The French and British Change in Position in the CESDP: A Security Community and Historical/Institutionalist Perspective

The conclusions reached by the European Council in Helsinki in December 1999 aimed at strengthening the common European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). EU Member States decided that the EU should be able to assume responsibility for the full range of conflict prevention and crisis management tasks required to deal with events such as the Balkans crisis. They are currently looking at the degree of autonomous capacity available to the EU to take decisions, and where NATO as a whole is not engaged, to conduct EU-led military operations in response to international crises. This paper argues that France and the United Kingdom reached more than Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) agreements when they negotiated the creation of the ESDP, changing their initial positions, with the UK changing its preferences. These EU Member States were mainly motivated by how the United States dealt with the Balkans crisis. They were then constrained in their action by US and EU institutions. Realism, the conventional theory expected to explain high-level political decision-making processes, does not seem appropriate to explain changes in the British and French positions. Rather, the concept of a security community and historical institutionalism might be more useful. This paper is divided into two main parts. The first analyzes the creation and substance of the ESDP, while the second focuses on the evolution of the French and British positions and looks at possible explanations for this change.