ABSTRACT
Until the eve of the new century, the institutional roles assigned to NATO and the EU were relatively unambiguous for Americans and Europeans alike. The US viewed the EU as primarily an economic actor and partner in global liberalization, while NATO was viewed as the sole guarantor of European security. The Europeans, in turn, had limited aspirations for the EU as a security actor despite the growing ambition that the EU adopt a broader and more influential presence on the world stage. The problem of governing the European security space, the demands placed on Europe to assume a more robust military role globally, and the rising complexity of security have introduced a progressively greater degree of ambiguity with respect to the security governance roles of the EU and NATO, as both independent and codependent actors. This role ambiguity has been driven by a variety of factors. The most prominent among them include the changed context of the post-Cold War system which fundamentally transformed NATO from a compulsory to a voluntary alliance for the Europeans, the absence of a credible conventional or nuclear threat to the members of the alliance, a security agenda detached from the requirements of conventional or nuclear deterrence, and the renewed dedication to deepening and widening the EU in the wake of German unification.
