When Tony Blair Opened the Pandora’s Box: Revisiting the Creation of an EU Defence Capacity

The decision to establish a separate EU defence capacity alongside NATO in the late 1990s remains a perplexing issue, even 25 years later. The inception of the EU Common Security and defence Policy (CSDP) in 1999 raised crucial questions that have gained renewed relevance in the context of the Ukraine war. As scholars discuss new configurations of the NATO/CSDP relationship, it is worth revisiting the period of origin to ask why Europeans first wanted to create an institution that mirrored NATO’s mandate, replicated its institutional structure, and had a very similar membership. This study relies on recently declassified British archival resources and high-level elite interviews to provide a second historical reading. Embracing a historical IR epistemology, it reveals how prevailing role conceptions of British Atlanticism and French Gaullism continue to provide misreadings of this period and the broader CSDP/NATO relationship. Moreover, its goal is to foster an appreciation of how contemporary debates on transatlantic burden-sharing have a peculiar history that should inform discussions on building a new security architecture for European security.