Cooperative bargaining in the EU's common security and defence policy: EUNAVFOR Atalanta

Abstract

This article examines the EU's decision-making on military operations to assess the contested nature of the EU as an international security actor. It investigates both the decision-making process on the launch and subsequent development of EUNAVFOR Atalanta, from 2008 to 2014. First, empirically, the article, based on policy documents and semi-structured interviews, unpacks the contestation concerning the use of military force in the EU by distinguishing between the justification of military force and the policy embeddedness of military force at the more operational level. Second, it shows how the strategic interaction among different advocacy coalitions, which is characterized by a process of cooperative bargaining, explains the particular development of EUNAVFOR Atalanta in terms of its justification and policy embeddedness.

Military operations and the EU’s identity as an international security actor

“…Thus, with Atalanta, the EU explicitly acknowledged for the first time its own economic interests in the set-up of an operation (Germond and Smith 2009). While it is true that the protection of trade routes has not come at the cost of the world food programme (Riddervold 2011), it turned out that one or two of the EU frigates are used for the protection of the WFP and the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), while five or six other frigates are deployed to protect commercial vessels (see Palm 2019).…”