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Studies the implication of the European Security Defense Policy on Switzerland. Effects of the European Union's balanced security approach on the implementation and advancement of Switzerland's foreign and security policy goals; Consideration for Switzerland to Europeanizing its security and defense policy; Need for Switzerland to evaluate alternative options in preparation of joint actions.

This article undertakes a critical examination of the analytical leverage provided by the literature on strategic culture in explaining the development of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). It posits that patterns of progress and stasis in CSDP cannot be fully explained by processes of normative convergence and the resilience of national strategic cultures. Instead, the article argues that a focus on material power sheds greater light on the dynamics driving and hindering Europe's quest for military autonomy. It highlights how the ‘balance of threat’ is fostering both convergence and differentiation in the defence policies of Britain, France, and Germany. Through case studies of the development of British, French, and German policy towards CSDP and NATO, the article demonstrates the important roles played by energy dependency and geographical position in determining the willingness of European states to embed their defence policies in NATO/CSDP or pursue national strategic autonomy. The article argues that strategic culture can provide valuable insights into European defence cooperation; however, this contribution is best framed within the theoretical insights of neoclassical realism. By highlighting the nature of the variables determining the scope and depth of European defence cooperation, the article raises a number of policy implications for European security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As framed here, the key question regarding the larger debate about the European approach(es) to the United States after the end of the Cold War is: are the Europeans bandwagoning or balancing? And in that context, how should the development of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) be interpreted? Both articles provide valuable insights into the dynamics of transatlantic relations, yet they both miss important (although different) parts of the larger picture. First, this response to the two articles argues that the CSDP can be understood neither as balancing behaviour nor as an attempt to bandwagon with the United States for the simple reason that the CSDP is little but a paper tiger. For all practical purposes there is no common European security and defence policy. Second, it is argued that the structural realist tendency to see the Europeans' behaviour aseitherbalancingorbandwagoning is futile. Some European nations clearly bandwagon; others are pursuing a more independent and autonomous approach to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Realists continue to bend their analytical concepts and vocabulary in an attempt to subsume recent developments in European security policy under their traditional nomenclature. Yet neitherbalancing(preceded by some diminutive adjunct) norbandwagoningcaptures what is happening in Europe. The balancing proposition fails to explain the overwhelming incidence of European Union member states supporting rather than constraining American foreign policy. Yet that does not automatically entail bandwagoning, a concept which implies that they gave in to American threats or sought opportunistic gains through an alliance of convenience. Instead, European security policy is driven partly by a shared liberal consensus, and partly by diverging national preferences and priorities rooted in idiosyncratic political cultures. This article examines these diverging approaches by looking at how British, French, and German governments acted in the context of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Examining the drivers behind key operations undertaken in this framework, it focuses on CSDP's intended impact on the transatlantic relationship. EU foreign policy has generally furthered rather than countered American foreign policy preferences. But it is conceptually misleading to subsume this behaviour under bandwagoning. In contemporary EU-Europe (orEurope), the relevant arena for the struggle for power is the domestic stage. Beyond Europe, this perspective also challenges realists to reconsider the importance of domestic calculations in foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the early days of the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the European Security and Defence Policy, the EU has always paid special attention to developments in the Western Balkans and therefore declared them a strategic priority for European external action. Thus, it is not surprising that the first missions in the framework of ESDP were deployed to this region. Considering the deployment of civilian crisis management missions to the Western Balkans a first step in the shaping of a strategic culture and based on the assumption that the European Union clearly possesses the prerequisites to form such a strategic culture, the following chapter will analyse the development of civilian crisis management and chronologically describe and evaluate the four civilian missions carried out in the Western Balkans. The conclusion is that despite the fact that ESDP is still a work in progress, the engagement in civilian crisis management missions already provides a marker for the existence of an emerging European strategic culture in the process of formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence that the European Union has acquired a distinctive strategic culture must be sought in the realms both of ideas and of action. Elements of a declaratory European Union strategic culture are to be found in the 2003 European Security Strategy and the subsequent reflections of officials and academics. A supplementary but perhaps more reliable guide to its central features may lie in how the European Union has conducted itself in the 24 European Security and