The development of the EU's strategic culture and its constructive power: EU-NATO relationship's new course

Abstract

The first official strategic reflection of the EU, the European Security Strategy - ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World’, underlined how in order to become a global actor the EU needs “a strategic culture that fosters early, rapid, and when necessary, robust intervention” (EU, 2003: 11) given the complexity of today’s security threats. This dissertation will seek to find out how the strategic culture of the EU has developed since 2003 through a discourse analysis of the main European strategic documents: we aim to assess how the norms have changed since 2003 and which new ones will guide EU’s action after the release of the new strategy in 2016. Indeed, if strategic culture is considered as being socially constructed, acts of speech and interactions are the means thorough which it is expressed. If these norms tough are to be successfully implemented, they need to be accepted by EU’s international counterparts: if we refer to the security issues, NATO is the main security provider for the European continent. We will therefore analyze NATO’s response to the new norms and how they affected EU-NATO’s relationship, thus aiming to assess the constructive nature of strategic culture.