How Differences Between Security Crises Change the EU's Role

Security crises take different forms and have different dynamics; the European Union has different capabilities to respond; and there is variable support from European public opinion for the EU to deal with security crises. Our paper will apply these conceptual distinctions to the EU’s role in dealing with monetary policy and military crises. It will first document how responsibility for dealing with these two types of crises was divided between the European Economic Community and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation led by the United States in the 1950s and how the creation of the eurozone and a Foreign Affairs & Defence pillar has increased the EU’s policy competences. It will then contrast the EU’s primary role in responding to challenges to economic stability policy and its secondary ole in responding to the war in Ukraine, in which the Ukraine government has relied most of all on the United States. Original data from the eight-nation European Security Survey will be analysed to show the extent to which European citizens give priority to the EU in defending their economic security but to NATO and the United States in protecting their country against military threats. The paper will conclude by showing that the end of fighting in Ukraine will create a new polycrisis: the EU will be challenged to help finance the reconstruction of Ukraine and to adapt its political institutions to deal with Ukraine’s application to become an EU member state. If Donald Trump is elected president and puts NATO’s guarantee of Europe’s military security at risk, this would add a third dimension to the polycrisis.