The EU and the Danish Mohammed Cartoon Crisis.

Paper Title: The EU and the Danish Mohammed Cartoon CrisisAbstract: The paper focuses on the role of the EU in the crisis in Danish foreign policy that followed from the cartoons of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper in September 2005. It has been a tacit norm in EU foreign policy cooperation that EU member states help each other in times of major national foreign policy crises. This can be illustrated by the immediate EPC/ EU support for Britain and Spain after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982, and the terrorist attacks against Spain and Britain in 2004 and 2005. For Denmark the cartoon issue was clearly perceived as a crisis in Danish foreign policy and, indeed, for Danish international trade. The paper analyses and answers three questions: 1) in what way did the Danish government attempt to use the EU during the crisis? 2) what was the EU response to the crisis? 3) why did the EU reaction take the form it did? The focus in the paper is on 2 and 3.The main suggestion is that clear EU support was not swift and forthcoming compared with the previous crises mentioned. The primary reason for this was the character of the issue. Rather than being a traditional foreign policy or security issue, the Mohammed cartoon crisis went to the core of the debate about religious tolerance versus freedom of expression where national and global issues were inseparable. Different national discourses on this issue within the EU made it difficult for Denmark to gather support. The issue thus suggests that the character of EU support for national foreign policy in times of crisis very much depends on the area in case. In a broader sense, it suggest that the EU may not be a unitary actor vis à - vis the global religious/political issues which flow from the cartoon crisis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]