ABSTRACT
In the context of international security governance, the development of the ESDP has arguably been ‘one of the great political revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (Webber et al. 2004: 19). In this chapter, we examine the material, political and ideational dimensions of this process, which led, in 2005, to the deployment of 10 peace support operations on three continents.1 While we agree with the claim that from its inception European integration ‘was about security as much as it was about economic integration’ (Laffan, O’Donnell and Smith 2000: 38), it would be wrong, as the quote with which we opened the chapter suggests, to see the constructionof theESDPas the inevitableoutcomeof adevelopmental process that began in the 1950s. This would attribute a teleology to the Western European security narrative and practice that disregards the discontinuities and the element of chance that has been pervading their unfolding. The chapter falls into four parts. We begin by exploring what Jolyon
Howorth (2004a) calls the transformative discourse of European security policy that led to the creation of the ESDP. What were the conditions and events that prompted the member states to problematize the EU’s existing foreign policy tools and to launch the ESDP? Given the concern of this book, we pay particular attention to how the policy came to embody a commitment to peace support operations. Next, we outline the development of ESDP military and civilian capabilities and the allied policy machinery. In the third part, we inquire into the ideational dimension of the EU’s role conception as peacebuilder, limiting ourselves to its civilian aspects. We explore the evolving peacebuilding concepts of the EU and bring into relief the governmental ambitions inscribed in them. We conclude the chapter by discussing the broader epistemic changes in world politics that made these ambitions possible.
