European Security in the New Political Environment provides a thorough analysis of the detail and nature of post-Cold War security issues, from both traditional and new security agendas, assessing the current efficacy of current institutions and policies to address these issues.

Looks at how EU political institutions in security and defense have developed through the political economy of interest group intermediation.

This new edited volume examines contemporary European security from three different standpoints. It explores security dynamics, first, within Europe; second, the interaction patterns between Europe and other parts of the world (the United States, Africa, the Middle East, China and India); and, finally, the external perceptions of European security. The first part of the book analyses the European security landscape. The roles of EU, NATO and the OSCE are given particular attention, as is the impact of their evolution- or enlargement- on the European security architecture and European security dynamics. In this context, Russia’s repositioning as a major power appears as a shaping factor of contemporary European geopolitics. The second part presents European security from an external perspective and considers interactions between Europe and other states or regions. Security trends and actors in Europe are examined from an American, Chinese, and Indian perspective, while Europe--Africa and Europe--Middle East relations are also addressed. This book will be of great interest to students of European Security, European politics and IR in general.

The EU and China are often characterised as parties whose bilateral political differences still remain too large to bridge, so that they have failed to convert rhetorical promises into tangible results of cooperation, particularly with regards to the field of international security. Yet in terms of their bilateral interaction on security risk management in Africa; EU and Chinese naval officers jointly brought down the number of successful Somali pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and to a lesser extent were jointly involved in seeking a resolution to the lingering conflict in Darfur. This book asks how we can make sense as a whole of this relatively sudden shift in regards to the dealings between their respective officials on the topic of security risk management. It argues that the outcomes of Sino-European bilateral dealings on this topic are above all determined by the ability/inability of these officials to build political trust as a complex and cognitive social phenomenon. Consequently, the book applies an innovative conceptual framework on political trust to explain why EU and Chinese officials bridged their ‘endemic’ political differences to practically cooperate on Somali piracy but were unable to do so when it came to their interaction on Darfur. To conclude, it examines the longer term impact of this bilateral trust-building process by covering more recent examples of bilateral engagement in Libya and Mali and aims to show that although this trust-building process may be case specific, ramifications may go beyond the realm of their bilateral dealings on security matters in Africa, to impact wider issues of international security. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of African and Chinese politics, EU politics, security and maritime studies, and more broadly of international relations and to governmental actors.

The book is a timely investigation into the European security policy dynamic from the perspective of actors engaged in the contentious policy process. Instead of looking at security actors in isolation from one another, the book enquires into the practice of the policy process and maps out the constellations of formal and informal actors sponsoring concrete ideas on what European security should be about. The understandings of security shift and advocating a particular reading of security involves entering the political contest with actors advancing different conceptions. The contributors analyse these different modalities, overlapping scenes and shifting meanings that bring about EU security policies. Our case studies illustrate how these processes unfold both at the intra-EU level, where different institutions supply and endorse their security framings, and vis-à-vis the EU and its neighbours. The purpose of the book is to uncover, by pluralistic means, the rules of the game that structure the field of the EU’s security making. That way, rather than impose a rigid theoretical model, the editors structure the inquiry around three concepts: security, politics, and policy. This book was published as a special issue of Perspectives on European Politics and Society.

NATO has been a successful forum for managing European security policy. Yet European governments have repeatedly tried to build a new security institution in NATO's shadow. In this innovative book, Stephanie C. Hofmann asks why governments attempted to create an additional institution despite no obvious functional necessity and why some attempts failed while others succeeded. European Security in NATO's Shadow considers security cooperation through the lens of party ideologies to shed new light on these questions. She observes that political parties are motivated to propose new institutions by their multidimensional ideologies. Moreover, the success of efforts to create such institutions depends on the degree of ideological congruence among parties in power. In particular, the relationship between the values of multilateralism, sovereignty and Europe informed the impetus and success rate of the attempts made during negotiations for the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties to create a European security institution.

This volume addresses how and in what capacity the European Union and its member states are able to respond to fundamental shifts occurring in global politics and remain relevant for the future. The changing nature of the international system is subject to considerable contestation among scholars, with many claiming that the fundamentals of the post-war international system are being rewritten. This volume brings together prominent scholars in the field of European security to address a range of pertinent issues related to Europe’s role in the context of evolving global challenges. The first section focuses on whether the EU is an actor with a strategic nature and the means to act on a global security strategy. The second section considers the institutional dynamics and the approaches at the EU’s disposal to fulfil its possible intended global roles. The third section addresses Europe’s most important strategic relationship—the partnership it has with the United States. This section considers the recalibration of the transatlantic relationship in light of the changing international system and the reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. This book will be of much interest to students of European Union policy, European Security policy, European Foreign policy and International Relations in general.

The key role in the security policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is to prevent new types of asymmetric challenges and deal with the new architecture of the Euro-Atlantic security environment, including the control of weapons of mass destruction. In modern international politics, the growing militaristic policies of the states have created many dangers and raised the need for NATO to address new issues that the Alliance did not face during the Cold War. NATO and the Future of European and Asian Security reflects on difficult geopolitical and geostrategic conditions and reviews how new types of warfare have a drastic impact on NATO’s military and defense doctrine. This book provides the newest data and theories and contributes to the understanding of the transformation of the regional security environment in the aegis of the Euro-Atlantic. Covering topics including foreign policy, global security, hybrid warfare, securitization, and smart defense, this book is essential for government officials, policymakers, public relations officers, military and defense agencies, teachers, historians, political scientists, security analysts, national security professionals, administrators, government organizations, researchers, academicians, and students.

This book addresses the challenges presented to the EU by an increasingly complex security environment. Through the interdisciplinary approach taken, researchers in economics, law and political science identify a range of problems relating to the multiple security threats that the EU faces, and present new means to address them within their respective fields of expertise. The contributions provide accessible and policy-relevant analyses of crucial challenges to the EU’s ability to function as a political union in the years ahead.