Paper Titles & Abstracts

In 1998, France and Britain came to a historic agreement on the need to equip the European Union (EU) with an autonomous military capability. This initiated a process that led to the creation of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) in 1999 and to the launch of first CSDP operations in 2003. In academia, the addition of security and defence issues into the EU's policy-portfolio has often been hailed a historic milestone. However, policy elites have rarely reciprocated this enthusiasm. Thus, one has to ask why there seems to be a mismatch between academic and elite interest towards the CSDP?By relying primarily on recently published memoirs and autobiographies, this paper argues that policy elites' disinterest towards the CSDP is due to the fact that it falls into grey area between Stanley Hoffman's famous high/low politics dichotomy. Because of this, it represents a case of "grey politics", i.e. a policy that is not "high" enough to be treated together with the most pressing national security issues, but also not "low" enough to be placed into the same category as most domestic policies. As a result, the CSDP has rarely occupied a prominent place in EU Member States' foreign policy agendas or, if it has, it has been overshadowed by more pressing issues. In order to get out of this political grey area, the paper argues that the EU should stop using the CSDP as an instrument for conducting "wars of choice" and take on more pressing operations.