Defence Policy missions, both military and civilian, that it has created since 2003. Overviews of these missions reveal some consistent themes and patterns of behaviour roughly congruent with the discourse of EU strategic culture. A closer analysis of the two Balkan military operations – Concordia in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Althea in Bosnia-Herzegovina – gives a richer and more nuanced picture of the relationship between words and deeds. The aim in studying strategic culture should be not to reveal causality as much as to explore consistency between ideas and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's annexation of Crimea and war on Ukraine has led to upheaval in NATO's discourse and practice. Taking a step back from the security debate, this article contends that the very process of responding to Russian aggression has led to the reimagining of NATO's identity. While NATO tends to present change as continuity, this article's mixed methods analysis illuminates how a trio of new and ambitious self-representations have risen to prominence within NATO's post-Crimea discourse. NATO has anointed itself defender of the international rules-basedorder and purveyor of truth and facts amidst a world of disinformation, while pushing a resilience policy agenda that expands its authority into new domestic domains. Problematizing these shifts, the article warns that NATO's new narrative ignores its own role in the problems it seeks to solve and thus risks undermining NATO efforts to rally global support for Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing scholarship shows that neutral and non-aligned countries in Europe closely and often covertly engage with NATO despite their official posture. However, we lack comparative insights into how this phenomenon plays out in various countries. To understand this phenomenon of crypto-Atlanticism (CA) better we develop a framework to capture variations depending on the strength of elites' Atlanticist preferences and their perceptions of public opinion's preferences for neutrality. We illustrate our framework with evidence from twenty-four interviews with policy elites from Austria, Serbia and Sweden conducted between 2020 and 2022. Our findings show that elites exhibited various forms of CA: while the strength of Atlanticism is stronger in Austria and Sweden than in Serbia, the degree of restriction in publicly expressing these preferences was less restrained in Sweden than in Austria and Serbia. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for the theory and practice of military neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the connection between the new 2013 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation and Christian messianism in contemporary Russian intellectual thought. The ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics is associated with the return to the cultural and political ideologeme of Katechon, which is proposed by several right-wing intellectuals as the basis for the Russia's new state ideology and foreign and security policy. The theological concept of Katechon (from the Greekό Κατέχων, ‘the withholding’) that protects the world from the advent of the Antichrist originates in the Byzantine Empire. In Russian tradition, this concept is presented in the well-known doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome, dating back to the 16th century. The term ‘Katechon’ in contemporary Russian political discourse is relatively new and can be traced to the post-Soviet reception of Carl Schmitt's political theology. The concept of Russia as Katechon is directly connected to the national security and defence policy, because it is used as the ideological ground for the new wave of militarization and anti-Western sentiment, as well as for Russia's actions during the Ukrainian crisis. This analysis puts the internal political and cultural debate on Russia's role in international affairs and its relations with the West into historical perspective and demonstrates the right-wing intellectual circles’ influence on the Kremlin's new domestic and foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on fourth generation strategic culture debates to show the gap between the rhetoric of Australian defence and the more modest reality. Our analysis shows that these limits derive from tensions between national strategic culture and organizational strategic subcultures. There are serious debates in the nation regarding the preferred course of the Australian military and security policy. This article frames these debates by examining the ‘keepers’ of Australia's national strategic culture, the existence of several competing strategic subcultures, and the importance of norm entrepreneurs in changing defence and national security thinking. Strategic subcultures foster compartmentalization, constraints, and bureaucratic silos that narrow national conceptions of security threats and opportunities, and impinge on the formation of coherent foreign and defence policy in relation to the Asia-Pacific region. This analysis shows that a distinct national strategic culture and organizational strategic subcultures endure beyond individual governments, placing potential limits on Australia's interface with other Asia-Pacific strategic cultures in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tools of classical strategic analysis support distinctive explanations for the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union. Looking at the articulation between ends, ways, and means offers a perspective on the CSDP that is different from the approaches usually favoured by European Union specialists or even security studies scholars. In particular, it is argued here that the CSDP is no strategy, and little more than an institutional make-up for the lack of strategic thinking within the European Union. First, I show that the CSDP is not European security, and that the EU security policy is astonishingly absent from the security challenges facing Europe. Second, I argue that this situation stems from a lack of a political project within the European Union. I