Disinterested Capabilities: A Realist Assessment of the Transatlantic Dimension of EU Foreign and Security Policy

The EU is often seen as a sui generis actor which, being an embodiment of the postmodern project designed to overcome and reject traditional power politics, is largely considered fundamentally incompatible with the theoretical apparatus of the realist school of International Relations. This has induced not only a significant gap in IR and European Studies literature, but also arguably some of the political failures of the EU as an actor, caused by the focus on devising and maintaining capabilities before (or even instead of) recognizing and specifying plausible foreign policy interests to be achieved by employing such capabilities. Although the specter of security dilemma rooted in power politics still has not completely vanished even among the EU member states, there is one important aspect the EU Foreign and Security Policy (FSP) which can hardly be understood without utilizing the tools of the realist school: it pertains to the issue of trans-Atlantic security cooperation, and the role of the United States of America in the creation, historical development, and current state of European defense cooperation. Drawing from classical realist concepts, structural and neoclassical realist balancing propositions, as well as contemporary assessments of realism and European politics by US and European scholars (Posen, Rosato, Simón, Rynning), the author aspires to map out critical junctures of US involvement in European security architecture, mainly in the context of great power competition. Subsequently, by engaging in qualitative historical analysis, he outlines that the US role in the development of European foreign and security integration has given a strong context of power politics to the project, even though – or exactly because – the American security umbrella provided European powers with the chance to focus on softer, dominantly economic aspects of integration. It is in this way that the author intends to demonstrate not only the usefulness of realist approaches to explaining and understanding EU Foreign and Security Policy, but also the notion that taking some realist prescriptions into account might strengthen the prospects for a feasible European Union FSP, even without its communitarization.