The EU’s Strategic Approach to CSDP Interventions: Building a Tenet from Praxis

The article analyses the strategic and concrete approach of the EU and EU Member States to crisis management in the CSDP framework. In particular, it investigates the creation of objectives for CSDP interventions by exploring the way they have been developed, practised and interpreted by practitioners working in the CSDP framework.

The analysis argues that the development of the EU’s approach is characterised by experimentalism and emergence, which are enabled by repetitive processes of intergovernmentalism and institutional learning in the framework. At the same time, discrepancies in the integrated approach and decision-making are found to limit the capabilities of the EU as a strategic actor. Finally, three trends are argued to curtail the EU approach to crisis management at present: a decreasing level of ambition, squeezing between other instruments for foreign and security policy, and a rhetorical shift from external to internal security.

Reference: Karjalainen, T., Savoranta, V. (2021). The EU’s Strategic Approach to CSDP Interventions: Building a Tenet from Praxis, Finnish Institute of International Affairs Analysis, October 2021 (11).

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