The European Parliament – Political culture without Strategy?

The role of the European Parliament (EP) within the CFSP structures has been highly contested in the past. The accounts range from describing the EP as an agenda setter to merely being a bystander. If we take a closer look at the CFSP through a traditional strategic culture-lens we may observe, that the European Parliament plays an important role in the constitution of a European political culture. But what is its role on the strategic side? In the context of the strategic culture-approach „strategy“ has usually a strong connotation towards a rational dimension underlying the augmentation of state power like the stand of military capacity. The paper argues, that in order to use the strategic culture-approach on CFSP the concept of strategy must be disengaged from the traditional state-centric framework. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of such a conceptual change and subsequently proposes an alternative operationalisation of the „strategic“. Finally the proposed analytical framework is used to show how we can better capture the role of the European Parliament in the Field of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.