Stephanie C. Hofmann

Why Institutional Overlap Matters: CSDP in the European Security Architecture

The creation and continued existence of CSDP cannot be understood without reference to the institutional environment within which it is located. To explain its emergence and design, one needs to study the institutional architecture into which this additional institution emerged. Once institutional overlap exists, it becomes a crucial independent variable explaining not only the strategies that member states have at their disposal, but also the development of international institutions occupying the same policy domain as well as the impact on the policy field at large.

Overlapping Institutions in the Realm of International Security: The Case of NATO and ESDP

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Unions (EU) European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) both occupy the policy space of crisis management. This overlap has two effects. First, overlap has generated “chessboard politics” shaping member state strategies. Second, institutional overlap has generated a number of feedback effects. The prior existence of NATO shaped the conceptualization and organization of ESDP at its creation, and the existence of two alternative security institutions continues to influence the ways that the institutions evolve—how each institution defines security interests and how member states adjust the mandate of each institution to address changes in the security environment. Because both institutions are intergovernmentally organized and consensus-based, the actions and decisions of both institutions reflect the agreements of members. Chessboard politics and feedback effects are consequently interrelated—states strategize to affect outcomes in one venue or another, and decisions in one institution can affect decisions and behaviors in the other institution.

Governance and State Power: A Network Analysis of European Security

A growing number of scholars argue that the development of the common security and defence policy (CSDP) should be analysed as the institutionalization of a system of security governance. Although governance approaches carry the promise of a sophisticated, empirically grounded picture of CSDP, they have been criticized for their lack of attention to power. This is because governance approaches focus on institutional rules and ideas rather than the social structure that underpins them. To refine the notion of security governance, this article analyses co-operation patterns through social network analysis. Confirming the governance image, it maps out a complex constellation of CSDP actors that features cross-border and cross-level ties between different national and EU policy actors. It is also found, however, that CSDP is dominated by a handful of traditional state actors in particular, Brussels-based national ambassadors who retain strategic positions vis-a-vis weaker supranational and non-state actors. These actors are not giving up on state power, but reconstituting it at the supranational level.

Varieties of neutrality Norm revision and decline

With the end of the Cold War, the neutral countries of Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden have grappled with the question of what their neutrality means in relation to membership in the European Union’s (EU) Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Partnership for Peace (PfP). The concept of neutrality has continued to inform the foreign and security policies of these four neutral EU members to varying degrees, but what explains these ‘varieties of neutrality’ and what does neutrality mean in relation to membership in the EU’s CSDP and NATO’s PfP? In this article, the primary focus is on neutrality as a norm. Understanding neutrality as a norm helps clarify how neutrality becomes embedded in national identity, what it shows about the interactions between domestic belief systems and international security conditions over time, and how the definition of a norm can be revised to allow for desired policy choices. To this end, the article asserts that there are four interrelated factors key to explaining how and why each state modified its interpretation of neutrality vis-à-vis international military institutions such as NATO, and the CSDP: the reason for and timing of institutionalizing neutrality (coerced or voluntary), the form of institutionalization (de jure or de facto), political elite opinion and public opinion/belief.

Transgovernmental Networks in European Security and Defence Policy

An increasing number of authors describe the European Union as an advanced form of transgovernmentalism. Whether called Europeanization, supranational intergovernmentalism, multilevel governance, administrative fusion or Brusselisation, the transgovernmentalist thesis states that European politics is shaped by the growing interaction of national government officials at every level of the decision-making process. This paper tests the transgovernmentalist thesis by looking at patterns of formal and informal cooperation in the framework of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The data is based on a questionnaire circulated among 73 defence officials in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Brussels-based institutions. The results are analyzed through social network analysis. We find that the governance of ESDP is characterized by a weak form of transgovernmentalism, in which cross-border links do exist but formal state actors occupy strategic positions. In particular, two groups display transgovernmental features: a core policy group of crisis management and capability development officials in and around the Council, and a Franco-German group of capital-based defence actors.

Institutional authority and security cooperation within regional economic organizations

The proliferation of regional economic organizations (REOs) is a prominent feature of the contemporary international environment. Many of these organizations aspire to promote regional peace and stability. Some strive to promote these goals only through economic cooperation, while others have expanded their mandate to include mechanisms that address security concerns more directly. A glance at the security components of such organizations indicates that their purpose and design are very diverse. This article sheds light on the sources of this poorly understood phenomenon. Specifically, it argues that organizations that enjoy greater delegated authority are in a better position to expand their mandate into the security realm and to have more far-reaching agreements in this issue area. It then develops a metric that gauges the degree of security cooperation within REOs and presents a new dataset of numerous organizations on this institutional aspect. Employing this dataset in a rigorous statistical analysis and controlling for a host of alternative explanations, it demonstrates that, indeed, REOs with greater delegated authority develop deeper security cooperation.

Investing in international security: rising powers and organizational choices

Abstract How do rising powers choose to allocate their finite resources among the multiple global and regional security organizations? Building on the literatures on forum shopping and rising powers, we argue that the different organizational investment choices of rising powers are explained by varying regional ideational affinities. Organizational settings have ideational foundations that can look very different from region to region. We argue that regional ideational affinity leads rising powers to invest in regional rather than global organizations. However, if the ideational composition of the region is highly diverse, global organizations are a better vehicle to accommodate rising powers’ emergent ambitions. To demonstrate our argument, we examine the choices of Brazil and South Africa in terms of their material and ideational investments in regional and global organizations.

Party preferences and institutional transformation: revisiting France’s relationship with NATO (and the common wisdom on Gaullism)

ABSTRACT France’s so-called exceptionalism in multilateral security policy is often explained with its Gaullist political culture. However, a closer look shows that Gaullism cannot easily capture different French policies, particularly toward NATO. To unearth what can explain policy variance, this paper asks the question of whether French political parties value NATO differently and, if so, to what effect? Looking at French governments from 1991 to 2014, I argue that political parties in France carry different values, which lead them to interpret NATO’s role for France’s security policy differently. As a result, French parties in power encouraged, delayed, or halted NATO institutional transformation at specific junctures. This argument builds on the insights of the study of ideational factors in IR and the study of party politics in Comparative Politics. Through an analysis of French governments’ policy preferences toward NATO, this paper stresses that institutional transformation can be understood through the study of veto points in conjunction with national preference formation.

Business as usual: The role of norms in alliance management

How do allies successfully manage their alliance partnership in times of political crisis? We argue that the procedural norm of political contestation and the substantive norm of security consensus set the parameters for non-detrimental disagreement among democratic alliance partners. Rather than interpreting sharp disagreements with the US as signs of soft-balancing or alliance decline, we explain the seeming contradictions in alliance behavior — maintenance of the alliance versus sharp disagreements within the alliance — by drawing norms and institutions into the power equation. We use within- and cross-regional case comparisons of alliance disputes in East Asia and Europe to test our argument in both bilateral and multilateral contexts, respectively.

The politics of overlapping organizations: hostage-taking, forum-shopping and brokering

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to theory development about the politics of overlapping organizations. It explains how organizational overlap can affect the execution of organizational mandates. Within the universe of intergovernmental overlapping organizations, I argue that we need to study institutional positions in conjunction with governmental preferences. Based on these two variables, member-states have different strategies at their disposal: hostage-taking, forum-shopping, and brokering. These strategies affect the formulation and implementation of multilateral commitments. Taking the EU-NATO overlap as an example, I show how these strategies can lead to compromised organizational mandates, where hostage-taking leads to long delays in sending troops, operational uncertainties and wasted resources and brokers are left with innovating informal solutions.