refer to the classical distinction made by Hans Morgenthau betweenpouvoirandpuissanceto show that, short of a political project, we will not see a strategic CSDP any time soon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Realist scholars have been challenged by the growing European integration in defence issues. In a previous article we argued that realism is still relevant, but we also criticized recent attempts to explain the ESDP/CSDP as a form of balance of power. In turn, we suggested that – coherently with realism's core propositions – the European efforts to forge a common security and defence policy can be explained as an example of bandwagoning. Writing from a liberal perspective, Benjamin Pohl contends that focusing on the role of states’ relative power in foreign policy behaviour is misleading. As a result, for Pohl European integration is driven by European states’ consensus on the American liberal international order. While conceding that liberalism is an important alternative approach, in this article we stress our main point: simply put, bandwagoning is a better explanation for ESDP/CSDP. Drawing on Pohl's remarks, we refine our argument by discussing how the concept of bandwagoning can be used for both alliance formation and alliance management. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on whether (and eventually how) it is possible to get to a synthesis of our positions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Engaging two recent articles published inContemporary Security Policy, this intervention affirms that the emergence of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) cannot be meaningfully described as European balancing vis-à-vis the United States. It is equally sceptical about attempts to explain it as a bandwagoning move. Instead, it suggests that European investment in CSDP can be most plausibly explained with a constructivist framework that takes into account strategic culture and identity-related concerns. From this perspective, CSDP is best understood as a vehicle for emancipating Europeans from American tutelage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although realist perspectives seem challenged to explain European choices and preferences, realism retains great utility with its stress on states and states' concern for their national interests. Traditional realist analysis of European security policy err, rather, by focusing on balancing and related concepts such as soft balancing and balancing for autonomy. These accounts are theoretically and empirically flawed. Whilst balancing perspectives shed some light on European security policy predispositions, bandwagoning better explains trans-Atlantic contemporary security cooperation and increases the explanatory power of realist theories. The case for European bandwagoning is illustrated here by the empirical experience of prominent European Union military initiatives and the French defence reforms in the post-Cold War period. The tendency to bandwagon shows that European attempts to increase capabilities are strengthening rather than weakening transatlantic ties. Contrary to dominant realist views, through bandwagoning NATO benefits from European security and defence policy, becoming more durable and stronger than traditional realism expects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at cases in which political leaders have engaged in seemingly inconsistent behaviour and explores how they framed and justified their decisions. After showing that strategic culture is composed of different facets, I argue that when faced with conflicting pressures from the international environment and their own national constituencies, political leaders intentionally manipulate facets of their own strategic culture to legitimate a decision, made for contingent reasons, to participate (or not) in a military operation. I illustrate this argument by analysing in depth the decision-making process and public justifications of the German participation in the European and Security Defence Policy (ESDP) mission EUFOR Congo in 2006 and its refusal to militarily participate in a similar mission in Chad in 2007. This conception of strategic culture as both a constraint and a resource for policymakers reinforces our understanding of the boundaries of strategic culture's explanatory power, and provides an explanation of seemingly inconsistent foreign policy behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the inter-organizational relationship of the two leading security organizations in Europe: the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rather than discussing the two organizations’ material overlaps, the paper discusses their quest for organizational identity and role in the domain of foreign and defence policy, as well as the ideational structures that affect both institutions’ social behaviour and their behaviour toward each other. It aims first to tease out how structures of meaning in the form of norms, values, and beliefs have affected the two organizations’ behaviour toward each other; and second to introduce explanatory arguments about their subcultural relationship that can help explain their attitudinal divergences. The article makes two arguments: First, there is a significant normative overlap between the two institutions, especially with regards to future challenges and threats and the role of third parties and international organizations. Second, I introduce a preliminary argument by holding that the best way to make sense of the ideational divergences between the two organizations is to conceptualize NATO's strategic culture as a subculture of the European Union's strategic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the European Union about to develop a strategic culture? Analysis of past and present civilian missions under the European Security and Defence Policy in Africa and the assessment of the corresponding institutional setup in Brussels, including the Lisbon Treaty, does not deliver evidence for such a geopolitical quality. Most of the European Union member states continue to be preoccupied with the practical puzzle