Maritime engagement in the Gulf of Aden is a puzzling case for anyone interested in the political and institutional problems underlying European Union-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (EU-NATO) cooperation. Although the EU's operation NAVFOR 'Atalanta' and NATO's 'Ocean Shield' operate in the same theatre and with similar mandates, there is no formal link between them. No joint planning has been envisaged, and no official task-sharing takes place. As this article aims to show, cooperation and coordination between EU and NATO forces at the operational and tactical levels have nevertheless worked surprisingly well. Two faces of EU-NATO cooperation become apparent: the political level is dominated by a permanent deadlock, while on the ground and at sea staff have developed a modus operandi that allows them to deliver fairly successfully in complementing yet detached operations. Based on 60 interviews with NATO officials (2010-2013), this article illustrates how the operational and tactical levels have developed ways of coordinating efforts informally despite the lack of a formal framework. It aims to show to what extent and how they succeed at bypassing organizational boundaries and at overcoming political limitations. Although these practices are becoming increasingly institutionalized, it remains to be seen whether this will translate into formal changes.

This chapter examines the problem of coherence in the European Union's international relations. The EU consists of an extremely complex system of institutional structures. One of the implications of this complexity is coherence, or the ambition and necessity to bring the various parts of the EU's external relations together to increase strategic convergence and ensure procedural efficiency. The chapter first provides a historical overview of the concept of coherence and the debates around it before discussing different conceptual dimensions of coherence. It then describes the neutral, benign, and malign ‘faces’ that coherence assumes in political and academic debates. Based on this conceptual framework, the chapter explores the current legal basis of the Treaty of Lisbon as well as the EU's comprehensive approach to external action in crises and conflicts as one of the key political initiatives aimed at fostering the objectives laid down in primary law.

This article provides the framework for the contributions to this special issue. It first puts the theme into context and outlines the main issues that justify further analytical engagement with European Union (EU)-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) relations to the extent we propose here. We then provide some historical background to frame the discussion, and in doing so also outline the current state of interaction between the EU and NATO. We then briefly contextualise the changing strategic environment shaping the relationship, including recent proposals to implement their declared "strategic partnership". This introduction then presents an overview of the existing literature to set the stage for a renewed look at the research agenda that has emerged over the last two decades. We close with an outline of the individual contributions to this special issue, which are presented in two sections: one focusing on theoretical and conceptual approaches to the study of EU of EU-NATO relations, and one on the interorganisational relationship in practice, followed by a concluding synopsis and outlook.

European leaders frequently vaunt the European Union's distinctiveness in adopting and pursuing a comprehensive approach to security. The EU's profile as an international actor is designed to span across all dimensions of security. As a result, its security policy portfolio involves a large number of institutional actors and policies that need to be coordinated. The ambition of the EU to provide security in a comprehensive manner raises challenges at the politico-strategic level, at the level of operational and policy planning and in day-to-day implementation. So far, the field is lacking an inclusive analytical framework for the analysis of providing security through a distinctively comprehensive civil-military, economic and political organisation. This article seeks to close this gap by providing suggestions for how the wide range of issues related to comprehensive security could be structured, and by framing the matter theoretically and with reference to existing conceptual work and empirical research.

Studies of the relationship between the EU and NATO often focus on the limitations of cooperation, be it at the political or operational levels. However, little is known about the functioning of the political institutional linkages between the EU and NATO. This article therefore studies the main decision-making bodies of the two organisations at the political, ambassadorial level, namely the Political Security Committee (PSC) of the EU and the North Atlantic Council (NAC) in NATO, as well as their joint meetings. The article employs an inductive Grounded Theory approach, drawing on open-ended interviews with PSC and NAC ambassadors, which reveal direct insights from the objects of analysis. The findings emphasise the impact of both structural and more agency-related categories on decision-making in these three fora. The article thus addresses both the paucity of study on these bodies more broadly and the complete lacuna on joint PSC-NAC meetings specifically, warranting the inductive approach this article endorses.