ABSTRACT
Twelve years after the European Union (EU) began to deploy crisis management operations, the underlying drivers are still disputed. In part, this reflects a broader difficulty to theorise and theoretically explain humanitarian interventions and peace support operations.1 Whereas the last two decades have seen an impressive increase in multilateral interventions in conflict and post-conflict situations, theoretical innovation in international relations (IR) theory has hardly caught up. We are still missing a theoretical framework that generally explains why governments decide (not) to intervene in a given conflict. To be sure, there have been attempts to explain specific interventions via different theoretical frameworks. Scholars have in particular focused on the role of party ideologies,2 elite
opinion,3 domestic political incentives,4 coalition dynamics,5 bureaucratic preferences6 or emerging normative frameworks.7 Some analysts have also combined similar variables for the purpose of explaining the drivers behind humanitarian interventions.8 Yet these analyses often remain incomplete in so far as they bracket or dismiss causal mechanisms employed in rival theoretical traditions. Such lack of clarity as to the drivers behindmultilateral interventions also applies
to EU crisis management. The very reasons for which the EU set up its institutional mechanism for collective external action, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its operational arm, the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), remain contested. Whereas some observers reckoned it to be a means of assuring European autonomy vis-à-vis the USA,9 others saw it as a means to provide for more European capabilities (not least in support of US foreign policy objectives).10
Scholars also invoked the need for a means more effective than national foreign policies,11 an expression of the Union’s European state-building drive,12 an attempt by security policymakers to re-appropriate the EU integration project from competing bureaucracies,13 an expression of cross-EU party ideological congruence regarding appropriate foreign policy objectives and instruments,14 or an attempt to satisfice domestic expectations of effective and legitimate foreign