of the EU's internal build-up. At best the former colonial powers, especially Paris and London, seem to have an idea of a more far-reaching role of the EU on the African continent (see Libya). In the security field the European Union remains a collection of states with no common defence and not much collective, let alone unified, political will. It also lacks the ability to mount the resources for its declared international ambitions. Without these prerequisites for any development of a strategic culture Brussels is condemned to stay at the margin of an increasingly competitive multipolar world and to simply hope for some influence in individual cases of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) is in crisis. The concept of strategic culture is controversial, even more so at the European level. Yet as a historical context and as a grouping of shared beliefs and practices, it helps us to better understand how and why the promises of Saint-Malo were not met. A specific set of European political and security beliefs that should not be confused with a strategic culture were developed at the European level. The EU's misunderstanding of human security, combined with a widespread risk aversion, has transformed CSDP missions into political exercises, more focused on Europe's own image, posture and legitimacy than on the strategic requirements necessary to their success. The EUFOR Chad mission, the longest and most complex CSDP mission so far, was a good illustration of this problem. Moreover, this operation played a significant role in the French disillusion and estrangement from CSDP itself. The credibility and legitimacy of the Union in security and defence are now in doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars interested in contemporary security and defence policy, in Europe as elsewhere, often seek refuge in conceptual havens, and the articles in this special issue are no exceptions. One of those sheltering spots has been dubbed security culture, while another fashionable resting place carries the label, ‘strategic culture’. This article argues that attempts to draw a distinction between the two categories are superfluous, not to say meaningless, and that insofar as what we should call our concept, it really is a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More important is the task of attempting to abstract policy significance from the complexity and definitional vagueness of the more ‘senior’ of the two concepts, namely strategic culture. This complexity and vagueness to the contrary notwithstanding, this article claims that strategic culture can be of some analytical use in highlighting the ways in which both context and character have played, and continue to play, a part in shaping states’ orientation toward security and defence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the naval strategy of the European Union (EU) with respect to foreign security operations and the anti-piracy operation under the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). It discusses the launch of the Operation Atalanta, ESDP naval mission that will fight piracy and provide the humanitarian aid in Horn of Africa. It also explores the development in the ESDP operations, development of the EU naval and maritime dimension, and launch of EU NAVFOR to counter threat.

German reunification, the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the iron curtain, as well as the large number of Eastern European countries from the former Eastern bloc that have gradually became members of the EU and/or NATO partners, have resulted in Germany 'moving' from the geographical periphery of the Cold War period into the centre of both the European Union and NATO alliances. This change in the security environment has had an impact on the German security and defence policy and has led to a process of continuous restructuring and resizing of Germany's armed forces, rendering large numbers of military SALW surplus. While in the immediate aftermath of unification, exports were initially chosen as the main means to reduce surplus weapons, this policy was changed to destruction becoming the means of reducing surplus stocks: from 1990 to 2006, the German military destroyed a total of 2,076,442 SALW from its own inventories, accomplished entirely through domestic processes. While the inheritance of an entire army and its weapons constitute a context-specific example, one technique can be drawn from the German case: surplus is identified by determining the national armament and security requirements, where surplus is anything left over. This method implies that international efforts to destroy surplus weapons should focus on assisting countries to determine what their armament requirements are; this would facilitate determining the quantity of arms over and beyond this armament requirement as surplus, which could then be easily destroyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the improvement of military capabilities has been a key rationale underpinning the development of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), EU member states' continued preference for non-binding, intergovernmental forms of 'soft' or 'new' governance in this policy field has limited progress significantly. It is argued here that while agreements based on such mechanisms are easier to make, they are also easier to break. Stronger governance elements, such as independent leadership and enhanced cooperation, are likely to be required if security ambitions are to be translated into the kind of credible, deployable military capabilities that member states seek. Clauses contained in the Constitutional Treaty, as well as the creation and consolidation of the European Defence Agency, permit a degree of optimism, however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the abstracts for several articles on defense policies towards ballistic missile defenses published within the issue. They include "America: Escaping the Legacy of the ABM Treaty," by Bernd W. Kubbig, "Canada: Doubting Hephaestus," by J. Marshall Beier and "Britain: Balancing Instinctive Atlanticism," by Mark Smith.

