ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the structural and institutional adaptations of the EU in the area of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) related to the 2014 crisis in Ukraine (especially, the annexation of Crimea by Russia), arguing that the EU has not become more structurally differentiated as a result of this organisational learning process. Rather, further differentiation (understood as the differentiating effects of a shock) and fragmentation were prevented precisely because the EU demonstrated an ability to learn as an organisation, adapt, and offered structural “channels” that facilitated unity (namely, through the unanimity voting procedure in the Council, and more specifically, also the constructive abstention mechanism). Especially from the 2022 perspective, post-2014 instances of fragmentation and dominance proved to be temporary, not structural nor lasting. In 2022, the Member States and EU institutions both illustrated an ability to make use of both the unanimity-voting procedure at the level of Coreper II to facilitate compromise and achieve unity and actorness, also using the feature of constructive abstention in CFSP voting in order to achieve consensus and prevent differentiation and dominance.
Although the unanimity rule also served as a shock amplifier to the extent that it motivated the creation of the Normandy Format in 2014, further – lasting and structural – differentiation and fragmentation were prevented, because (1) there were structural shock-absorbers in place, which facilitated unity (again, namely, the rule of the unanimity-voting procedure in the CFSP, and especially the practice of constructive abstention, essentially a mechanism of differentiated integration), and (2) the EU institutions (mainly the Commission) demonstrated an ability to learn as an organisation, and adapt to specific conditions (e.g., by exploring new mechanisms of offering macro-economic help).
