument and also agreed on the IcSP reform. In other words, while there was a clear demand for integration, its supply can only be explained by taking into account functional pressures and the role of supranational entrepreneurship. Although liberal intergovernmentalism may well explain the preference formation among member states and the bargaining dynamics within the Council, neofunctionalism thus provides a superior explanation of the overall outcome of the legislative process. Hence, the article confirms the argument made by recent studies that there is substantial potential for neofunctionalism to explain integration in the external policy domain and a need to further exploit this potential (Bergmann and Niemann 2018: 434; Visoka and Doyle 2018: 444).

Apart from the article’s contribution to neofunctionalist theorising, the findings resonate well with recent claims about the creeping supranationalisation of EU foreign and security policies (Riddervold 2016; Rosén and Raube 2018). They indeed confirm the expectation by Riddervold and Rosén (2016: 699) that the EU’s growing focus on conducting a comprehensive and coherent foreign policy increases the possibilities of influence of supranational institutions. The Commission, in particular, exploited its centrality in the legislative process and applied both bargaining and framing tactics to ensure its policy-making influence.

Finally, the findings on the role of NGOs in lobbying against the IcSP reform suggest substantial scope for further exploring the ‘politics’ of EU external policy coherence. As this case demonstrates, the EU’s quest for a joined-up approach to its external policy is likely to create resistance among those groups that perceive integration as a threat to the distinctiveness of their respective policy fields. This opens up a space for additional examination of how different actors promote, contest and resist EU external policy coherence. Future studies could further investigate other cases of EU cross-sectoral policy-making, such as the migration-security, the development-climate or the humanitarian-development nexus.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous referees and my colleagues at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Mark Furness in particular, for helpful comments on earlier versions. Moreover, I am indebted to all interview partners for sharing their views and insights with me. Research for this article has received funding from the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in the context of the research project on ‘Europe’s role in the world: from development policy towards a policy for global sustainable development’ of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has received funding from the Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ)/ German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) in the context of the research project on ‘Europe’s role in the world: from development policy towards a policy for global sustainable development’ of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE).

Notes on contributors

Julian Bergmann

Julian Bergmann is a post-doctoral researcher at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE).

Notes

1 Another neofunctionalist logic is ‘political spillover’, referring to political pressures generated by national (governmental and non-governmental) elites based on their perception that problems of substantial interest cannot be adequately addressed at the domestic level (Niemann and Schmitter 2009: 49). After having controlled for political spillover pressures in the empirical analysis, the decision was taken not to include it into the theoretical framework because of moderate empirical support for this logic. Neither did the analysis reveal socialisation and deliberation processes on part of member states’ government officials nor did the findings suggest additional integrative pressures exerted by non-governmental elites. Rather, non-governmental elites played a crucial role in lobbying against further integrative steps (see empirical sections below).

2 The Commission’s proposal states that EU assistance under the CBSD component will continue to exclude the financing of (i) recurrent military expenditure, (ii) the procurement of arms and ammunition, and (iii) training which is solely designed to contribute to the fighting capacity of the armed forces (European Commission 2016). Non-lethal equipment may, inter alia, include IT systems, transport vehicles, communication means, and training infrastructure.

3 These EU member states were Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

4 The initially considered options were: (a) adapting the APF to allow for capacity building activities at the national level; (b) the establishment of a facility linking peace, security and development in the framework of one or more existing instruments, or (c) a dedicated instrument for military capacity building (European Union 2015: 11).

Annex I. Institutional affiliation of interviewees.

Table

A	European Commission, June 2017
B	European Commission, June 2017
C	European Commission, June 2017
D	European External Action Service, June 2017
E	European Commission, June 2017
F	EU member state, June 2017
G	S&D Group, European Parliament, June 2017
H	GUE/NGL Group, European Parliament, June 2017
I	European External Action Service, June 2017
J	European External Action Service, June 2017
K	European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO), June 2017
L	The European People’s Party (EPP), European Parliament, July 2017
M	EU member state, July 2017
N	European External Action Service, July 2017
O	EU member state, July 2017
P	EU member state, August 2017
Q	The Greens, European Parliament, August 2017
R	European Commission, August 2017
S	EU member state, December 2017