This article discusses the nuclear strategy of the U.S. in the twenty-first century. A revolutionary transformation is quietly occurring in US nuclear strategy and defence policy. It is quiet only because it is being overshadowed by the war on terrorism, by fundamental organizational changes in the US government that are flowing from the new requirements of homeland security, and by a chaotic international environment exemplified by the ongoing dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. But at least from the perspective of realism, the transformation reflects a rational response to a changing threat environment, especially the end of the Cold War. The Bush administration has launched the first significant departure in US nuclear policy since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The use of AI to automate defense and intelligence tasks is increasing. And yet, little is known about how algorithmic analyses, data capture, and decisions will be perceived by elite decision-makers. This article presents the results of two experiments that explore manifestations of AI systems in the cyber conflict decision-making loop. Though findings suggest that technical expertise positively impacts respondents' ability to gauge the potential utility and credibility of an input (indicating that training can, in fact, overcome bias), the perception of human agency in the loop even in the presence of AI inputs mitigates this effect and makes decision-makers more willing to operate on less information. This finding is worrying given the extensive challenges involved in effectively building human oversight and opportunity for intervention into any effective employment of AI for national security purposes. The article considers these obstacles and potential solutions in the context of data gathered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the standard conceptualization of differentiation in the European Union (EU) focuses on differentiated integration, scholars devote less attention to differentiated cooperation. This article argues, on the contrary, that member states' engagement in differentiated efforts in EU foreign policy manifest themselves both in the form of differentiated integration and cooperation. It elaborates an original conceptual framework for exploring differentiated cooperation as a mode of governance. Drawing on the articles in this special issue, this introduction maps empirical manifestations of differentiated cooperation in various areas and dimensions of EU foreign policy. The results of the special issue show that differentiated cooperation has mostly manifested itself in informal patterns of cooperation, with the treaty-based mechanisms being limited. As such, the special issue reflects the differentiation and informalization processes occurring not only in the EU, but also in global governance more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustaining meaningful defense cooperation in Europe is made difficult by defense-industrial fragmentation, a multiplicity of institutional frameworks, divergent strategic cultures and domestic opposition to integration. The European Union's recent foray into defense integration incorporates multiple forms of differentiation to overcome these barriers, with Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) characterized by selective membership, external participation, and project-based clustering. Such "combined differentiation" offers an instructive example of how EU practices and principles can contribute to meaningful defense collaboration, even though Brussels is often thought a weak actor externally. It also illustrates how distinct forms of differentiation can be embodied within a single structure to accommodate complexity in strategic preferences. Using the example of PESCO, this article shows how "combined differentiation" has emerged as a response to the nature of the European defense landscape and how debates between member states about how to respond to specific challenges have brought about further differentiation over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers differentiated cooperation between European Union (EU) member states and third countries in diplomatic statements at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Using a novel dataset on interventions in OSCE Permanent Council meetings, it analyzes when and why third countries align with the EU's positions. The observed alignment patterns underline the complexity of third country motivations to form part of the EU's diplomatic alliances, such as their institutional proximity to the organization, or their own involvement in regional conflicts. In so doing the article explores the limits of differentiated diplomatic cooperation with the EU in multilateral security organizations. It also points to the constraints the EU faces when trying to establish itself as a relevant player in European and international security through diplomatic acceptance and amplification of its own views by others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although informal groups of member states often steer EU foreign policy, existing scholarly literature does not offer an overarching theoretical approach to account for their causes and their different types. This article conceptualizes informal groupings and offers a theoretical approach that explains their occurrence in EU foreign policy. It claims that while disagreements among member states and the lack of EU capacity are the main causes of informal groupings, the combination of these two factors over time and across different policy issues determines the emergence of specific types of informal groupings in EU foreign policy. Indeed, evidence from Kosovo, Libya, and Syria shows that different types of informal groups addressed various policy issues by replacing, complementing and/or supporting corresponding EU policies. Nonetheless, as these groupings lack central guidance and accountability mechanisms, they are not a panacea for EU foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]