One Foot in the Door: Regime Complexity in European Security

Using NATO-EU cooperation in the field of crisis management as a case study, this article explains the implications of institutional overlap on multilateral security policy. It shows that it is necessary to study institutional positions in conjunction with state preferences in order to understand how overlapping institutions interact and to what result. Institutional overlap has deep consequences for organizational performance. In instances of heterogeneous preferences and heterogeneous institutional positions, I argue that formal institutional paths can be foreclosed to inter-institutional security cooperation of planning and conducting crisis management operations and as a result we should observe sub-optimal and inefficient institutional and political outcomes. These politics of crisis management can lead to blocked cooperation, long delays in sending troops, wasted resources as well as the absence of security agreements and (political and military) strategic dialogue. Civilians’ and soldiers’ lives are put at risk in conflict areas.